What in Crawl isn't fun?


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Post Saturday, 8th January 2011, 20:09

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

-Searching for the abyssal rune. The abyss itself isn't so bad, but finding the rune is entirely a matter of luck or tedium, for any character powerful enough to actually want to look for it. There are ideas about making it better, but they don't address how the abyss is entirely monotonous, and how everything gets dealt with by running away from it (even if the abyss had harder enemies, you could still flee from them). I've seen dpeg mention he wouldn't mind seeing the abyssal rune removed; I have to agree with that sentiment. Although, the game would need a new 15th rune to make up for that.
-Scrolls of paper. Have these ever actually done anything besides waste one turn near the start of the game? Does that one turn ever actually make a difference? Removing scrolls of paper would pretty much have the effect of making every ascension three turns quicker, because with scrolls of paper, all you do is pick it up, read it, drop it, and ignore it for the rest of the game. On the other hand, if there could actually be a use for blank scrolls, that would be cool.
-Spellbooks always being unidentified. Why is it that, once I've identified a book of power, all future books of power are still unidentified? Why are spellbooks the only items to behave like this? Does this actually add anything to the gameplay? Right now it's kind of silly that you have to read each and every spellbook you find, even though they may be duplicates (all this changes is that you waste a turn reading it). All books of power have the same set of spells, so once you identify one, you should identify all of them.
-Hive (as a branch) really needs to go. It would be better as a portal vault. The game wouldn't really suffer from this: there is enough food in the game that Hive isn't that important, and for players that do find a Hive portal, the food is a nice bonus but it's not enough to be a game changer.
-Being abyssed by hell effects. The abyss is easier than any of the hells, so when you do get randomly abyssed while doing the hells, it's more like the game is giving you a break than making things harder for you.

These last two are more from my own personal taste than anything:

-Centaur warriors on early dungeon levels. I encountered one on D:9 a few games ago. Normally I don't mind the occasional out of depth monster, but centaur warriors can be REALLY bad due to their ranged attacks. If you run into one this early, you only have one or two moves before you're dead (that means teleporting is too slow). I was able to survive this encounter, but only because I had meph cloud and repel missiles.
-I've never liked labyrinths. Usually they are easy, and when they aren't easy I just feel like I got unlucky with the layout. I've never felt like my own skill was being challenged when doing a labyrinth.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Saturday, 8th January 2011, 21:58

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

I find the Hive enjoyable because it's fun to kill fast bees. Also it makes a good stash location.

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Post Saturday, 8th January 2011, 22:40

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

evilmike wrote:Searching for the abyssal rune. The abyss itself isn't so bad, but finding the rune is entirely a matter of luck or tedium, for any character powerful enough to actually want to look for it. There are ideas about making it better, but they don't address how the abyss is entirely monotonous, and how everything gets dealt with by running away from it (even if the abyss had harder enemies, you could still flee from them). I've seen dpeg mention he wouldn't mind seeing the abyssal rune removed; I have to agree with that sentiment. Although, the game would need a new 15th rune to make up for that.

Why do we need 15 runes? The other problems of the Abyss (monotonicity; used too often as a "punishment" while it is the safer area later on; hence Abyss abuse as life-saving; generally underwhelming threat-wise later on) are just more important than the rune, I think. There are many ways to make the hunt for the abyssical rune less annoying: a simple one is rune vaults (just make some maps); another, more fancy one, is rune-bearing monsters (they come after you, in contrast with the rune).

evilmike wrote:Scrolls of paper. Have these ever actually done anything besides waste one turn near the start of the game? Does that one turn ever actually make a difference? Removing scrolls of paper would pretty much have the effect of making every ascension three turns quicker, because with scrolls of paper, all you do is pick it up, read it, drop it, and ignore it for the rest of the game. On the other hand, if there could actually be a use for blank scrolls, that would be cool.

I agree.

evilmike wrote:Spellbooks always being unidentified. Why is it that, once I've identified a book of power, all future books of power are still unidentified? Why are spellbooks the only items to behave like this? Does this actually add anything to the gameplay? Right now it's kind of silly that you have to read each and every spellbook you find, even though they may be duplicates (all this changes is that you waste a turn reading it). All books of power have the same set of spells, so once you identify one, you should identify all of them.

