Idea: a "generic character ghost" (XL=1) in early game

[RoGGa]

Imagine this scenario:
in D:2, you encounter a monster that is a generic ghost of a character combo (ie: DEMo, TrWz, HuFi) as if it had died during it's 1st battle (XL=0, next: 0%)

You'd have to figure out if it is a potential threat (viable character combo such as a MiFi) or just an easy kill (such as a DEMo).
Could this be an interesting addition to the initial pre-Temple game especially for those who do not play online?

I got this idea from many sources including chequers very informative spreadsheet linked in this post:
https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=14156
( where I realized that most combos are very rarely played )
...and I'm thinking that these "generic character ghosts" could be very educational for new crawlers ( especially for those who do not play online ).

If this is a good idea, here's a Q for devs:
How complicated would it be to implement the simplest prototype?
From my non-dev perspective, I'm thinking that a few "generic character ghosts" prototypes could be created as new Uniques or just by stripping a Bones file down to a character's starting state.

Feel free to share an interesting spinoff as a reply if it is fairly similar,
or as a new post if it is quite different.

[Sandman25]

When I was trying to get my first win (offline), I didn't use internet much and I was really curious to see new monsters in Lair and alike.
When I met my player ghosts, I knew exactly how powerful they were (and they usually were the same combo as I currently was playing). Spending several hours without meeting any new monsters because of dying to my own player ghost felt really disappointing. Eventually I learned how to delete player ghosts and did just that (and I keep doing that even after getting many wins). I suspect new players can be really disappointed by dying to all those ghosts too especially since new players have no idea how powerful specific ghosts are. Also player ghosts are bad because they are not susceptible to poison, EH, nets etc. (but have normal speed unlike most zombies) and ignore spell failure rate.

[and into]

I don't know if it is a good idea to add several hundred new uniques to the early game in one fell swoop. That is a lot of information to demand of new players. Even setting aside the many combinations that would be extremely unfair (most/all Sp**, Fe**, Ce**, **Su, etc.)

There is a reason actual player ghosts do not generate unless they died on D3 (IIRC) or later.

[RoGGa]

So I did my own prototype:
I successfully created 8 bones files on D:3 of diff character combos that died with no kills (XL=1, next=0%)
and I finally succeeded in encountering one of these really weak "generic character ghosts" GCG.

I think this could be a good way to:
- prepare new crawlers to the eventuality of meeting their own ghosts (or other player ghosts for those playing online); and
- add a bit more variety/replayability to the early game.

Here's how I would address the concern of difficult combos from: and into:
- the weaker ones (non-viable combos like DEMo) could generate in the early game (ie: D:3), while
- the "stronger" yet still fairly weak ones (viable combos) could generate in a deeper level (ie D:4), and
- the strongest ones (such as OgFi & TrMo) could generate only in even deeper levels (ie D:5).

Before I spent anytime on writing a formal proposal, I am wondering if there are any other concerns with this idea conceptually as I am currently blinded by the above benefits to the early game.

[notcluie]

so what does this add to the game when you already have ghosts spawning on those levels
(also the actual "strongest" ghosts are all the fast species + a book background but that isn't massively relevant other than the fact a d:2 CeWz ghost or something like that is probably instant death and this feature is bad)
e: and it would be quite a bit more code for very little gain

[RoGGa]

so what does this add to the game when you already have ghosts spawning on those levels

for those who play online, I'm guessing not much.
For new crawlers playing locally, it would add a whole new educational experience preparing them to eventually encountering their own player ghosts.
And for experienced crawlers like me who play offline, it would just add some cute re-playability to the early game.
I only play offline so I'm not aware of the current online experience. It obviously seems to be quite different and this idea would close that gap.

I'd like to point out that DCSS gets about 2-3K DLs/week on Sourceforge
(and I'm guessing that doesn't include installations via repositories such as for Debian and Ubuntu).

(also the actual "strongest" ghosts are all the fast species + a book background but that isn't massively relevant other than the fact a d:2 CeWz ghost or something like that is probably instant death and this feature is bad)

As for the more dangerous Generic Character Ghosts you are referring to, it would obviously not be allowed to be generated until deeper levels since it would be considered part of the "strongest" Generic Character Ghosts.
Would you see an issue with new crawler encountering a CeWz (XL=0, next=0%) on D:5?

[RoGGa]

Attached is the successful v.15.2 prototype I created.
On a Debian/Ubuntu linux flavour, just save it to your "saves" folder (~/.crawl/saves)

Obviously, such an encounter would not always be as lopsided since this HuFi player character has been quite lucky already:
* 3 enchant weapon & 2 nets (both of which were used to kill Sigmund on D:2)
followed by a Potion of Experience that was targeted exclusively to Polearms.

