xp from exploration


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Zot Zealot

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Post Thursday, 16th August 2018, 21:42

xp from exploration

Would it be possible for some characters to gain xp from exploring, rather then from killing things?
Would this work as a characteristic of a race?
Would it be cool if Elyvilon granted this characteristic? (I feel it suits her pacifism flavour)

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Post Thursday, 16th August 2018, 22:37

Re: xp from exploration

Yes.
No.
No.

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Post Friday, 17th August 2018, 00:50

Re: xp from exploration

Some gods give piety for exploring, this sounds similar.

It would open up the (theoretical) ability to win the game without killing anything, which is a nice advanced conduct.

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Post Friday, 17th August 2018, 14:53

Re: xp from exploration

I like the idea that Ely grants XP via exploration, at the cost of reduced or no XP from killing. Ely is a fairly pointless god at the moment. With this change, Ely could become a great god for sneaky ninjas.
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Post Friday, 17th August 2018, 16:12

Re: xp from exploration

It won't work unless the race is slow. And then you add Chei and get even better combo than GnNe for speedrunning.
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Post Friday, 17th August 2018, 16:14

Re: xp from exploration

Also abyss would be basically free XP.
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Shoals Surfer

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Post Saturday, 18th August 2018, 10:59

Re: xp from exploration

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Also abyss would be basically free XP.


Isn't it already?
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Zot Zealot

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Post Saturday, 18th August 2018, 11:55

Re: xp from exploration

What if Ely gives an ability which grants xp for all monsters in LOS, but also marks them so they are worth no XP when killed?

Depending on balancing, there could be a penalty (eg piety loss) for killing a marked monster, and it could grant 50% or 100% xp,

This way you can't get more xp than you could with killing, and you could still attempt pacifist runs.
Of course people could go to the deep dungeon to harvest XP from monsters they can't defeat yet, (vaults 5 would be an especially attractive target,) but since such behaviour is risky and carries long-term costs, I'm not sure it would be a problem.

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Post Saturday, 18th August 2018, 18:05

Re: xp from exploration

The thing about dissociating xp from kills is that you want to kill monsters anyway when it's safe to do so, since monsters can hurt you and killing monsters gets rid of them. So handing out piety or xp for exploration is not much different from handing it out for kills, but it leaves the player with less incentive to kill the hard-to-kill monsters instead of avoiding them. So unless you really want players to fight uniques less often, there's not a lot of purpose in these changes.

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Post Tuesday, 21st August 2018, 16:28

Re: xp from exploration

duvessa wrote:The thing about dissociating xp from kills is that you want to kill monsters anyway when it's safe to do so, since monsters can hurt you and killing monsters gets rid of them. So handing out piety or xp for exploration is not much different from handing it out for kills, but it leaves the player with less incentive to kill the hard-to-kill monsters instead of avoiding them. So unless you really want players to fight uniques less often, there's not a lot of purpose in these changes.


You have a point. It would make the game less challenging, and so less fun.

In Cardinal Quest 2 there was a pacifism mode which solved this problem by punishing you (quite severely) for killing things: You got double xp for monsters you didn't kill, and no xp for mosters which you did kill. This actually resulted in very challenging games. I don't think the same mechanic could work in crawl, but maybe there could be another punishment associated with killing monsters?

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Post Monday, 17th September 2018, 08:03

Re: xp from exploration

duvessa wrote:The thing about dissociating xp from kills is that you want to kill monsters anyway when it's safe to do so, since monsters can hurt you and killing monsters gets rid of them. So handing out piety or xp for exploration is not much different from handing it out for kills, but it leaves the player with less incentive to kill the hard-to-kill monsters instead of avoiding them. So unless you really want players to fight uniques less often, there's not a lot of purpose in these changes.


I realised that wanting to be able to play without having an incentive to kill uniques is exactly the reason for this request. I like it when DCSS gives me options. To use an analogy:

I recently played a mummy of Gozag. I really enjoyed it, because there was no clock. Don't get me wrong; I like it that there usually is a clock. But it was still liberating to play one game in which I could wait around as much as I liked. I don't think the scumming gave me an advantage, because the mummy was harder to play than my current demigod. However, for just this one game, it was fun.

I think the same effect could be achieved if there was a way to remove the reward of killing difficult monsters.

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Post Monday, 17th September 2018, 08:10

Re: xp from exploration

petercordia wrote:I think the same effect could be achieved if there was a way to remove the reward of killing difficult monsters.


Well, you can do it in wizard mode. You can even play with some weird conduct like "A monster is considered dead (but gives no piety/XP) if you managed to attack it from all 8 directions". Of course you would need to manually remove the monster using wizard command (&G, as far as I remember)
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