This one is okay and can stay. Just as you don't know a weapon's or armour's pluses, enchantment or randart properties from afar, you don't know what a book is about from afar. This point is not crucial and could be changed, but it matters with vaults.
It would probably be possible to identify ego (for armours and weapons) and book name (for standard books) once you stand on the book; or possible that only if you already know the book. (So that not even picking up is necessary.) I guess flavour-wise the idea is that you have to turn to the first page.

evilmike wrote:Hive (as a branch) really needs to go. It would be better as a portal vault. The game wouldn't really suffer from this: there is enough food in the game that Hive isn't that important, and for players that do find a Hive portal, the food is a nice bonus but it's not enough to be a game changer.

Will come, I hope already for 0.9. I do find that Hive food matters (depends on the build, of course). The main issue that it's very hard to die in Hive, and that a billion bees isn't very attractive opposition anyway. My plan to change this is by turning Hive into a race: once you enter, the larvae start crawling to nearby honeycombs and eating them (thereby growing into bees, I guess). So if you want full loot (i.e. food), then you need to be as fast and as efficient as possible -- which hopefully is more interesting than the current stomp. For details https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:branch:hive

evilmike wrote:Centaur warriors on early dungeon levels. I encountered one on D:9 a few games ago. Normally I don't mind the occasional out of depth monster, but centaur warriors can be REALLY bad due to their ranged attacks. If you run into one this early, you only have one or two moves before you're dead (that means teleporting is too slow). I was able to survive this encounter, but only because I had meph cloud and repel missiles.

Not an issue. There are also other ways to live and tell. Blinking, fog, berserk. It is a particularly good OOD monster because you survived it.

evilmike wrote:I've never liked labyrinths. Usually they are easy, and when they aren't easy I just feel like I got unlucky with the layout. I've never felt like my own skill was being challenged when doing a labyrinth.

Labyrinths have recently been limited to one per game. If you have ideas how to make them more interesting, please tell us.

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Post Sunday, 9th January 2011, 00:29

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

dpeg wrote:
evilmike wrote:I've never liked labyrinths. Usually they are easy, and when they aren't easy I just feel like I got unlucky with the layout. I've never felt like my own skill was being challenged when doing a labyrinth.

Labyrinths have recently been limited to one per game. If you have ideas how to make them more interesting, please tell us.

Labyrinths have a major issue in their core design, namely that they're zero-risk/high-reward but still require a ton of time to slog through anyway. Anyone with a couple of rations is bound to stumble their way to the end eventually, and the minotaur is no harder than any of the other big beatsticks the dungeon throws at you. And increasing the challenge by making the maze harder to navigate just makes it even more boring (and dying to starvation in a maze is a really lame way to lose a character anyway).

I think labyrinths require a drastic change to become challenging in a fun way. One possibility (which just popped into my head this very minute) is to change them from being a literal maze of passageways to a branching web of chambers between the starting point and the treasure vault, each one with its own challenge inside (getting more dangerous the deeper you go, naturally). Something vaguely reminiscent of the Red Sonja Dungeon Sprint map, but more random and with way more potential routes. The objective would be trying to find a survivable path that ultimately leads to the treasure, which might require doubling back and going through a larger total number rooms in order avoid some particular challenge that you aren't equipped to handle. The player should probably be allowed to retrace their steps and leave if they give up (unlike current labyrinths, which are do-or-die), but randomly spawning new enemies in cleared rooms from time to time might be a good idea to keep the tension up (and possibly force the player to search for new, unexplored paths back if one of the new spawns is too hard for them). There would probably need to be either a time limit or some sort of experience penalty to keep players from deliberately grinding them empty, though.

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Post Sunday, 9th January 2011, 00:41

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Sjohara wrote:
dpeg wrote:
evilmike wrote:I've never liked labyrinths. Usually they are easy, and when they aren't easy I just feel like I got unlucky with the layout. I've never felt like my own skill was being challenged when doing a labyrinth.

Labyrinths have recently been limited to one per game. If you have ideas how to make them more interesting, please tell us.

Labyrinths have a major issue in their core design, namely that they're zero-risk/high-reward but still require a ton of time to slog through anyway.

