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Jazerus
May 24, 2011


PMush Perfect posted:

What's the over-under on how long it takes someone on the trunk devteam to show up and explain to us plebs how the existence of centaurs ran contrary to the true spirit of DCSS?

floodkiller had to extend the code somewhat to support a second page of race choices in gooncrawl, which is not a change that trunk has shown interest in adopting. they literally just choose the species they feel is most "redundant" and replace it when they want to add a new one instead of making the game able to support more choices.

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Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

Jazerus posted:

floodkiller had to extend the code somewhat to support a second page of race choices in gooncrawl, which is not a change that trunk has shown interest in adopting. they literally just choose the species they feel is most "redundant" and replace it when they want to add a new one instead of making the game able to support more choices.

Isn't it because of some dumb number theme?

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
I doubt it. The original Linley Henzell's Dungeon Crawl had a bit of a thing about the number 27, but trunk Crawl has already abandoned so many of the best parts of that game, I doubt the devs give a drat.

Einwand
Nov 3, 2012

You idiot.
In this world it's pet or BE pet.

The devs did a thing again. Some stuff that seems interesting/good, some strange removals boots of running are dead and some changes that just make the game harder.

Arzaac
Jan 2, 2020


I gotta say, those new spells sound really fun. I'm all for new spells that encourage spellsword playstyles.

Zodack
Aug 3, 2014
RIP Ozcobu's Armor and Frozen Ramparts.

The new spells look very cool. There's a fond place in my heart for Skald and I like the idea of rolling around in heavy armor and then animating it to beat someone up.

I don't know enough about the game to ho-hum about Curse being removed except for Ash, but like the removal of Hunger it feels like another surgical cut to make the game a shiny, seamless bit of design instead of a crunchy old Roguelike.

Canine Blues Arooo
Jan 7, 2008

when you think about it...i'm the first girl you ever spent the night with

Grimey Drawer

Einwand posted:

The devs did a thing again. Some stuff that seems interesting/good, some strange removals boots of running are dead and some changes that just make the game harder.

This is the first set of 'patch notes' that I've seen from Crawl in probably 3 or 4 years that I haven't full recoiled at tbh.

The stat reworks are pretty much all good, with maybe some nuance lost in Dex.
The monster spellbook changes are good.
I like the demonspawn changes for the most part.
The new spells seem interesting.

I will say that the curse changes is just classic modern Crawl devs though. Instead of making something interesting, you could just delete it entirely! Yes, curse as it is today is basically either a D1/D2 annoyance, or a thing that you play around with Ash, but Ash is proof that curse can be interesting. Ash is also not long for this world either it seems...

Zaodai
May 23, 2009

Death before dishonor?
Your terms are accepted.


Wasn't one of Disintergrate's classic uses against Statues, or are those gone now?

Einwand
Nov 3, 2012

You idiot.
In this world it's pet or BE pet.

Zaodai posted:

Wasn't one of Disintergrate's classic uses against Statues, or are those gone now?

That got removed from trunk ages ago, because tools being used for more than one thing was against their code or something I don't know.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

The stat reworks are pretty much all good, with maybe some nuance lost in Dex.
The monster spellbook changes are good.
I like the demonspawn changes for the most part.
The new spells seem interesting.

Agreed.

quote:

I will say that the curse changes is just classic modern Crawl devs though. Instead of making something interesting, you could just delete it entirely! Yes, curse as it is today is basically either a D1/D2 annoyance, or a thing that you play around with Ash, but Ash is proof that curse can be interesting. Ash is also not long for this world either it seems...

It's tough, I think you're right that curse had become vestigial so removing it was the obvious choice. I also think that curse was never a really big problem for anyone other than very new players. Sure, reckless players like myself sometimes got into a bad way because of a cursed amulet of hunger, but it's hard to remember curses having a big impact apart from that. If the rework of Ash proves interesting then I'll be fine with it overall, to be honest. Excited to see what PF does.

Arzaac
Jan 2, 2020


Honestly more interesting than curses I think are the other effects that can make you think twice about swapping items. Stuff like amulets or distortion weapons, where they have great benefits but will make you think twice about just wearing random unidentified items because removing them can be very punishing.

