Dungeon Crawl .Whatever: New Soups - The Something Awful Forums

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Tendales: Mar 9, 2012

Floodkiller posted:

Another big one you will run into: use the Descend Staircase key to pray at altars, since the prayer button was removed.

I like that they kept the prayer button in, but all it does is tell you to press the stair button instead. Thanks. That's very helpful, game.

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# ¿ Sep 18, 2020 13:59

Tendales: Mar 9, 2012

Zodack posted:

I don't understand - just choose not to use those tactics or know what you're getting in to in the first place?

I don't post much and I've never ascended but even I know that there are probably archaic or wild things that are weird and time consuming. Those are probably fun for some people and not for others (like me, maybe?) who would just choose not to do them.

Again, as someone who is a bad Crawl player and enjoys the game pretty casually the last thing I want is a sense that the game itself has put me on a clock. Food felt organic and something out of older roguelikes, a system to manage. Don't the players get to decide what is fun and what is not? All I can assume is they're talking about Xomscumming, which I don't understand because I'm bad, but... don't punish everyone else because there are loopholes or weird ways to play the game that became more viable because you gutted an entire system?

It seems like they've done the math but I guess I don't understand what they're balancing here, and that feels bad. I don't want to play a roguelike that punishes me for exploring or taking my time for any reason. And as someone who just plays for fun I certainly don't care if Forum Poster B decides to Xomscum a win or something.

I think your case is the exact reason why it's a good idea to remove tedious optimal behavior.

To get Crawl biases out of the picture, let's look at a different game, SotS: The Pit. A new player can have a lot of fun just charging in, shooting monsters and eating sammiches, but they won't get far. So they go to look up how to improve their odds of winning. Those ways are:

1) Stop using your guns. Ammo is scarce, so you need to use melee weapons for conservation.
2) No, put your sword away, too. Weapons break from use surprisingly quickly, so you need to use your bare fists as much as possible.
3) Learn to manually rest correctly. Rest mode gives you increasing +HP per round the longer you do it, so it's vital for conserving food. Resting also takes a LONG time, in actual real time. You literally have to sit in place for up to 100 turns at about 1 turn per second.
4-9999) etc

The Pit deliberately embraces boring as poo poo optimal behavior, and it sucks because the only way you can succeed at the game is to also embrace the tedious behavior. When people suggest they change these things, the responses always fluctuate between "It's important to the gameplay" and "You don't HAVE to play like that"

e: This new Crawl change is poo poo, because it's replacing a tedious behavior that was just busywork that would rarely kill you (eating), with new more opaque busywork that will often kill you (carefully counting how many turns you're allowed to be on each level to avoid wasting banked safe turns).

Tendales fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Jul 31, 2020

# ¿ Jul 31, 2020 20:27

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