While there is some truth in this, the whole statement is quite exaggerated, in my opinion:
"zero risk": the vault is timed, so there is some risk when rushing to the entry; also players have died to the minotaur;
"ton of time": I need at most five minutes;
"high reward": it's just not that good.
I should also mention that labyrinths now appear a bit earlier. This means that the rush, the nutrition and the minotaur are all more interesting challenges.

Sjohara wrote:Anyone with a couple of rations is bound to stumble their way to the end eventually, and the minotaur is no harder than any of the other big beatsticks the dungeon throws at you. And increasing the challenge by making the maze harder to navigate just makes it even more boring (and dying to starvation in a maze is a really lame way to lose a character anyway).

But that's what the labyrinth is about. Not sure you'll like it, but you can run into hungry ghosts in a labyrinth.

Sjohara wrote:I think labyrinths require a drastic change to become challenging in a fun way. One possibility (which just popped into my head this very minute) is to change them from being a literal maze of passageways to a branching web of chambers between the starting point and the treasure vault, each one with its own challenge inside (getting more dangerous the deeper you go, naturally). Something vaguely reminiscent of the Red Sonja Dungeon Sprint map, but more random and with way more potential routes. The objective would be trying to find a survivable path that ultimately leads to the treasure, which might require doubling back and going through a larger total number rooms in order avoid some particular challenge that you aren't equipped to handle. The player should probably be allowed to retrace their steps and leave if they give up (unlike current labyrinths, which are do-or-die), but randomly spawning new enemies in cleared rooms from time to time might be a good idea to keep the tension up (and possibly force the player to search for new, unexplored paths back if one of the new spawns is too hard for them). There would probably need to be either a time limit or some sort of experience penalty to keep players from deliberately grinding them empty, though.

This sounds interesting but also like a lot of work to flesh out. In my opinion, restricting to one, early-ish labyrinth solves the issues most people have, and not all players find them hideously boring. If you think you can be more specific, please post an outline at either https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:vault:labyrinths or https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:vault:portal_vaults

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Post Sunday, 9th January 2011, 01:26

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

dpeg wrote:While there is some truth in this, the whole statement is quite exaggerated, in my opinion:
"zero risk": the vault is timed, so there is some risk when rushing to the entry; also players have died to the minotaur;
"ton of time": I need at most five minutes;
"high reward": it's just not that good.
I should also mention that labyrinths now appear a bit earlier. This means that the rush, the nutrition and the minotaur are all more interesting challenges.

The risk: I think most players know their characters well enough to know whether or not they can take on a single Stone Giant-level threat or not before they go in; it's trivial for most spellcasters. And the risk in rushing towards the entrance portal doesn't count; that applies equally to every kind of portal vault. The time: Okay, maybe it doesn't take that long in objective terms, but it feels like a long time because it's so tedious. The reward: it's not a huge treasure trove, but I've gotten decent staves, jewelery, and randarts out of them. Enough that I feel like I'm gimping myself if I skip the labyrinth out of laziness. And putting labyrinths earlier makes mediocre randarts more valuable, since the odds of a low-level character still having garbage in that slot are pretty good.

dpeg wrote:But that's what the labyrinth is about. Not sure you'll like it, but you can run into hungry ghosts in a labyrinth.

The problem is that there's no skill or tactics involved. The map changes at random, so it's not like you're actively planning out a route. You wander aimlessly and either you get to the end or you don't. It's pure luck. You could have a portal that led directly to the treasure vault but which tallies up the food in the player's inventory and can randomly instakill them with x in [available nutrition] odds and there wouldn't be much of a functional difference. I've yet to run into a monster in a labyrinth, so I can't say how much they'd change things.

dpeg wrote:This sounds interesting but also like a lot of work to flesh out. In my opinion, restricting to one, early-ish labyrinth solves the issues most people have, and not all players find them hideously boring. If you think you can be more specific, please post an outline at either https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:vault:labyrinths or https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:vault:portal_vaults
Yeah, I know it was a fairly bold proposal; I was just trying to come up with something that I'd actually be excited to go up against (as opposed to a mindless chore) while still fitting the general definition of "labyrinth". A simpler alternative would just be axing labyrinths entirely and generating other portal vaults slightly more often. I wouldn't miss them, personally. They're starting to remind me of doing Sokoban by rote in your hundredth Nethack game: it barely ever goes wrong and it's really tedious and boring, but you can't bring yourself to not do it because there's free loot inside.

