Anti-stairdancing proposal: replace stairs with portals


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Shoals Surfer

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Post Wednesday, 21st September 2016, 21:28

Anti-stairdancing proposal: replace stairs with portals

This way, stairdancing is removed as an issue, and we will only have to deal with portaldancing!

Just kidding... Actually, the idea is that normal stairs (and hatches, I guess) are replaced with portals (and "unstable portals", respectively) that work in an identical manner to stairs, except that in the case of "stair-portals", the portals become inactive after being used. (Probably not necessary in the case of unstable portals, since they already stop you from going back up/down most of the time.) They do become active after a given number of turns, but until then, they cannot be used - if you enter a portal, you cannot immediately pull a bunch of monsters from there and 'rinse and repeat'. If you cannot deal with the whole welcoming committee, you have to choose another method of escaping, like teleporting/blinking away. You also couldn't just try out all three stairs and see which offers you the best entry point - you have to survive on the level for a while after entering it, holding your position or escaping to quickly find another portal up.

When you look at a portal (even from out of line of sight), it should say how many turns until the portal becomes active again, or if it has already reopened. (The counter should probably also advance when not on the levels where the portal lies.)

Potential problems:

- This only solves the kind of stairdancing that involves descending and immediately ascending with a small part of the pack. It does not entirely solve the fact that kiting packs and leading parts of them up is still a possibility (e.g. pull 2 of 5 deep trolls and kill the remaining 3 next time you descend). Long portal recharge times would reduce the chances of this strategy working, at the cost of added tediousness on occasion.
- Regarding tediousness, some added frustration might occur if someone wants to go up and then straight down afterwards, or vice versa - which may happen for quite a few reasons (you realize you forgot something on the previous floor, etc.) Shift-5-ing on a portal should wait until the portal is open again, and should then stop waiting - this would avoid wasting turns, but it would not solve the issue of having to Shift-5 in the first place (if this is even an issue).
- "Portal" is just the first name that sprung into mind - due to the potential confusion caused by mixing them up with timed portals (that work quite differently), either timed portals would have to be renamed, or a better name would have to be found for these stair-replacements.
- Some people may object that not being able to quickly nope out of an insane "welcoming committee" upon descending into a new level would lead to more unavoidable instadeaths, especially early on. This is a legit problem, but all of my ideas to solve it have only done so at the cost of more tediousness and confusing complication, so I welcome proposals to fix this problem (my best idea so far is: simply prevent monsters from spawning within a certain radius of the staircase upon level generation in early Dungeon floors at least - I'm not saying they'd all have to spawn out of line of sight, but at least the player should have enough time to cast an emergency teleport and then brave the unknown reaches of the level while possibly being far away from a portal).
- Tomb would have to be removed or drastically reworked so that it does not require insane amounts of stairpulling to complete. (Is this really a problem?!)

Flavor justification: due to a series of cave-ins, rough terrain, or just because nobody has bothered to build a set of durable set of stairs into a monster-infested dungeon, Zot has built a network of short-distance portals to be able to warp from one part of the dungeon to another.
If I play online, I do so under the screenname Marenglen.

Tomb Titivator

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Post Thursday, 22nd September 2016, 02:51

Re: Anti-stairdancing proposal: replace stairs with portals

Malevolent wrote:or a better name would have to be found for these stair-replacements

elevators
Wins (Does not include my GrEE^Veh 15-runer...stupid experimental branch)

Abyss Ambulator

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Joined: Thursday, 10th March 2011, 19:45

Post Thursday, 22nd September 2016, 19:48

Re: Anti-stairdancing proposal: replace stairs with portals

Just replace all stairs with hatches?

For this message the author Jeremiah has received thanks:
Shard1697

Slime Squisher

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Joined: Thursday, 12th June 2014, 06:56

Post Friday, 23rd September 2016, 10:45

Re: Anti-stairdancing proposal: replace stairs with portals

Malevolent wrote:- Some people may object that not being able to quickly nope out of an insane "welcoming committee" upon descending into a new level would lead to more unavoidable instadeaths, especially early on. This is a legit problem, but all of my ideas to solve it have only done so at the cost of more tediousness and confusing complication, so I welcome proposals to fix this problem (my best idea so far is: simply prevent monsters from spawning within a certain radius of the staircase upon level generation in early Dungeon floors at least - I'm not saying they'd all have to spawn out of line of sight, but at least the player should have enough time to cast an emergency teleport and then brave the unknown reaches of the level while possibly being far away from a portal).


Currently, you get a free turn upon first entering a new level, I gather for exactly this reason. An analogous extension, for this proposal, would be to make portals just stay open the first time you enter a level (as well as keeping the free turn).

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