VeryAngryFelid wrote:Is it possible to make those shops like spell books i.e. you always have access to them?
I would suggest, rather than constantly-available shops or "order forms", adding a short intermission hallway between floors that has a bazaar with access to every shop previously found in the game.
This has all manner of pacing benefits that wouldn't come with an always-on shopping list: It would provide a break between levels, it would allow the player to keep moving while they are actively clearing a floor (instead of feeling like they should be checking their shopping list and thereby inducing a modality shift away from playing the game every time they pick up some gold), it would provide an opportunity to mix tilesets inside of the intermission hallways for less-jarring branch transitions, it would prevent players from feeling like they have to do silly things like holding enough gold for on-the-spot purchasing from consumable shops, and it would retain the balancing option to lockout intermission bazaar availability during areas of the game intended to induce player tension such as Zot or Hell.
An intermission area would also provide a neat opportunity to drop unexpected bonuses on the player, like a city-of-gold trove or a branch-skipping reward shortcut for quick play. (This is all a shameless rip of Spelunky, but when the shoe fits..)
Hellmonk wrote:I am wondering if it would be possible to recapture the feel of a normal DCSS game with tweaks to casual difficulty or by adding another difficulty mode that alters stuff like monster spawn and item generation, or if it is just a matter of too many mechanics being different.
I would be very careful with bumping item generation. In my early Blitz testing, this played poorly enough that I reverted it and began exploring alternate approaches to Dungeon compression.
_So_ many problems with DCSS can be traced back to excess item availability. In my current opinion drastically fewer but more impactful items is the way forward, even if it forces a hard break with the older DCSS feel.
Altering monster density, monster action probabilities, or further tweaking the player power curve through XP gain or statgain adjustments, seem more probable spaces to explore as difficulty fixes without horribly unwanted pacing-destroying knockon effects.