watertreatmentRL wrote:As luck would have it, you don't have to speculate about what it would be like to have only one staircase. There's an even more radical thing already available in hellcrawl: No upstairs.
Now I realize that many here think of stairs as a crucial part of "storytelling," building the game in your mind, that feel of place and space in crawl... but having to fight it out where you drop is wildly better in terms of tactical gameplay than the total silliness of going up and down stairs luring things up and down, peeking all the stairs, rotating and so on. That stuff is scumming. It's not even tactics. Disengaging, re-engaging, using and reusing and reusing the same dungeon features to trivialize every encounter is scumming. We call it "tactics" here because we haven't had a real alternative in which to ground another vocabulary. You go down and you have to fight it out, move the encounter within the normal rules of map navigation, use what you have to get through the initial rush, think about noise and all that. That's tactics. Up and down, X >>>, > < > < > -- That is not tactics.
But I don't want to go off on a rant... duvessa's comment addresses the X >>> part and some of the scumming part. Narrower thing, but still valuable. It would be a worthwhile change. I'd also say the orbrun would be a bit less milquetoast with only one up/down stair per level.
edit: A middle ground between one stair and no upstairs is hatches only, which has been discussed here in connection with the stair dancing issue.
Actually we already have a definition for "scumming" that's not it, trying to redefine a word we already use is confusing. ("Scumming" is presently used to describe reloading the game from an earlier state, typically to get better results from the RNG)
Technically a "tactic" is any action you take to achieve your goal once you're aware of the situation, so < is tactics, it's just not complicated (Although it is complicated enough that novices don't understand it, often unspoiled novices will go quite some time before using stairs as a combat feature occurs to them).
Note that there's only so many dungeon features, crawl is a pretty simple game in terms of terrain, for example there's stairs, corners, corridors, sometimes some water, and thousands of combats. No matter what you do, you're going to be reusing and reusing the same dungeon features to reduce the risk inherent in combat, because crawl is a game about reducing combat risks, and there's lots of combat and not very many dungeon features. Complaining that staircases are too easy to use is a bit silly IMHO, removing stairs as the best option just pushes the "obvious best tactic" one notch further down the chain, and reduces the actual variation of available experiences by a small amount.
What stairs do provide that is unique is a convenient "stop" to the action, so you can reset fights with less tedium. If your best option is to retreat to reset the combat, then you could retreat indefinitely by walking in a circle until you have effectively reset the combat (After you've healed to full), you could also do that by going up stairs and pressing '5', which accomplishes the same thing, but with less keypresses. If you prefer walking in circles to going up staircases, then having no stairs is probably the best choice for you.
You could eliminate that possibility by removing in-combat healing (Doing so is tricky, there's not a solid delineation between 'in-combat' and not, and the fuzzy grey areas at the edges leave room for abuse) but presuming you did so, you'd be left with a game with no way to reset fights except for consumables. Which is fine, except that it would make Crawl more luck based than it is now.
You could probably fix *that* by fiddling around with the drop rates of various fight-resetting consumables, Maybe throw in some differences in combat variance to make it more regular, or change some of the critters around so that there was more regularity in what kind of fights you could expect in a given area, possibly remove identification so you have more dependable access to your consumables early, etc, etc... Depending on what exactly you did there's probably a chain of dependancies that would want to be addressed in some fashion, Or maybe you just prefer games that are more luck based, and are totally ok with that.
If you did all that, would you have a better game? I don't know, but it would be very different from DCSS, and I know I like DCSS. Maybe someone should should be able to go make a fork that does the things that they think it should and call it something else that people will want to play... oh wait...