-Crawl- What I Like about Crawl ...

I'm pretty new to roguelikes (I've been playing Nethack casually for
about 6 months now), but what I've come to like about them is what I
call the "MacGyver-factor" (yeah, I watched the show when I was a
kid). Nothing beats getting out of a tight spot by cleverly combining
the items and abilities you have available to you. IMO, this is what
makes roguelikes tick.

Now, what I dislike about a lot of roguelikes, is a feature they have
in common with MMORPGs, namely rewarding or requiring boring and
repetitive behaviour, often referred to as "scumming". As for Nethack,
this includes stealing from shops, and even some aspects of the ID-
minigame. Basically, I regard as "scumming" everything that relies on
time in stead of skill to get ahead in the game (granted, some things
may take time AND skill). Of course, skill in any game is only gained
through the time you put into it, but that is not what I mean. I'm
talking about methods that translate time into the @'s skill only,
while contributing little to the actual player's skill level.

One of the reasons I think roguelikes should try to avoid "scumming"
as I described it, is because of the instadeath nature of the genre:
grinding just doesn't make any sense if you can't load a previously
saved game when you're dead. If I have to go through the whole ordeal
of improving my @'s situation at the cost of my utter boredom, I don't
like the risk of having to do it all over again. Roguelikes are indeed
characterized by having to start over often, but this is only
acceptable if every trip through the dungeon is new and exciting.
Getting to the point where your previous character died shouldn't feel
like a chore.

With this semi-rant in mind, I will now explain what I specifically
like about Linley's Dungeon Crawl (which I recently discovered):

- a high level of difficulty maintained from the beginning to the end
(otherwise the early part of the game eventually becomes something
boring you just have to grind through, before things get interesting).

- shortcuts like Ctrl+o (auto-explore) that facilitate thinking about
the game as one MacGyver situation following the next (moreover,
manually exploring every single square can be considered a drudgery).

- design decisions that discourage "scumming" (shops don't buy items,
slower respawning of monsters, increased hunger, ...)

- good balance of gameplay elements (the ID-minigame, for example,
isn't as dominating as in Nethack)

These qualities, IMO, give Linley's Dungeon Crawl an edge over other
roguelikes, especially in attracting new players (roguelike newbies
tend to die A LOT, and adding a lot of unnecessary drudgery to the mix
certainly doesn't help in keeping them motivated to keep trying).

On Jan 21, 6:20 pm, dpeg <pl... DeleteThis @zio.mathematik.hu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
> Let me point out at the end that there are at least three sources of
> grinding left in Crawl:
>
> - pillar dancing: this is grinding in pure essence. Sometimes the only
> method to keep you alive. Most often, an investment of much time with bad
> payoffs. One suggestion was to heal only when not moving. Nothing is
> settled on this yet.

Seems backwards to only provide healing when not moving. This means
someone exploring must always stop and rest rather than being able to
recharge while on the go. It replaces pillar dancing scumming with
another form of scumming I hate, the '.' rest scumming. Y'know, hold
down the wait key until your hit points return.

The GBA version of POWDER punished wait scumming in several ways, the
most notable being having to waste a valuable button on wait if you
were so inclined. I reluctantly added a Sleep command to protect
would be scummer's fingers, but I stand by my claim that waiting to
heal is unnecessary in POWDER.

All this goes to explain the sort of healing mechanism I have
considered, but not yet tried to implement. I think it might work for
Crawl too. Instead of having some silly "heal only while still" which
penalizes the person having fun exploring the levels, have a different
system. Track a pool of potential heal points that hit points come
from. This pool is finite in size - when it empties, you stop
regenerating. How then does it recharge? The method I'm most
interested in is that you recharge the pool whenever you explore new
dungeon tiles. Basically, every tile marked mapped gives you another
unit of potential healing. This acts like a sort of implicit food,
but one not tied to the vagaries of monster generation, but still one
that rewards the brave and punishes those who want to loiter on the
same level for ten years.
--
Jeff Lait
(POWDER: http://www.zincland.com/powder)