Locking Branches

Currently, it is very desirable to do branches up to the second last level, skipping the branch end for (often much) later. This is not good: players get a lot of loot and good chunk of xp on the way, while trivialising the challenge. You could say that the food clock is present to prevent this behaviour but you have to swing back and forth a lot before it hurts. This behaviour makes the midgame a lot more boring than it has to be.

So we are looking for other ways to force players into action. A quick IRC discussion led to these principles:

• It is better to lock players out of branches than to lock them in.
• Runes would make great keys (in fact, using them before Zot would highlight their (only!) role as keys).
• Using clocks is a more complicated and also prone to gaming.
• Ideally, there are difficult/risky ways to overcome the obstacle.

Basic idea: Need to present a rune to enter (or leave, our choice) D:14.

This could be achieved with just a little vault. We could also make the level more special, here are some ideas:

• interpose a normal dungeon layout with a branch-specific theme or threat (such as slime walls, tides)
• split D:14 into thirds, with one downward staircase and one branch-specific theme in each third
• a new unique guarding access to the second half of the dungeon (think Geryon)
• stuff the level full of uniques
• a large, very nasty vault (think Swamp branch end); in front a portal with rune requirement, at the end a portal without rune requirement (effectively, this would mean that players have a third battleground beyond the two easy Lair subbranches for going deeper)

galehar: A (large or whole level) vault is a nice way to get new content for the game with less work than full blown branch. Any theme is acceptable for the vault, except one thing: no castle. If we get several good ones, then we can have a random rotation.

There is the question of whether players should be able to bypass the lock in some way. Ideas:

• A vault full of (pre-identified) shafts. (You couldn't go back up without a rune, though.)
• Place a portal directly to D:15 within the Elf:5 vault, allowing reckless individuals to bypass D:14 and its rune restriction at great personal risk. The portal could also be one-way, and you'd need a rune to use the upward staircase to D:14, so you'd be effectively stranded in the latter half of the dungeon without access to your stash until you retrieve a rune.
• A normal staircase from Elf:3-4 to Vaults:2-3 or so. You can bybass the rune lock, but need to go through dangerous terrain, and arrive at dangerous terrain. (The player may want to “reverse-dive” back to D:15 for the easiest level.) Normal staircases have the downside of requiring major changes to dungeon generation (and autotravel probably). One-way portal would be easier to implement.

Perhaps the threat of the Snake, Shoals, Swamp ends needs to be toned down.

This discussion I do not understand. Why is not finishing a branch boring? I do not think that most people finish the dungeon before they start lair. If people want to quit a branch because it is now too difficult, it seems that they should be allowed to do so. Perhaps the lair branches just need to have a more obvious difficulty gradation? That said, it would be fun to have some interesting tactical levels in the mid-dungeon. — Tenaya 2011-10-01 18:22

Well, although I still think the lair branches would benefit from more gradation, a mid-dungeon/mid-game gate would be a fun component. So, never mind what I said right there ^^. On its own though, a DL:14 Gate will not prevent hopping, it will just give fewer places to hop to before a rune is picked up. — Tenaya 2011-10-05 06:39

I would like to add that I don't see the problem this is trying to solve either. Firstly, branch hopping is not optimal strategy: it costs you turns, and it's fairly dangerous to take on a branch if you can't handle what's on its last level. Think how often you seen deep elf annihilators around Elf:2, or greater nagas on Snake:4. Secondly, this idea of locking people out of areas of the game smacks of two things: 1) a cut against the non-linearity of Crawl; currently, the order you do things is up to you, and 2) “Rune acquired. Area of the dungeon unlocked!” reminds me of 'achievements' so common in modern games. Please don't let Crawl have that as well. Runes for Zot are one thing - that's the last area of the game. Runes for D:15+? That just seems arbitrary and weird, and moreover, is addressing a problem I don't think is that huge in the first place. -IonFrigate

I've thought about this some more and I've decided a rune lock is one of the worst possible ways to try to solve this. Let's make something clear: it is nearly always best to do the easiest available level first. That is why people leave Snake:5 until after D:27; Snake:5 is more dangerous than D:27. People do not necessarily leave it until it's trivial…if Snake:5 is trivial, then D:27 is also trivial, so surely the problem isn't just that Snake:5 is too easy, it's also that D:27 is too easy and presumably D:26 too and a lot of other levels.
The goal of this appears to be to make people do harder levels earlier. However, if someone has to do Snake:5 before D:15, then D:15 may as well not exist, because it's easier than Snake:5! If you can do Snake:5, you can surely do D:15 easily. So a lock might make Snake:5 more exciting but other huge chunks of the game would become (even more) boring.
So how about this as an alternative: Either make branch ends nearly as easy as the earlier levels in their branches, or make the earlier levels nearly as hard as the branch ends. That is to say, give the branches a normal depth progression - Snake:5 should be to Snake:4 as D:20 is to D:19. — minmay 2012-03-04 16:35

I disagree: there is a large difference between being able to do something and being able to do it easily, safely and without spending a lot of resources. If you use a lot of consumables and take some risks, you might be able to do Snake:5 pretty early. This does not mean D:15 will be trivial, because you usually don't want to take risks or spend consumables, and because after spending your consumables on Snake:5 you probably wont have many left. I think forcing players to do harder levels earlier would be a good thing, and would not at all trivialize later levels. All you get from Snake:5 is a rune, some exp and floor trash, after all. And yes, lair branch end difficulty might have to be brought a bit more in line with the rest of the branch for a rune lock to work. The proposal mentions this. — Galefury 2012-03-05 13:28