Wouldn't mind seeing more "soft" curses like that tbh.

bees x1000
Jun 11, 2020

I got through the entire Trunk update without getting really annoyed until the last line. Running removal is awful and horrible and I hate it.

Arzaac posted:

Honestly more interesting than curses I think are the other effects that can make you think twice about swapping items. Stuff like amulets or distortion weapons, where they have great benefits but will make you think twice about just wearing random unidentified items because removing them can be very punishing.

Wouldn't mind seeing more "soft" curses like that tbh.

I agree.

SirSamVimes
Jul 21, 2008

~* Challenge *~


I strongly dislike the monster spellbook change, watching for certain spells before you know how scared you should be was a fun piece of strategy.

That Ogre Mage just cast Sting :ohdear:

death cob for cutie
Dec 30, 2006

dwarves won't delve no more
too much splatting down on Zot:4
Is there any reason for removing rings of stealth/boots of running?

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
Nothing in the game is allowed to be good and useful without also actively loving you over in some capacity.

Tiler Kiwi
Feb 26, 2011
id guess one reason to get rid of running boots is that, if you think crawl is about getting big scores and fast times, equipment that just makes you faster that randomly drops would make it frustrating to try to get consistently good scores and times

which is a design thing that is completely against the appeal of roguelikes in a lot of ways but ha

e: it is nice for them to simplify the combat math and stats because it was just stupid nonsense before; it was really bad in a game that's supposed to be up front with its information since presenting it in a simple way like they did was very misleading and explaining it in depth would reveal that it was, as said, stupid nonsense.

Pigbuster
Sep 12, 2010

Fun Shoe

Epsilon Plus posted:

Is there any reason for removing rings of stealth/boots of running?

quote:

Rings' mechanical niche is as a swappable slot: items that provide
you with tactical decisions to make about gear loadout within a given
combat. Do you want rF or Slaying while fighting the lindwurm? Is it
worth the extra half a turn to swap? There's some argument over how
often ring swapping creates interesting decisions vs busywork, but if
rings should exist, that's why.

There's no combat where you want to be wearing =Stealth, You want to
wear =stealth *outside* of combat, and something else inside. Essentially,
if you care about optimizing, you'd want to swap away from =stealth at
the start of each combat, which is... not very exciting!

So, rings of stealth will no longer generate. They're still around as a
base type for the Ring of Shadows, but should probably be refactored into
a 'ring of nothingness' at some point. Octopus King now gets +flight
instead, for all those pesky lava moments.

quote:

Boots of running were extremely strong items, which isn't at all a
problem. It's great for the game to have rare and powerful items -
it creates exciting variance.

However, runboots didn't create fun and exciting gameplay. They drained
tension from the game by allowing the wearer to (over ~1-10 turns!) walk
away from any normal speed enemy, which is powerful, but not that fun.

So, farewell. Lightning scales remain as the last holdout, though maybe
they should be restricted for naga only.

Maybe we can finally have that scroll of brand armour now...? (:

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
With that kind of stupid reasoning behind it, who is willing to bet that we are losing teleportation and blink as well within the next three to four updates? After all, the only thing they really do is to give you a reliably ~not fun and exciting~ escape option from normal enemies.

Tiler Kiwi
Feb 26, 2011
if that was the design intention of rings maybe dont let you swap them (or make it a pain in the rear end to do so) in combat so then stealth is a sacrifice in exchange for advantage in a different area instead of just doing optimization gut math to determine what best increases your odds for survival at any given moment

then again im the kind of roguelike player that hates doing magic because its too many keystrokes so i never really fiddled with rings much aside from incredibly obvious things like "wear the fire resist ring when fighting the fire thing" moments

Tiler Kiwi
Feb 26, 2011
and gently caress you its fun to get running boots because they give you options instead of pillar dancing. its fun to get to be stronger in one run out of ten, it makes it exciting. you are wrong crawl dev, my lived game playing experience is different from yours. maybe if its too obviously good a pick make them have some disadvantage to them like being curs- oh nevermind

e: like hell just remove found equipment because its "not fun" to just be better than you were before, it "makes encounters more boring", "removes gameplay decisions" or some poo poo i dont know. thats not game design logic thats just saying words.

Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Feb 19, 2021

Pigbuster
Sep 12, 2010

Fun Shoe
The most infuriating thing about the DCSS removals is that every single one is reasoned with "it wasn't fun so we took it out!". Like, eat my rear end, dude, they were fun. The only other boot egos are +50 stealth and flight; an ability you just removed the ring of because it didn't add anything in combat and one of the shittier ways to get flight. With such exciting choices as that it's no wonder Running was on the chopping block!!

There aren't even any unrandart boots to make up for it! They took them all out!!! gently caress!!

Pigbuster fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Feb 19, 2021

Tiler Kiwi
Feb 26, 2011

Pigbuster posted:

The most infuriating thing about the DCSS removals is that every single one is reasoned with "it wasn't fun so we took it out!". Like, eat my rear end, dude, they were fun. The only other boot egos are +50 stealth and flight; an ability you just removed the ring of because it didn't add anything in combat and one of the shittier ways to get flight. With such exciting choices as that it's no wonder Running was on the chopping block!!

There aren't even any unrandart boots to make up for it! They took them all out!!! gently caress!!

where crawl really shows its age and such is how a bunch of stuff is number fuckery bonuses and stuff and does nothing else, like boots of running's utility is that you can move faster. the problem is you have it tied to a stat and the only thing you can do is just make the stat good or less good, instead of doing things that other rougelikes have done with boots to make them give you better movement at some kind of cost or weird gimmick. everything has to have the same movement rate in crawl, basically, its such a binary problem where youre either faster or slower and not much in between there.

like necrodancer has boots that let you move two spaces but force you to move two spaces unless you bonk a wall so movement becomes more annoying to plan out; you can disable this but if youre a specific character that starts with them then they hurt you to move only one space. they have boots that hurt to put on but damage things you move next to, they have boots that help you ignore floor hazards, boots that make it so you dont get pushed around they have excellent boots that break if you take damage wearing them. you get a lot of boot options. you also had flying boots which were great until you wanted to step on a floor switch or not get smacked across the room when you messed up.

now unlike crawl you cant just carry ten boots and swap them all the time, and a lot of the power of boots is very contextual and depends on what other stuff youre running with. some boots are flat out better but are harder to use or will punish you harder if you screw up with them, other boots are good when you're new but get less useful because they just like, give you armor or damage instead of expanding your movement options. a lot of other things will impact your movement, its an important thing in any game and its an easy way to add options for the player. but in crawl they had "boots improve a number" "boots ignore terrain" and "boots that just make you flat out better at movement than most everything in the game at no cost". the only solution they could come up with is just to delete the boots. what exactly does their game bible say boots are supposed to be doing at this point, anyways?

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Tiler Kiwi posted:

and gently caress you its fun to get running boots because they give you options instead of pillar dancing. its fun to get to be stronger in one run out of ten, it makes it exciting. you are wrong crawl dev, my lived game playing experience is different from yours. maybe if its too obviously good a pick make them have some disadvantage to them like being curs- oh nevermind

e: like hell just remove found equipment because its "not fun" to just be better than you were before, it "makes encounters more boring", "removes gameplay decisions" or some poo poo i dont know. thats not game design logic thats just saying words.

They keep going to this well where anything they want to remove they just describe in a straightforward manner. Fireball doesn't create fun and exciting gameplay, you just shoot it at monsters. Stealth doesn't create fun and exciting gameplay, it just means monsters don't approach you. Armor doesn't create fun and exciting gameplay, it just makes you take less damage.

Tiler Kiwi
Feb 26, 2011

Ferrinus posted:

They keep going to this well where anything they want to remove they just describe in a straightforward manner. Fireball doesn't create fun and exciting gameplay, you just shoot it at monsters. Stealth doesn't create fun and exciting gameplay, it just means monsters don't approach you. Armor doesn't create fun and exciting gameplay, it just makes you take less damage.