[Sprucery]

Personally I think ghosts are one of those things that should not have been taken from Nethack into Crawl (although the implementation is quite different) in the first place. Ghosts are boring and playing locally I very much enjoy the fact that I don't have to see other players' ghosts.

[damiac]

Speaking of ghost problems, Draconian ghosts with breath attacks. Enjoy all your skills being drained to 0... Why don't they just get the actual breath attack of the original character? It's not like cj ghosts cast ghostly missile instead of magic missile.

[RoGGa]

Considering how many Thanks Sprucery received about Player Ghosts in Crawl,
what is the current dev's perspective of player ghosts?
Is it something similar to the current trend for the Zealots backgrounds? The minimum the better!
(see the 2nd half of this long thread: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14125)

[TeshiAlair]

I for one LOVE player ghosts. To me, they are just as interesting of "bosses" as uniques because they serve the niche of being a randomized unique. They often have far more optimal spell sets, and serve as a genuine deterrent/obstacle even to stronger characters.

I am convinced that if they were flavored as "randomly generated uniques" (which I think was its own proposal) people would be all in favor of them.

[esran]

I for one LOVE player ghosts. To me, they are just as interesting of "bosses" as uniques because they serve the niche of being a randomized unique. They often have far more optimal spell sets, and serve as a genuine deterrent/obstacle even to stronger characters.

I am convinced that if they were flavored as "randomly generated uniques" (which I think was its own proposal) people would be all in favor of them.

I for one would much prefer randomly generated uniques to player ghosts.

[duvessa]

randomly generated uniques don't make you read a morgue every time one appears or make different servers have different difficulty levels

[1010011010]

New unique: Jack

Jack can't decide what to do with his life, picks a random suggested combination.

I still wouldn't want uniques/ghosts spawning on D1.

[notcluie]

they wouldn't spawn on d:1 though
this guy wants them to spawn on d:3+ where they're completely pointless instead of at least killing dudes sometimes

e: seriously though what's the point of this feature? it's easy enough for a new offline player to find their own ghost on d:3 that kills them, why do we need this as well

[Lasty]

If the purpose of this idea is education about different background/species combos, I don't think it will succeed:

1) 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.
2) Level 1 ghosts are very similar for all characters, since they've had no time to develop interesting features. All level 1 ghosts are very easy to defeat.

[and into]

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:

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.)

[Sar]

but ghosts are fun

[damiac]

I agree with some of what and into said, however ghosts aren't just a flat difficulty increase. They are also bags of experience. Of course, that could be considered a difficulty decrease, which also may be problematic.

[jejorda2]

Maybe Pan Lackeys, which are weak demons with unpredictable powers that are clearly noted in the description, would be a good idea? But they wouldn't do much that out-of-depth monsters don't do already.

[Sandman25]

I agree with some of what and into said, however ghosts aren't just a flat difficulty increase. They are also bags of experience. Of course, that could be considered a difficulty decrease, which also may be problematic.

That's the problem. Devs carefully create uniques setting their HP/AC/EV/XP/weapons/spells, assign range of dungeon levels where the uniques can generate. Compare with player ghosts. Some of them are extremely easy and are a bag of XP as you wrote, others have Fire Storm on D4. Why should we have monsters with random power this early? (pan lords can be fun and are in optional branches mostly)

[RoGGa]

Thank you all for your feedback.

As my signature states, my main concern is with the new crawler offline experience
In the early game, apart from a few Uniques like Sigmund, I find there is a huge challenge for new crawlers when they 1st encounter their own Player Ghosts and I am thinking that this could be addressed in part by my idea of Generic Character Ghosts
The only clarification I'd like to make presently relates to:

If the purpose of this idea is education about different background/species combos...

Since my initial posting, my idea is now maturing into a draft proposal and it is now focused on how new crawlers deal with encountering their own Player Ghosts.
Maybe a new Tutorial Lesson for dealing with Uniques and Player Ghosts would be sufficient or a combo of the 2 would be better.

I've created a prototype of 21 Death Knights GCGs and posted in a different thread:
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=14226

[notcluie]

theres a massive difference between some trash shortsword dedk ghost and an actual player ghost though
i still don't see why adding a hugely redundant feature to "teach new offline players" something almost anyone with functioning brain cells could work out
also why would you need a new tutorial on dealing with uniques/ghosts; you deal with them in the same way as everything else in crawl

this thread really makes no sense to me

[mikee]

Are demo and dedk ghosts really that easy to kill?

