Lasty wrote:If the purpose of this idea is education about different background/species combos, I don't think it will succeed.
True, but I think there is a substantial basis for discussion here about whether the current implementation of player ghosts in the game is ideal.
Some problems I could see with ghosts:
1.) Online, tough ghosts reward searching for others' morgues; offline, if you have a lot of bones files, you might have to search for morgues as well. [duvessa brought this up]
2.) Corollary to the above: Offline, you are actually penalized (albeit in a minor way) for how you name your characters and how well you remember them.
That might not sound like a big deal, but I can speak personally to this matter. I usually just type "adsdf" or some random thing for my names when I play offline, and I'll often reboot with the same name and species/background, if the character dies and I want to play the same type. Unless you clear out your bones files, this actually puts you at a disadvantage. A small disadvantage, but any difference in game difficulty caused by how you name your character (which should be a purely flavorful / aesthetic choice) strikes me as rather hideously out of line with Crawl's philosophy. [Note: This isn't just theoretical. Once I got good enough at the game, I didn't mind fighting ghosts occasionally, but I found they spawned too often offline, and I didn't want to put much thought into most of my character's names and keep track of them.]
3.) Different servers have different de facto difficulty levels [duvessa]
4.) Ghosts differ from the player version in certain ways (e.g., all draconians past level 7 get draining breath, unless that was removed) [raised by Lasty]; I would add that these differences are not always obvious and may even be counter-intuitive.
5.) Ghosts can be fast and can achieve levels of EV and certain combinations of spells, etc., that just make them annoying to deal with. That's fine if they also happen to be dangerous to your character, but if they aren't, it isn't very fun.
6.) Online, ghosts at least theoretically allow for "griefing"—intentionally building a low level character that will make a deadly ghost, and dying on D3 or D4. (D4 is arguably better for this purpose because the Temple can spawn there.)
7.) I'll just quote Lasty here:
Lasty wrote:Ghosts really aren't much like players, and monsters in general aren't much like players. How effective a certain character's ghost is against a player is almost entirely unrelated to how effective that character would be as a player fighting monsters.
I'd suggest that having a potentially important game element depend on something other than a player's ability to survive encounters with monsters does not fit well with Crawl's overall design. (This relates to the point about the possibility of griefing, as well.)
The rest are offline-only points:
8.) Offline, deleting and re-downloading the file will create an easier game than playing one with lots of bones files. (Pretty awkward for new players, until they learn how to delete bones files.)
9.) Offline, ghosts are entirely optional, but getting rid of them is not newbie-friendly. [Note: On some new Macs, Library files now come hidden and will re-hide themselves as the default whenever you make certain updates. {Insert joke about Macintosh not trusting its own customers not to destroy their computers.}]
10.) Offline, the more you die, the more you are penalized. Fundamentally I don't think this is a fun feature. It is good that Crawl is tough, but I remember when I first started playing I went through a period where I felt I was constantly dying to my own ghosts, and it was demoralizing. If I hadn't figured out how to wipe the morgue it really could have turned me off to the game.
Based on all the above, I think there might be ways to fix some of these problems for online player ghosts (though they may not be worth keeping). In the online version there is at least potentially some novelty value in fighting against other people's characters. Whether that's worth the problems above is very debatable, of course.
I think offline should simply not spawn player ghosts, at all. (I know DCSS wants to maintain identity between online and offline versions, as much as possible, but the way ghosts work now is
completely different between online and offline, already, so you aren't actually introducing a
new dissimilarity between the two.)