Hey claws, thanks for taking the time to look over the vaults and give feedback. You're absolutely right that I haven't yet loaded them all up in Crawl to test yet; I had hoped that I could present them here as a first draft, with the goal of getting to sorts of critical review you provided. I can see how seeing typos and other errors could be distracting for a veteran vault-maker, so next time I'll make sure they're typo-free before I post anything. I have some questions about and responses to some of the things you say below.
claws wrote:you really need to practice with more restricted types of vaults, such as 089 vaults; the vaults are also very boxy aside from random lines, and I recommend looking through other vaults for ideas of more tactically interesting shapes.
By 089 vaults, you mean vaults using standard monster placement to avoid getting suckered into novelty monster layouts leading to unpredictable OoD monsters? I'll confess that these are mostly expected dungeon shapes: oblongs and rectangles. Is there a consensus that there are already enough rectilinear and oblong vaults that more should not be added?
claws wrote:In general you seem to not have much of a grip on what's acceptable levels of danger for vaults placing quite early.
Could you be more specific? I did put thought into what I would consider to be reasonable danger when I am playing (though you make a fair point below about the rod vault). Are you thinking of the wands in the wanded-unique vault?
claws wrote:Please, please be inclusive in where a vault places, not exclusive without any exclusions. These vaults will place in a lot of places besides D, and they already will look "off" in D
I'm not sure what you mean here. It sounds like you're saying that as written the vaults could end up in any branch, that they will look out-of-place in other branches, and that they also look out-of-place in the main dungeon. The first two points are technical ones, and I'd love for you to clarify them. The last piece I'm confused by, since the shapes and terrain and monster set are entirely consistent with the sorts of vaults found in the main dungeon. Maybe you're just trying to tell me that you don't like the vaults, and if so, that's fine, but please distinguish that from substantive criticism so that I'm not confused.
claws wrote:I'm drastically concerned that one could get a neutral lich on d:2 killing anything that passes by on the floor, possibly including the player. It'd be a lot less ridiculously lethal if the neutral wandering monsters were limited to the "abyss 5s", but even then if anything wakes up the monsters before the player sees them the abyss monsters will probably tear the kobolds apart regardless.
Definitely deserves a lower weight as such a gimmicky vault.
I'm not particularly concerned about the neutral lich killing anything that wanders by, but killing the player would certainly be bad. My experience with neutral monsters is that they tend not to target the player with any attacks intentionally, which makes this the Lugonu equivalent of the Vehumet altar set in a fire cloud -- you can get in and worship, but there's an ambient danger that you must overcome. If the monsters are too dangerous, I could see turning them friendly_neutral so that they never intentionally harm the player.
You're right about the kobolds -- they're a) unnecessary and b) likely to die before the player gets there. They should be removed.
You're also right about the low vault weight.
claws wrote:_foo_spiral
-- I don't like the structures of these spiral vaults: there's no loot, a series constant prompt to open up to excessively dangerous monsters for most of the depths involved, and a great degree of spoiler issues resultant from both; plus, while there can be strength in sheer variety of encounters the vault's layout is extremely boring, which makes up
- This certainly isn't useless as a concept though. [... omitted revised concept]
The idea behind the vaults is to have a progression of difficulty of a given sort of monster throughout the dungeon: humanoids, lizards, and insects. Any player paying the slightest bit of attention should be able to see that the difficulty is increasing with each successive door they open, and stop before they hit anything actually OoD, so I don't see a spoiler issue here. The first door is prompt-to-open in the vaults so that the player doesn't auto-explore into the vault; the rest are normal doors except in the humanoid vault, where the doors are all prompt-to-open to prevent the humanoids from opening the doors themselves.
I agree that the vault is somewhat boring in design, but to make it less boring it has to take up a lot of space on the level, which doesn't seem like the best idea for a vault that can't be fully explored right away.
I'm fine with adding loot, but I don't see it as strictly necessary. I see the vault as being an ambient challenge which some players will enjoy engaging and revisiting when they're ready for it (assuming it spawns at low depth), and other players will be scared off by the first mildly OoD monster and never return (which is fine -- discretion is good in Crawl).
The only piece of this vault which your proposed revision seems to preserve is the idea of rooms with monsters in a spiraling shape, and I think we already have a few of those.
claws wrote:_wanded_unique
I think all of your suggestions here are good ones, and I'll make those changes.
claws wrote:_mutated wizard
Plain staves are gone in trunk; just use a weak weapon that wizards are stereotypically prone to use, like daggers. Also, an ugly thing in a box seems rather minimal and out of depth in the provided ranges, which probably need tightening.