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Post Sunday, 9th January 2011, 01:44

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

dpeg wrote:Why do we need 15 runes?

Mainly for scoring reasons. Consider this: if the game only had 14 runes, would the scoring formula remain the same? If so, previous versions (which had 15 runes) would yield higher scores for allrune wins, for the most part. This wouldn't be such a problem if the scoring formula was updated to reflect the existence of only 14 unique runes (I hadn't thought of that when I made that post). In any case, it's worth thinking about if only because of the existence of the scores on CAO going back several years, and competition between players.

There's also a more superficial reason: it sounds more impressive to say "I won with 15 runes" than it does to say "I won with 14 runes". This has utterly no impact on gameplay, but it's significant when it comes to bragging rights.

...

Not an issue. There are also other ways to live and tell. Blinking, fog, berserk. It is a particularly good OOD monster because you survived it.

...

Labyrinths have recently been limited to one per game. If you have ideas how to make them more interesting, please tell us.

Yeah, I don't really think the last two points I made hold much weight, they are really just personal opinions, especially the first one (which was just me venting). I figured I'd post them anyway just for the sake of discussion.

Regarding labyrinths, I can't really say much that hasn't already been said. I think the current ideas about them are a move in the right direction, but my problem with labyrinths is, fundamentally, that they are easy mazes with loot at the end. I don't know if that can be fixed, because if the mazes were made too hard (or starvation was made a significant threat in them) people would just avoid labyrinths.

Ideally, I would like to see the maze part de-emphasized by making the mazes smaller, or even easier, and compensating by adding variety (such as vaults) and plenty of monsters. In other words, less maze-solving, and more combat. This would be a radical change, though, and the trend with labyrinths (when it comes to changes and improvements) seems to be more conservative.

Labyrinths just happen to be one of those parts of the game which I don't like very much. That's not such a big problem - different people have different tastes, and you can't please everyone.

For this message the author evilmike has received thanks:
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Post Sunday, 9th January 2011, 17:54

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

I don't mind labyrinths. They only take 2-3 minutes to finish and you get loot. I don't like the Abyss. It's either annoying or boring, depending on your level. And I don't like the sickness mechanic.

Sickness isn't going to deter me from eating contaminated chunks, so what's the point? It just forces me waste time resting. I think sickness should be removed from food and eating a tainted chunk causes you to randomly pass out for a few turns. Then I wouldn't have to keep pressing the rest button until I recovered.

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Post Sunday, 9th January 2011, 18:01

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Sickness is occasionally significant. If I find myself in a situation where I'm both very low on nutrition and moderately injured and my only available chunk turns out to be contaiminated, I usually feel it's too dangerous to hunt for more meat on low health but can't wait out the sickness or I might starve anyway, which typically forces me to use permafood. It is a pretty minor factor on the whole, though.

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Post Sunday, 9th January 2011, 19:07

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Sickness could be made riskier: each contam chunk gives a higher chance of catching the pox, and each turn gives a higher chance of stat degeneration. That would make eating contam chunks more of a gamble and increase the need to strategise carefully with food.

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Post Sunday, 9th January 2011, 23:43

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Early deaths in general, but death by poison in particular.
Mummies. Characters that can literally only win by scumming. Its okay to give people who really want to grind aeons an option, but Mummies are so horrible that they literally drink the fun out of the game. Other gimmick classes (Spriggans, Felids, Ogres) have a much greater chance of at least surviving the very early game, and Spriggans and Felids are pretty viable overall. The only draw for Mummies seems to be the resistances and no spell hunger--but when you get fragged by orc wizards before even seeing the Temple, you won't get a chance to exploit them.
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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 00:18

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

jackalKnight wrote:Early deaths in general, but death by poison in particular.
Mummies. Characters that can literally only win by scumming. Its okay to give people who really want to grind aeons an option, but Mummies are so horrible that they literally drink the fun out of the game. Other gimmick classes (Spriggans, Felids, Ogres) have a much greater chance of at least surviving the very early game, and Spriggans and Felids are pretty viable overall. The only draw for Mummies seems to be the resistances and no spell hunger--but when you get fragged by orc wizards before even seeing the Temple, you won't get a chance to exploit them.