thinking back on it necromancer and its sequel iirc doesnt ever have anything move faster than the player anyways because you know what isnt fun or exciting? being unable to utilize movement at all to deal with problems or control the situation. movement gives a player options and room to plan and express their skills in the game to turn difficult problems into easy ones without having to give them stat sticks or other math optimization gameplay stuff so they die 10% or the time instead of 45% of the time in that encounter. enemies that move at your speed rate in that game are incredibly dangerous since they already will box in your choices, an enemy that is literally faster than you results in having very, very few actual strategies or options unless you have tools, which are limited in crawl. but to the crawl dev teams being faster than enemies is "not fun" or "exciting" compared to the gameplay of trying to cautiously kite things to a doorway for an hour because doing anything else will get me blasted to death unless im mathematically optimal in my loadout configuration beep boop

e: im mostly thinking of necrodancer despite it being mechanically very different from crawl because it is a speed/score based game that is full of good and smart design decisions; like a bunch of stuff in that game is good only for speed stuff but you naturally will trend towards playing the game like that as you improve since those tools require high risk and skill to use and will make the game harder in exchange for more points. score and speed offer you ways to develop your skills and chasing after them means taking bigger risks and having to do away with crutches. that's fun and exciting without having to "streamline" the gameplay by removing options and gameplay elements. you could streamline necrodancer down to just having one heart and one weapon and in fact, the harder characters do that, but that would make the game emphatically worse for most everyone, even the people that like to play that way, because making the conscious decision to challenge yourself by "streamlining" your own options in exchange for Go Fast / Go Fewest Moves / Go For Big Points is a fun and exciting choice and part of the appeal of the rougelike genre, imo.

Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Feb 19, 2021

cock hero flux
Apr 17, 2011



i gave up on trunk a long time ago and now reading changelogs only causes me an abstract kind of hopeless depression, like watching your hometown slowly be consumed by a volcanic eruption while you sit on the deck of ship taking you to safety

Canine Blues Arooo
Jan 7, 2008

when you think about it...i'm the first girl you ever spent the night with

Grimey Drawer
The ring changes specifically are just deleting what is perceived as a 'rough edge' instead of leaning into something that could be interesting.

What if there were a whole set of rings that required more effort to remove. These rings may provide unique egos, or more powerful effects. The decision the player would be effectively making is, 'do I want flexibility in combat, or do I want to trade away that flexibility for this unique/powerful effect'. In fact, we already kind of have a soft model for this in the game: Cursed items.

So now, imagine a version of the effect of 'curse' that is specifically attached to items that are more powerful. You can find stronger-than-average gear, but it's cursed (and labeled as such) and cannot be removed without a scroll of remove curse. Remove Curse scrolls go from Identify rarity, to Blink rarity. You don't read Remove Curse anymore, but are instead prompted to consume one every time you remove a cursed item. The curse item remains cursed. This also opens up an avenue to explore other items like weapons with major situational drawbacks that are otherwise very powerful. Think of something like the Singing Sword. I personally would also turn Scrolls of Remove Curse into something non-scroll, like Dust of Remove Curse.

And then you can go wild from there. What if Curses aren't just 'you can't remove this item', but also impart debuffs based on the power of the item they are attached to. You are constantly being asked to trade off power in one axis for power in another.

The point here is that there are ways to actual ADD to the game when you see a weird outliar mechanic, to impart interesting decisions and depth, rather than REMOVE from it entirely. If it's an issue of time, I'd do it myself and put in a PR for it (Although I strongly suspect that it'd get rejected since I'm not part of the 'in' crowd).

If PleasingFungus still reads these forums, please steal this or some other variation of this. We don't need to remove stuff if it's not accomplishing a goal - we can reshape it and give it new meaning.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
There's an interesting idea, actually. What about a special class of, I don't know, double rings that go on both ring slots at once, take four or five turns to put on or take off and which provide highly powerful but also very narrow unique effects. It would make for an interesting calculated risk, because they provide a greater benefit than wearing two normal rings most of the time, but once you put them on you're committed and can't simply swap them out for something more situationally useful in a fight if you encounter a particulary dangerous enemy.

