Refused and Rejected Concepts List

This is a list of often-suggested concepts that will deliberately never be designed for various reasons.

This list is incomplete.

  • Choosing your colour as a Draconian
    • Dr isn't meant to be nine subspecies, but to introduce a challenge where the player must adapt to the colour.
  • Cooking skill
    • Would probably just complicate things. Would really only be worth considering for whimsy, not as an actually useful skill.
  • Ice bridges
  • Throwing potions, or dipping weapons into them
    • Actually, you can throw potions all you want; there just isn't much point.
  • Dual wielding
    • Likely way too tricky to balance
    • Would lead to annoying dilemmas
  • Commands for individual monsters. (“give”, “take”, or assigning tasks like “follow me”, “attack” to single allies). This is only relevant for permanent (or very longterm) allies, and if needed, we will rather get rid of those than implementing this kind of micromanagement.
  • Restoring saves after death. There's Felids since version 0.8, though.
  • Two-headed player species. In particular, no to two-headed playable ogres, double no to wearing two amulets at once and double double no to simultaneous religions.
  • Selling items in shops
    • This just leads to scumming (drudgery) anyway.
  • Containers (like sacks or bags): 52 item slots, that's it.
    • For everything else, there's the stash tracker.
  • Getting loot from player ghosts (like bones in Nethack)
    • Again, scumming. Not much fun.
  • Removing the Ecumenical Temple.
    • It serves as an important milestone for almost all new and some veteran players, and creates flavour (there are animosities among the gods, but they are of the Greek or Norse type, not of the monotheistic variant).
  • More numerical feedback, for stealth or MR or piety or damage dealt to monsters.
    • More numbers displayed lead to more cognitive load for all (but especially new or casual) players. We attempt to display numbers only where it is crucial (such as HP, MP, AC, EV).
    • Moreover, showing plain numbers needs a lot of context (e.g. for monster AC or damage done to monsters, we'd need to announce monster HP etc.)
    • Displaying information graphically (such as for spell power, piety, MR, stealth) has its own issues (is the scale linear or logarithmic etc.) but we reckon that it strikes sufficient balance between needs of new and seasoned players.
  • Adding acid spells to the Poison Magic school.
    • Poison is already well-defined, adding spells that bypass all of its drawbacks/advantages does not improve it.
    • Acid damage is not very different from plain nonelemental damage for players, since acid resistance is so rare and the monster corrosion effect is mostly insignificant.
  • Crafting.
  • Removing Paralysis
    • Paralysis is interesting because it is impossible to respond to after being paralyzed. A more elaborate defense of paralysis.
  • Scroll of brand armour
    • Creates really boring un-decisions when armour of pondering generates, among other issues.
  • Different amounts of defence against different kinds of physical damage
    • (e.g., skeletons weak to maces and strong vs daggers as in D&D)
    • This mostly adds complication without any kind of noticeable effects. If the effect is strong enough to change player behaviour at all, then it will be in ways we don't actually want to encourage because they're not any fun, for example:
      • Good players must memorise a table of what kinds of weapons are best against every kind of enemy, armour, etc.
      • Good players must carry weapon swaps for dealing with specific enemy types. We already have hydrae, and they're bad enough on that front.

You can also check The Graveyard for other concepts.

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dcss/planning/wont_do.txt · Last modified: 2021-03-26 05:17 by PleasingFungus
 
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