You can win a mummy without scumming. A MuCj (ice) is pretty fun to play imo.
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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 01:55

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

On sickness, since it's been mentioned: I think the biggest reason we ignore it so often is because we have to. If you're a carnivorous race, you pretty much have to eat contaminated chunks to survive. You ignore the risk of sickness because it is a minor inconvenience compared to starvation.

Personally, I think it would be more interesting if bad chunks still provided nutrition. So you'd be making the tactical choice between hunger and poison / sickness etc.

Staff IDing isn't fun. Someone in the selling stuff thread said that if you give players a grindy way to not have fun, they'll use it. That's what staff IDing is. I don't want to wack plants with staffs, evoke them, and test cast spells to try and trigger an ID, but I totally will, just to save my identify scrolls.

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 07:23

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

The staff identification thing could be partly improved by having it auto-ID on equip if you have at least one rank in the skill it enhances. Also potentially applicable to rings of fire/ice(/wizardry?).

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 07:31

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

victory dancing -- fixes discussed here: https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... ol_changes

insubstantial wisps (crazy defenses (resists, 20 ac (how do insubstantial monsters have armour anyway), 20 ev) and blink, while being completely nonthreatening) -- fix: remove them, unless they add something to the game, in which case tone down their defenses and give them a better attack; vapours and air elementals are both far more interesting, anyway

As for sickness from chunks, I personally think it would be more interesting if bad chunks gave nutrition in addition to their effects (and contaminated chunks always induced sickness), making it far less of a no-brainer not to eat them and removing the frustration of getting a bunch of sickness and no nutrition.

oh and what's good about 0.8 mummies? Unless I'm missing something, they don't seem to be all that great.

(Why isn't this thread in Game Design Discussion anymore? I read the reason, but I see a good lot of discussion on improvement, so I don't know what you're getting at.)
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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 16:22

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

You know, what drives me nutters are potions of decay (that's the one that causes rotting, right?)

I had a early character with unID'd potions, got in trouble, gambled on finding a potion of healing, and got rot instead. I survived the fight because I then got might or something, but I rotted down to 17/38 HP or something like that and I just gave up in disgust and quit the character. I didn't think I'd live long enough to find 21 potions of healing to restore my max HP.

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 17:05

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

MrMisterMonkey wrote:victory dancing -- fixes discussed here: https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... ol_changes

insubstantial wisps (crazy defenses (resists, 20 ac (how do insubstantial monsters have armour anyway), 20 ev) and blink, while being completely nonthreatening) -- fix: remove them, unless they add something to the game, in which case tone down their defenses and give them a better attack; vapours and air elementals are both far more interesting, anyway

As for sickness from chunks, I personally think it would be more interesting if bad chunks gave nutrition in addition to their effects (and contaminated chunks always induced sickness), making it far less of a no-brainer not to eat them and removing the frustration of getting a bunch of sickness and no nutrition.

oh and what's good about 0.8 mummies? Unless I'm missing something, they don't seem to be all that great.

(Why isn't this thread in Game Design Discussion anymore? I read the reason, but I see a good lot of discussion on improvement, so I don't know what you're getting at.)


In terms of sickness, chance of being sick from contaminated meat is a gameplay mechanic that's supposed to differentiate between races that have different carnivore mutation levels. It could be implemented better, though, I agree.

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 18:17

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Saprovore and Gourmand would give a chance to reduce/eliminate sickness.

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 18:44

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

danr wrote:You know, what drives me nutters are potions of decay (that's the one that causes rotting, right?)

I had a early character with unID'd potions, got in trouble, gambled on finding a potion of healing, and got rot instead. I survived the fight because I then got might or something, but I rotted down to 17/38 HP or something like that and I just gave up in disgust and quit the character. I didn't think I'd live long enough to find 21 potions of healing to restore my max HP.


In my experience all you need to cure rot is a single potion of healing when you are at max (rotted) health.

I like to begin IDing potions on about DL 5, when I've got a big batch of unknowns. I drink the ones I have the fewest of first, because those are more likely to be bad ones. If I get a rot, I start drinking the ones I have most of, because those are likely to be heals. 99 times out of 100 I find a heal and the rot disappears immediately, with the loss of maybe one HP.

