Decreasing marginal experience gains would convince me to go deeper, but many people need more inducement. They would see decreasing experience meaning that they just have to scum for longer. I don't think it is enough on its own.
In general, players left to their own devices typically want to wait until they are safe in order to continue down. This is exacerbated due to permadeath -- it is just the rational decision. They weigh this against boredom, but this just means that they grind until they reach their boredom threshold, so you pretty much guarantee that all the players of your game are near their threshold most of the time -- not a good thing. This is worse again when you consider that in Sil some builds are not very viable. If someone has such a build, I think the kindest thing to do is to force them to a difficulty level that is challenging and interesting (perhaps too challenging) and then kill their character, so they are free to start again and try new things. This works particularly well in Sil as it is shorter than Nethack, Angband, Crawl, and Adom.
In general, one of the key features of the forced descent is that it keeps the play at a challenging level, which is good for overall player enjoyment (even if the moment when you are killed is not fun).
Regarding the Edain, I think you might be thinking of success the wrong way (which is partly my fault). Most players will never be able to win with them, but you can succeed without winning. See how deep you can get, and try to beat that depth. Can you get all the way to 500 ft? To 750 ft? In a future version, I will probably put a success message on death if you get the furthest you have so far with a given race, rather than the generic failure message.
Regarding stats, we'd actually defined 0 in a stat as the average for the Edain (the allocation of stat points on top of this is because you are a hero, not a typical person). We therefore really want to keep the default 0s for Edain. If anything, we'd make them easier by making the other races less good and the monsters less good. But we don't think that is required. We want to be able to give great players a serious challenge to win and Edain do that pretty well.
In general, players left to their own devices typically want to wait until they are safe in order to continue down. This is exacerbated due to permadeath -- it is just the rational decision. They weigh this against boredom, but this just means that they grind until they reach their boredom threshold, so you pretty much guarantee that all the players of your game are near their threshold most of the time -- not a good thing. This is worse again when you consider that in Sil some builds are not very viable. If someone has such a build, I think the kindest thing to do is to force them to a difficulty level that is challenging and interesting (perhaps too challenging) and then kill their character, so they are free to start again and try new things. This works particularly well in Sil as it is shorter than Nethack, Angband, Crawl, and Adom.
In general, one of the key features of the forced descent is that it keeps the play at a challenging level, which is good for overall player enjoyment (even if the moment when you are killed is not fun).
Regarding the Edain, I think you might be thinking of success the wrong way (which is partly my fault). Most players will never be able to win with them, but you can succeed without winning. See how deep you can get, and try to beat that depth. Can you get all the way to 500 ft? To 750 ft? In a future version, I will probably put a success message on death if you get the furthest you have so far with a given race, rather than the generic failure message.
Regarding stats, we'd actually defined 0 in a stat as the average for the Edain (the allocation of stat points on top of this is because you are a hero, not a typical person). We therefore really want to keep the default 0s for Edain. If anything, we'd make them easier by making the other races less good and the monsters less good. But we don't think that is required. We want to be able to give great players a serious challenge to win and Edain do that pretty well.
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