Ascii Dreams poll

[Mikko Lehtinen]

To modify this just a bit. Make the OoD check dependent upon character level. At CL1 almost nothing out of depth will appear. At CL50, anything can happen, and usually will.

This will however lead to characters leveling faster on shallower depths. It's easier to kill tough monsters if they are surrounded by mooks. Killing OOD monsters gives a lot of experience.

What if experience rewards depended partly on your dungeon level?

[LostTemplar]

Crawl does that, and IMO it is the single mechanic which makes Crawl harder than Angband.

Unless you stairscum by luring monsters one by one from extremely dangerous level to already cleared one, that is even more cheesy, then angband style stairscumming. Personally I find Crawl boring just due to this.

[Antoine]

At CL50, anything can happen, and usually will. Ancient Dragons on DL1, no problem

Why would a CL50 character be on DL1??

A.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Why would a CL50 character be on DL1??

A.

Heading toward dungeon level 100 because town didn't have Scrolls of Recall?

EDIT: Words of Recall, duh. I can't even remember what they're called since Fay doesn't have them.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Would a message "You feel you can't learn anything new on this dungeon level." annoy you much?

DLs could have maximum CLs.

[Magnate]

To modify this just a bit. Make the OoD check dependent upon character level. At CL1 almost nothing out of depth will appear. At CL50, anything can happen, and usually will. Ancient Dragons on DL1, no problem (we can presume that Morgoth becomes more aware of the PC as he gains power and actively sends minions after him). Most of the game will function largely as it does now, with moderate leveled characters
facing moderately OoD enemies a moderate amount of the time. I particularly like idea this because for a large part of the game it's a rather small change to the status-quo.

Damn but you have some good ideas. There's absolutely no reason why the OOD check has to be the same throughout the game. IMO we should keep some OOD chance at cl1, but I'd be quite happy to see what happened if we upped the existing OOD calc with a small term that depended linearly on clev. I think perhaps the clev should affect the extent to which monsters can be OOD, rather than the chance of them being OOD. Or perhaps both.

Definitely one to ponder.

[Derakon]

Just make OoD a supercharge, while varying the charge chance with dlvl. Something like this:

charge_chance = dlvl; 
ood_range = 0; 
while (d100 < charge_chance) {
    ood_range += 1
    charge_chance -= 5;
    if (charge_chance <= 0) charge_chance = 1;
}

Theoretically you could get a dl90 monster at dl1, but it'd pretty much be proof that the RNG was biased.

[andrewdoull]

I'm with Antoine here. I don't see the need for this mechanic. Why would a CL50 player be on DL1?

It just makes DL1 much more scummable if you do this.

[buzzkill]

I'm with Antoine here. I don't see the need for this mechanic. Why would a CL50 player be on DL1?

"Why" is the wrong question. Because the game doesn't prohibit it, if it can be done, it will be done. The correct question is "what if". This whole discussion revolves around 'encouraging' the player to have 'more fun' while playing. CL50 characters on DL1 is exactly who we are targeting.

It just makes DL1 much more scummable if you do this.

Why scum DL1 when you could scum DL90? In any case, nerfing the ability to scum would solve this problem... and a lot of others.

[Malak Darkhunter]

I'm with Antoine here. I don't see the need for this mechanic. Why would a CL50 player be on DL1?

It just makes DL1 much more scummable if you do this.

Cl50 characters probably wont be on DL1 but a CL50 character on DL 40 is highly probably, you can scum for good items at these depths and have reasonably nothing to worry about danger wise.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

"Why" is the wrong question. Because the game doesn't prohibit it, if it can be done, it will be done. The correct question is "what if". This whole discussion revolves around 'encouraging' the player to have 'more fun' while playing. CL50 characters on DL1 is exactly who we are targeting.

Exactly!

But I share Andrew's worry also: having lonely high-level monsters on shallow levels might actually increase the scumming potential more than danger. (Maybe! No way to be sure, it all depends on the numbers.)

[andrewdoull]

Results are in.