Course if you're gambling when you're in trouble you deserve what you get! :lol:
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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 19:00

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

You cure rotting with a healing potion.
You can restore rotted HP with a healing potion (one HP per potion) or with a wand of healing.
Mangled by Mennas

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 19:27

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

ID potions with scrolls if you really hate the rotting.
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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 19:33

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

re: rotting: in this case it was not an option, it was "find a good potion or die". I guess I just had really bad luck in this situation.

re: contaminated chunks:
When you eat a contaminated chunk and it causes sickness, I think you should still get nutrition.

Actually, this would make it more interesting: when you eat a chunk that would give you sickness, you don't actually know right away. Then, 20-50 turns later "You suddenly feel violently ill" and you could have a range of effects:
- You vomit (floor spatter! small chance to ruin a scroll?) (and lose nutrition according to the amount of food expelled)
- lose 10-20% STR or DEX
- temporarily lose some max HP

Each of the above would only happen some of the time, so you'd get 1-3 of these effects. The last two would recover after the end of the sickness. Deep Dwarves might not recover similarly though.

Currently the contaminated chunks are just a lower-preference food source. I'll eat them before permafood every time. With some more chancy and significant ill effects I might be less inclined, depending on my character's frailty and saprovore levels etc.

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 19:42

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Turning off useless skills like stabbing or stealth for an ogre, I hate to miss the moment when I miss the 1st level and continue wasting tons of XP
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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 20:47

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Yeah, I don't get why you can see or control skills until they get to level 1.
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Slime Squisher

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 21:15

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

How do you turn off or control a skill you haven't developed yet? :)
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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 21:23

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Doesn't the new skill interface let you see all skills? If it doesn't, it should!

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 21:34

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

It lets you see all skills, but you still can't interact with the ones you don't have. It would be a pretty handy thing to add, though.

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Post Monday, 10th January 2011, 23:23

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Sjohara wrote:It lets you see all skills, but you still can't interact with the ones you don't have. It would be a pretty handy thing to add, though.



Really? dang i assumed thats what they meant by "can see all skills". Please allow all skills to be turned off even if they are at 0!

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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 00:29

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

ryak wrote:
Sjohara wrote:It lets you see all skills, but you still can't interact with the ones you don't have. It would be a pretty handy thing to add, though.



Really? dang i assumed thats what they meant by "can see all skills". Please allow all skills to be turned off even if they are at 0!


Seconded.
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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 01:26

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

starless wrote:How do you turn off or control a skill you haven't developed yet? :)

Well, you can drop out of school before you get a degree, can't you?

If I'm not planning to use armour, stealth or spellcasting, I shouldn't have to train them to level 1 in order to turn them off, should I?
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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 02:16

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

I think the idea is supposed to be you can't chose to not train a skill you don't know you have.

Level 1 is when your character realizes the that the skill even exists. At that point, they can choose to train the skill, or not. The character really can't chose to not become aware of something. Denial only gets you so far.
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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 02:31

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

I guess I see the logic, but how does that make the game better?
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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 04:58

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

I don't think turning off spellcasting and stealth and armour, say, will take that long. There's no point turning off magic schools if you will never be training them. It only applies to the skills that train "vampirically" - taking your XP whether you want them to or not.

Another way to do it is with sensible defaults. Have most skills default to off. Fighting might default to on, since it is useful for every character. But stealth and armour for ex. are ones that not everyone will want to train but that might get trained inadvertently.
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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 06:50

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

danr wrote:You know, what drives me nutters are potions of decay (that's the one that causes rotting, right?)

I had a early character with unID'd potions, got in trouble, gambled on finding a potion of healing, and got rot instead. I survived the fight because I then got might or something, but I rotted down to 17/38 HP or something like that and I just gave up in disgust and quit the character. I didn't think I'd live long enough to find 21 potions of healing to restore my max HP.


A single potion of healing will stop the rot, but potions of healing will only heal 1 maximum hit point back at a time. However, drinking a heal wounds potion while at maximum health will restore multiple rotted hit points at one time, so you wouldn't have needed 21 of those. Using a wand of healing, as someone else mentioned, also restores multiple rotted hit points per use. Just in case you thought only healing potions restored rotted hit points.
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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 11:15

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Twilight wrote:
danr wrote:You know, what drives me nutters are potions of decay (that's the one that causes rotting, right?)