Fair point on staves -- I hadn't realized they were already gone. I take it good_item staves won't be enhancer staves, they'll just be staves with egos. Swapping for a dagger is probably best, then.
You're right that it's minimal, and perhaps slightly too OoD at D5. Perhaps D6 or D7 would be a more acceptable minimum depth (lone ugly things hit less hard than an ogre, but move slightly faster and have about 1.5x - 2x hp; frogs move way faster, hit a little less hard, and have less hp, but are a common enemy at that depth). It's not meant to be a vault that dramatically changes the dungeon structure; it's meant to be a vault that has a bunch of mutation potions (for fans of mutations), and which can be understood to tell a story encouraging you not to drink the potions. In short, it's meant to be relatively minimal, but to pack a lot of player experience into that minimal space.
claws wrote:-- While one could probably argue that it can be predicted that the potions in the vault are mutation, there's too much of a chance of not noticing which potions came from where for it to be acceptable that reliably bad items spawn un-identified as such an obvious spoiler: pre-identify them.
I do think anyone who loots 5-10 potions from a vault generally notices when they're all the same type. The nature of the vault should make anyone know what the potions are if they haven't already ID'd them by that depth, and anyone who does miss it will almost certainly realize that they were foolish to miss it once they quaff it blindly. That said, I have no particular objection to making them known potions.
claws wrote:I don't like the gimmick and it's a bunch of spoiler information for one to end up usually brushing the armour aside since the maluses are going to be either ignorable enough for it to be free amour or too thick to ever wear the armour. The potential gimmick is already covered well enough in the old_forge anyway.
How is it spoiler info? You put on the armor, and if you don't like the (quite reasonable, IMO) maluses, you take it off. Problem solved. It's not like it's cursed. You say that the maluses are going to be too light or too heavy in every case, but I disagree. I think I've put them at more or less exactly the right place to make the armor useful without being just a give-away of a too-good piece of armor. That said, maybe I got the maluses just slightly wrong -- they can be tweaked until they're right. The armors involved are good enough to be potentially worth enchanting up, and the maluses are such that they armors give okay but not stellar AC from the moment they're found -- which is good, since they're handed to the player on a plate, so they shouldn't be an unequivocal advantage.
I haven't been able to find old_forge -- which .des file is it located in?
claws wrote:_rod_priest
Excessive length in size of vault, flame duration (just make there be no delay in generating a new cloud), and placement of flames. It's nice that the exclusions block accidentally finding the priest by autoexplore but said blocks are otherwise annoying to keep walking through to actually enter the vault: please use excl_rad = -1 to shrink the exclusions. Also! The rods are extremely excessively powerful and reliable loot even if the monster can kill you with it, the monsters are weirdly chosen since deep elf priests are not stronger then orc high priests, the monsters are out of depth mostly anyway, and most importantly noise will make the priests wander and roast itself before the player even sees it.
Regarding the flames, I'm happy to make those changes -- I copied the fog machine for those flames from an existing vault with a single-space flame, thinking that those would be good default settings.
The length of the hall was designed to put the monster at the end out of sight range from the door when it is opened. The idea is to create a sense of trepidation in the player as they approach the far end.
I felt that the danger of taking on the rod-owner was sufficient to offset the power of the rod (since the danger should be proportional to the rod's power), but I can understand that others may disagree, and they may well have a better understanding.
Are any of the monsters I selected willing to walk into fire clouds without being confused? I'm sure orc priests and elf priests are not. That said, you're right that the progression is wrong -- it should probably be orc priest -> elf priest -> orc sorcerer or orc high priest. Elf priests do have more hp than orc priests, and better evade as well as a slightly better spell set, making elf priests slightly more dangerous.
claws wrote: _fedhas_misty_altar
Doesn't look finished enough to even comment much on.
It looks like I did forget to place the fruit, so I assume that's why you say it's to incomplete too comment on. Since it's apparently not clear, the idea is to have a Fedhas altar in a forest clearing filled with thick mist. There's some fruit, and a wandering mushroom camped close enough to the altar to nearly bump into it in the mist. The mushroom is often OoD, but mushrooms are the easiest monsters to escape in Crawl, and can be killed by anyone with a ranged attack or polearm. The mushroom is also patrolling, making it even easier to escape than normal.
Monday, 10th December 2012, 20:47 