Blades Runner
Posts: 593
Joined: Tuesday, 11th December 2018, 19:14
Re: Poll: What do you think about shaft effects?
duvessa wrote:But there are a ton of things you can do to minimize the risk of malmutation and paralysis before they happen...
True. You can even guarantee you'll never get teleported into Zot:5 lungs in every single game.
...if you're willing to endure sufficient tedium to make it so. You can *always* scum abyss for -tele or *always* switch to Ashenzari s a non-Dg, or even *always* gradually farm up to magic like D Door + revivification + shatter/tornado/firestorm with mana pots. Similar, but to less extremes, for blocking para/malmutes using summons (butterflies aren't reliable, but SLS is pretty reliable as are options like fog/cblink/etc).
I do dislike no-MR option games, though I've died to paralysis in a no-MR option game exactly once in 700+ games (which is why I remember it). That felt pretty bad, but it's the kind of fluke-odds thing even I'd not advocate putting significant time into addressing. Too many potential interactions at lotto ticket odds to care about them.
As for shafts specifically, they have the potential for extreme lethality/unfair outcomes on D:1 and quickly fall off after a couple floors. Kind of an annoying extra cheap death way to end streaks, in addition to the typical D:1 "jackal pack vs wizard" or "no pillar gnoll encounter" that decides your streak is over.
if shafts aren't dangerous past early game it's because nothing is dangerous past early game; that would be a problem with past-early-game, not with shafts
This is fairly disingenuous; in crawl many floors have a few situations where poor play by the player will take you from 100 health to 0 health in 5 turns or fewer. Sometimes as few as 1 turn. Good players recognize these threats for what they are, properly anticipate which actions will give them low-to-no risk, and choose those actions. But that doesn't mean the situation isn't/wasn't dangerous; for every good player that almost never dies in depths there are 10 more who are lucky to get past depths at all. Maybe more than 10 more.
What later areas don't share with starting areas is the number of options available to the player. Early on, you can lack resources due to RNG or even if you have them, they're not ID'd yet. Meliai are much more dangerous than bees. A pair or D:11 Meliai can smite a -hp% character to death 100-0 even if you read TP on-sight, if unlucky. But in practice they're much less dangerous than D:2 to D:4 bees, because by the time you encounter Meliai you have wands, god abilities, identified potions, and at least good odds of getting away with TP or blink. On D:3 you probably don't have any of those things, just a couple 20 speed monsters you can't 1v1 bearing down on you, so you blind use whatever resources you have and hope to get lucky.
I consider the Meliai encounter to be the better one, despite that it's less lethal to expert players. I died to them early as a player, learned the danger, and improved. Can't say the same for D:3 bees before identifying resources, or getting shafted next to an adder I can't 1v1 or escape.
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TL/DR:
Crawl does not need more of the game to be like D:1.