Movement modes

[debo]

IMO at birth just give the player a scroll of really deep descent that dumps you 50 levels down. They have the option if they choose to take it

[PowerWyrm]

IMO at birth just give the player a scroll of really deep descent that dumps you 50 levels down. They have the option if they choose to take it

Well it the forthcoming version you can change stair-skip from 1 to 50 in constants.txt if you want, which would make for a very very fast dive.

[bio_hazard]

Is there any reason the game couldn't ask you how many levels you wanted to descend each time you take a downstairs (or read deep descent)? I guess it would suck to fat-finger 11 instead of one, but that should make everyone happy, since default would be one, but would allow people to dive faster if they wanted. I can't really think of a good argument against this.

If you were willing to extend this to upstairs as well, then it would pretty much remove the need for word of recall, and I think also probably remove the need for food too.

[Derakon]

Is there any reason the game couldn't ask you how many levels you wanted to descend each time you take a downstairs (or read deep descent)? I guess it would suck to fat-finger 11 instead of one, but that should make everyone happy, since default would be one, but would allow people to dive faster if they wanted. I can't really think of a good argument against this.

If you were willing to extend this to upstairs as well, then it would pretty much remove the need for word of recall, and I think also probably remove the need for food too.

Biggest argument I can think of against it is that it would encourage stairscumming -- your level-1 character could dive all the way to the bottom of the dungeon in the hopes of scoring some random crap from the floor that is massively better than anything he could normally hope to find.

More generally, this kind of approach turns the dungeon into less of a "place". It should take effort to traverse the dungeon. I'm not opposed to making it easier to dive -- maybe every level that's a multiple of 5 could have an express shaft that takes you down 5 levels, say -- but it shouldn't be trivial.

[bio_hazard]

I guess it could only be a feature with disconnected stairs, which would help moderate the stairscumming a bit.

[AnonymousHero]

Biggest argument I can think of against it is that it would encourage stairscumming -- your level-1 character could dive all the way to the bottom of the dungeon in the hopes of scoring some random crap from the floor that is massively better than anything he could normally hope to find.

More generally, this kind of approach turns the dungeon into less of a "place". It should take effort to traverse the dungeon. I'm not opposed to making it easier to dive -- maybe every level that's a multiple of 5 could have an express shaft that takes you down 5 levels, say -- but it shouldn't be trivial.

+1. Just changing random stairs into shafts which transport you down 2+d3 levels should be enough, I think. I don't think there should be any "up" shafts. Nor should the down stairs you land on when going up (connected stairs) ever turn into a shaft. Possibly, there shouldn't be any connected up stairs when going down a shaft, even with "connected stairs" on.

I played for a while with fizzix's "ask if user wants to go down two levels instead of one"[1] and it kind of turned me off the idea of asking simply because I found myself just unable to abuse stairscumming to skip huge "intervals" of levels, basically just skipping straight to levels 20, 35, 60, 95, and then finally 99-100.

[1] I think that was the mechanic, been a while. It did definitely ask the player every time.