*Destruction*

[Atarlost]

The problem with tele_level with disconnected stairs is you can still teleport into a room full of eg. zephyr hounds. With free first move on level change and connected stairs you can escape and tele_level is a foolproof escape. Without both of those advantages it's instadeath just as surely as normal teleport into a room full of zephyr hounds with low HP.

One possible compramise is to guarantee all stairs (or tele_level invocations) lead into completely empty rooms and never line up with hallways. This guarantees safety for a few turns at least even without connected stairs, and with a guarantee of no visible items or monsters makes early scumming less viable. Late scumming could be made less viable by eliminating vaults or by will_asher's idea for a progressively reduced chance of connected stairs.

On that subject, though, it may be more interesting to try to track the number of level changes than to base simply on depth. Allowing x>100 connected stairs not counting level changes that end in town and allowing increasing stair disconnections thereafter would also penalize early scumming just as much as late scumming, but allow for some level of scumming without losing guaranteed stair connection. The bigger x is the sharper the cutoff between allways connected and allways disconnected stairs can be.

[buzzkill]

One possible compramise is to guarantee all stairs (or tele_level invocations) lead into completely empty rooms and never line up with hallways. This guarantees safety for a few turns at least even without connected stairs...

Where does this notion that one should be guaranteed safety for a turn (or a few turns) come from. Your in a frickin' dungeon, and probably fairly deep. Presumably, you either got yourself into a bad spot, or your simply scumming for items, otherwise why be so focused on the stairs. Either way, why do you feel that you are entitled to a safe haven?

[Donald Jonker]

Where does this notion that one should be guaranteed safety for a turn (or a few turns) come from. Your in a frickin' dungeon, and probably fairly deep. Presumably, you either got yourself into a bad spot, or your simply scumming for items, otherwise why be so focused on the stairs. Either way, why do you feel that you are entitled to a safe haven?

For better or for worse, it's part of the Angband paradigm. You've got a giant section of dungeon you can always escape to; you've got !CCW to reset your player state once you get there; above all you've got Town - the ultimate haven. In Angband you don't deal with the nastiest problems: you fly them and get to a safe place. Stuff won't follow you downstairs like in Nethack. Being a good player generally means knowing best how to get the hell out. If you want to make havens less safe, then you need to think about reducing the danger, or changing the nature of the danger, that makes them necessary.

Naturally, if you want things to follow you up/down stairs, you can't have gravity hounds spawning right next to you on new levels.

People only want guaranteed safety when teleporting away because there aren't a whole lot of options for more controlled alternatives of escape (besides winning the battle).

[Zikke]

I just hate the idea of a perma-death game having a 1 in X chance per staircase to be instantly killed.

[Pete Mack]

@Zikke-
that's the nature of the game. Enough dodging up and down stairs and you will eventually die, especially without speed 10 and RSound. It's something like 1 in 10,000, but you will eventually end up in a room full of plasma hounds.

[Zikke]

If going up and down stairs wasn't part of the required game and it had an inherent risk of insta-death, that would be fine. But going up and down levels is required for any character with any play style. Just giving the player the first turn in V would be a great improvement, regardless of whether or not they stair scum or have connected stairs. Then it would involve skill and planning instead of just bad luck.

[PowerDiver]

One more thing about*destruction* -- it is yet another misnamed spell. It does not destroy. If it did, uniques would not come back, but they do, so it doesn't. I think of it as a teleport level on the area, including walls [then maybe the ceiling collapses randomly?], but excluding the player. My view on artifacts is that if it teleports ordinary objects off the level [which is a fancy way of saying to delete them] it should teleport artifacts as well.

[Zikke]

Maybe call it something like *Explosion*?

[Atarlost]

I can sort of see why genocide was renamed but *destruction* is about as innoffensive as anything in the genre. Leave it be.

[Pete Mack]

I don't think there's anything wrong with *Destruction*, either. And Genocide was renamed in part because it was very different from the genocide spell, which in Rogue allows you to banish one race (generally 'X') permanently from the game.