[Quazifuji]

"teach new offline players" (an irrelevant and fairly small subset)

I think calling new offline players "irrelevant" is a bit silly. Most people, from what I understand, first play DCSS offline. That means new offline players are the majority of new players (maybe I'm wrong and most start in Webtiles, correct me if I am). New players are a pretty important set of players, because they're how the community grows. We were all new players once, and I think it's a good idea to want new players enjoy the game enough to eventually become experienced players and contributing members of the community.

That said, I agree that random level 1 player ghosts don't seem to clearly help with this in any meaningful way.

[RoGGa]

After thinking about those who wrote constructive feedback, I now realize I'm focusing on patching something that may not be an issue for some. So let me share my overall perspective as it is (since it has evolved from what it was 5 days ago when I started this thread):

From versions .12 to .15, I find that it is just too easy for new crawlers to continuously die before finding the Temple.
This could be an important deterrent for new crawlers during their 1st 100 games as they are unlikely to make it consistently to the 1st milestone the game has to offer*.

Ideally for new crawlers, I would like to see:
1) D:3 & D:4 as it is but without the possibility of Player Ghosts generating as often as they do for new crawlers**; and
2) a better way to point out the important lesson of simply running away from a strong monster, a pack of weak ones, or most Uniques and Player Ghosts.

My "generic character ghost" idea would only address item 1 by making Player Ghosts less likely to generate on D:3 (and D:4 (maybe even D:5) since a bone file of a "weakling" GCG would more often be selected and deleted.
The main advantage of this approach is: with time, there would be less GCG in the bones folder and more real Player Ghosts for the engine to select from.
Obviously, this is but one possible option to addressing a specific of a larger issue as I see it.

============
Notes:
*During their 1st 100 games, I wouldn't even be surprised if most new crawlers only make it to the Temple 10-20 times.
(with the exception of those who have played a lot of rogue games like Nethack).

**Many experienced crawlers (including Sandman25 and and into's item #10 above) have referred to the frustration of being a new crawler and frequently dying to your own ghosts...to the point where deleting the bones files becomes the preferred option (as was the case for me also). But what about new crawlers who don't figure how to do this?
Maybe the counter-argument to this whole thread is: learn to pick your battles! Isn't that why Sigmung can appear on D:2?!? He almost always stays 2 cells away from you so he is unlikely to follow you up or down a staircase and Player Ghosts don't use stairs either.

[Sandman25]

A better solution would be to NOT generate ghosts offline until player wins at least once.

[Arrhythmia]

A better solution would be to NOT generate ghosts

[chequers]

1) Ghosts of myself are boring, and 2) I'd expect most new offline players to not reset their name often. So, 3) perhaps don't generate ghosts of the same name as the current player.

PS, It would be cool if there were a few "dev ghosts", ie hardcoded uniqs. DCSS's theme is suprisingly po-faced and serious, it would be nice for a little testing of the fourth-wall boundary.

[Siegurt]

Hard coded Dev ghosts would have to be of only retired devs.

[Greyr]

Hard coded Dev ghosts would have to be of only retired devs.

One can assume that Dpeg is the Necromancer behind this.

[Lasty]

1) Ghosts of myself are boring, and 2) I'd expect most new offline players to not reset their name often. So, 3) perhaps don't generate ghosts of the same name as the current player.

PS, It would be cool if there were a few "dev ghosts", ie hardcoded uniqs. DCSS's theme is suprisingly po-faced and serious, it would be nice for a little testing of the fourth-wall boundary.

When I played exclusively offline, which I did until I had won every class and background at least once, I never intentionally cleared out my morgue on the grounds that I felt like ghosts were supposed to be part of the challenge and experience of playing Crawl -- and also because they offered a high risk, high reward encounter, which I found interesting. I did not at the time know that I could "spoil myself" about ghost danger level by looking up my old morgue files, and at the time ghosts did not announce AC, EV, spellset, and attack brand, as they do now. Of course, that's only one person's experience, but I offer it in contrast to the experiences of players who found ghosts exclusively frustrating and who did or were tempted to clear their morgue files.

I also tried to uniquely name every offline character, though sometimes creativity failed me. Once I started playing online I initially found it strange (though obviously necessary) that players keep a single name for all characters.

[PleasingFungus]

randomly generated uniques don't make you read a morgue every time one appears

at this point, I'm not sure there's any reason to look up morgue files when encountering a ghost, unless +- 4 EV or AC would make a critical difference to your decisionmaking.

(in some cases, looking up the morgue is actively counterproductive, in the case of ghosts that died when paralysed.)

about the only reason at this point would be if you really needed to know the ghost's exact xl - it would be nice if ghosts had that listed somewhere, instead or in addition to using the silly old "ghost words"...