I had a early character with unID'd potions, got in trouble, gambled on finding a potion of healing, and got rot instead. I survived the fight because I then got might or something, but I rotted down to 17/38 HP or something like that and I just gave up in disgust and quit the character. I didn't think I'd live long enough to find 21 potions of healing to restore my max HP.


A single potion of healing will stop the rot, but potions of healing will only heal 1 maximum hit point back at a time. However, drinking a heal wounds potion while at maximum health will restore multiple rotted hit points at one time, so you wouldn't have needed 21 of those. Using a wand of healing, as someone else mentioned, also restores multiple rotted hit points per use. Just in case you thought only healing potions restored rotted hit points.


Indeed. Potions of heal wounds and wands of healing can cure between 2 and 6 points.

Strongpoint wrote:Turning off useless skills like stabbing or stealth for an ogre, I hate to miss the moment when I miss the 1st level and continue wasting tons of XP


As minmay has explained, you can't disable levels 0 skill because we don't want optimal play to require players to disable tens of skills at the start of each game. Anyway, you shouldn't be worried about accidentally raising a skill to level 2. First levels are cheap, you are not wasting "tons of XP", and you won't ruin a character because of that.
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...

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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 15:32

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

If you remove Hive entirely, you'd have to increase the generation rate of bee vaults if you want Spriggans to remain remotely viable. I pretty much needed the Hive in my current Spriggan run. Also, it does make a useful stash location.

Good to hear that 0.8 mummies are more viable, but in 0.7 and before they were the most godawful race in Crawl. Even scumming is hard when you die to rats on D: 1 half the time.

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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 16:24

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Just thought I'd chime into this thread with 2 random things that annoy me:

1) The new transparent walls can make autotravel break in certain circumstances. I'm sure all of you have seen the new Ecumenical Temple entry vault which is a spiral of transparent walls. No one likes to manually navigate that spiral, I'm pretty sure. If any monster is visible through the walls, autotravel will refuse to navigate (most rightfully so) the swirl, making you manually back out of it (or into it) to complete your path. I'd almost suggest making those walls solid. There are a few other vaults where this is an issue, but it's not so bad, as they aren't spirals, and you can easily navigate your way past the transparent sections.

2) I think the portal vault timers are still a bit too agressive. Portal vaults are one of the coolest things in Crawl IMO. They're rare enough, that when you actually find one, you get a little adrenaline rush and get excited. Far too often though, I've missed out on one due to a number of things:

-- The vault was simply not found in time on the map. I don't feel that I've dawdled, just normally hacked and slashed my way through a level, pausing to rest/regen after fights, and am so disappointed when I find a sealed archway.

-- Shafts can really screw up your ability to get into a portal vault for a number of reasons.

-- Some of the entry vaults, especially for Ice caverns require a pretty tough battle just to clear to the entry portal. A couple times, I've been resting up after the entry vault fight, (just regaining hp/mana, or waiting for my berserk fatigue timer to reset) and had it disappear before my eyes. Now, I'm aware that the short timer was put in place to make you immediately enter, but if you dont rest up before you go in, some of the initial entry layouts in the portal vaults can mean instant death.

I'd love to see the timers for the portal vaults, doubled or maybe even more than that. As far as missing them entirely, a prominent message when you enter the level would be nice to alert you that a sewer, spider's nest, bailey, etc is on the level. We do it for labyrinths, why not other types of vaults?
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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 17:06

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

galehar wrote:As minmay has explained, you can't disable levels 0 skill because we don't want optimal play to require players to disable tens of skills at the start of each game.


That problem can be avoided just by having all non-starting skills disabled from the start. Then all players have to do is activate any additional skills they might want to add to their starting background. Certain skills like fighting that everyone can use a few levels in could be on by default, so that in most cases it is not necessary to change any from the outset unless you, the player, have a specific intention for your playstyle.