Reco
Feb 26, 2011

enemy one body to the proximity Zan attack discard the power slap hit.
How long until trunk replaces the main mode with dungeon sprint and just removes main mode entirely

a fatguy baldspot
Aug 29, 2018

Did they take out boots of rampaging too ? Those were a good new thing

bees x1000
Jun 11, 2020

Running used to give 0.2 movespeed. Those were the days.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


Tiler Kiwi posted:

but in crawl they had "boots improve a number" "boots ignore terrain" and "boots that just make you flat out better at movement than most everything in the game at no cost". the only solution they could come up with is just to delete the boots.

this is, of course, exactly the problem with trunk. instead of creating additional options that could compete with the boots of running, they simply remove them. this is a recursive process where the more they remove, the more the existing elements of the game become unbalanced because everything was designed to work together as a whole, and so they have to remove more things in response.

a fatguy baldspot
Aug 29, 2018

Aww, they got rid of the demon summoning spells, makes me sad even if there were better options

FlocksOfMice
Feb 3, 2009
I'm surprised at this point they haven't just gutted the entire game and started over from scratch so it can match their new design philosophy. Like, we're getting to Ship of Theseus levels where you could build an entire roguelike just from things removed from the game and it'd resemble stone soup more than the current direction is shaping up to be.

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

I'm gonna check out warper now.

bees x1000
Jun 11, 2020

Going through my old wins, I recall that brief period in 2014 where they renamed triple swords as claymores.

w - +11,+9 claymore "Boodgh" {chaos, rC+ rN+ MR+}

thanks Xom

Reco
Feb 26, 2011

enemy one body to the proximity Zan attack discard the power slap hit.
I remember back then folks thought a change like that was super dumb and pointless

If only we could have seen trunk now

cock hero flux
Apr 17, 2011



Hivac posted:

I remember back then folks thought a change like that was super dumb and pointless

If only we could have seen trunk now

the fond days of the past where completely pointless changes that didn't matter were looked upon negatively, as opposed to now where they're a rare breath of fresh air in the ocean of actively detrimental changes

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

The ring changes specifically are just deleting what is perceived as a 'rough edge' instead of leaning into something that could be interesting.

What if there were a whole set of rings that required more effort to remove. These rings may provide unique egos, or more powerful effects. The decision the player would be effectively making is, 'do I want flexibility in combat, or do I want to trade away that flexibility for this unique/powerful effect'. In fact, we already kind of have a soft model for this in the game: Cursed items.

So now, imagine a version of the effect of 'curse' that is specifically attached to items that are more powerful. You can find stronger-than-average gear, but it's cursed (and labeled as such) and cannot be removed without a scroll of remove curse. Remove Curse scrolls go from Identify rarity, to Blink rarity. You don't read Remove Curse anymore, but are instead prompted to consume one every time you remove a cursed item. The curse item remains cursed. This also opens up an avenue to explore other items like weapons with major situational drawbacks that are otherwise very powerful. Think of something like the Singing Sword. I personally would also turn Scrolls of Remove Curse into something non-scroll, like Dust of Remove Curse.

And then you can go wild from there. What if Curses aren't just 'you can't remove this item', but also impart debuffs based on the power of the item they are attached to. You are constantly being asked to trade off power in one axis for power in another.

The point here is that there are ways to actual ADD to the game when you see a weird outliar mechanic, to impart interesting decisions and depth, rather than REMOVE from it entirely. If it's an issue of time, I'd do it myself and put in a PR for it (Although I strongly suspect that it'd get rejected since I'm not part of the 'in' crowd).

If PleasingFungus still reads these forums, please steal this or some other variation of this. We don't need to remove stuff if it's not accomplishing a goal - we can reshape it and give it new meaning.

World of Warcraft, of all things, had an interesting idea of curses. Basically in the previous expansion the ultimate gear you could get was all cursed. And you had a Corruption Resistance stat that basically let you take up to X amount of Corruption before it started effecting you, and the negative effects from being cursed was BAD. A DPS or Healer could likely take more Corruption than a Tank, but everyone had a very hard limit on just how much they could take until the negative effects straight up killed you. But it was a risk and reward thing, and the gear it was on had powerful unique effects in exchange for the curse.

Like just do that. Instead of Curse being a binary minor inconvenience, have it be a thing you can weigh the pros and cons of more malicious bad effects or stronger abilities.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
That sounds familiar and I could swear I've seen an idea like that get used in a roguelike before

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Reco
Feb 26, 2011

enemy one body to the proximity Zan attack discard the power slap hit.
It kinda already exists in the form of randart negative effects but i feel like it could be expanded on some maybe

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