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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 17:21

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Yes, basically i would just like to see sensible defaults. Currently everything defaults to on which is pretty much wrong for every background (except maybe wanderer)

If a player really wants to tinker with the default, they probably only want to change a few at that point if what it starts as is reasonable.

galehar wrote:As minmay has explained, you can't disable levels 0 skill because we don't want optimal play to require players to disable tens of skills at the start of each game.


But now optimal play is to disable tens (in the worst case) of skills as soon as they reach level 1 instead. Only now you have to do it one at a time instead of all at once. (Assuming you notice they reached level 1 at all)

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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 18:15

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

minmay wrote:
danr wrote:That problem can be avoided just by having all non-starting skills disabled from the start. Then all players have to do is activate any additional skills they might want to add to their starting background.

Sure, let's avoid the problem of making players disable 20 skills at the start by making them enable 20 skills at the start.


You can enable 20 skills if you want to. With my next KoBe I'm not going to waste any time turning on spellcasting or earth magic.

Again, the starting skills would all be active (e.g., for a fighter: Fighting, Armour, Dodging, Shields) and a few other generally useful ones (stealth, traps and doors) could also default to on. Ideally you could play a fine game without ever turning any more on, at least initially.

Sensible Defaults. A Good Thing (tm).

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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 18:46

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Decrease the chance of finding a cursed butchery weapon on D:1.

Moose wrote: I think the portal vault timers are still a bit too agressive. ... As far as missing them entirely, a prominent message when you enter the level would be nice to alert you that a sewer, spider's nest, bailey, etc is on the level. We do it for labyrinths, why not other types of vaults?


Seconded and seconded.

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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 18:55

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

Moose wrote:I think the portal vault timers are still a bit too agressive. Portal vaults are one of the coolest things in Crawl IMO. They're rare enough, that when you actually find one, you get a little adrenaline rush and get excited. Far too often though, I've missed out on one due to a number of things:

-- The vault was simply not found in time on the map. I don't feel that I've dawdled, just normally hacked and slashed my way through a level, pausing to rest/regen after fights, and am so disappointed when I find a sealed archway.

-- Shafts can really screw up your ability to get into a portal vault for a number of reasons.

-- Some of the entry vaults, especially for Ice caverns require a pretty tough battle just to clear to the entry portal. A couple times, I've been resting up after the entry vault fight, (just regaining hp/mana, or waiting for my berserk fatigue timer to reset) and had it disappear before my eyes. Now, I'm aware that the short timer was put in place to make you immediately enter, but if you dont rest up before you go in, some of the initial entry layouts in the portal vaults can mean instant death.

I'd love to see the timers for the portal vaults, doubled or maybe even more than that. As far as missing them entirely, a prominent message when you enter the level would be nice to alert you that a sewer, spider's nest, bailey, etc is on the level. We do it for labyrinths, why not other types of vaults?

Timed portal vaults are about rewarding speed. This is obvious for the announced ones, and still true for the rest. If everyone would always catch all timed vaults, we could just as well get rid of the timer. (By the way, the reason why we have the timers in the first place is to make sure that players take them on now or never.)
The timer mechanic has been changed (for the non-announced vaults): now there is a slow counter until you see the vault, then a fast one.

There are no messages for all types of timed portal vaults because we don't want to turn all those levels into races for the portal. The non-announced vaults usually have larger entries, to make it easier to find them.

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Post Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 19:50

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

cyborgemu wrote:Decrease the chance of finding a cursed butchery weapon on D:1.

Moose wrote: I think the portal vault timers are still a bit too agressive. ... As far as missing them entirely, a prominent message when you enter the level would be nice to alert you that a sewer, spider's nest, bailey, etc is on the level. We do it for labyrinths, why not other types of vaults?


Seconded and seconded.


Agreed.
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Post Wednesday, 12th January 2011, 02:51

Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?

54 Gomm the Digger (level 1, -9/11 HPs)
Began as a Deep Dwarf Earth Elementalist on Jan 11, 2011.
Mangled by a goblin
... wielding a +0,+3 orcish dagger of electrocution
(19 damage)
... on Level 1 of the Dungeon.
The game lasted 00:01:06 (374 turns).


A goblin is nearby!
The goblin shouts!
You see here a viscous clear potion.
The goblin hits you with a runed orcish dagger.
You are electrocuted!
Ouch! That really hurt!
You die...
Mangled by Mennas

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