If you know my gaming habits, or read some of my posts about roguelikes, you know that I am a big fan of Linely’s Dungeon Crawl, or more specifically, the updated Stone Soup variant. I find the game fun, challenging, and interesting to play. It does not have a few of the flaws (I consider them flaws) of ADoM that keep me from regularly playing. ADoM is fantastic in it’s own right, and is definitely a step above everything else in the realm of roguelikes, but I keep starting and stopping, beginning and not getting far, and I think there are a few reasons why I do this, and can’t possibly be the only one:
1) Instant Death. Nethack is notorious for this, but ADoM has a huge number of these too. InstaDeaths are a good addition to gameplay within reason, but there is nothing quite as frustrating as losing a character you have been working on for a while, to a threat that you should have been able to handle, regardless of your HP, toughness, resistances ect. I won’t go into details here, (that would be a long rant), but with permanent character death, instadeath sucks, and should only be used sparingly in avoidable situations.
2) Certain skills are vital, others are pointless. While each character in Crawl only needs certain skills, different characters will need different ones, and they are all therefore useful. Can someone please tell me what your appearance score in ADoM was for? Me neither. On the other hand, I never had a win without the healing skill, which leads to my next issue…
3) Non random, non choice, linear paths. How many times did I have to rescue that damned carpenter? The only time I had a choice was if I already had the healing skill, and most classes don’t start with it. Choices are only good if they are meaningful, and not a no-brainer. This is a big part of the Crawl philosophy, any time you could choose to do something, you are choosing not to do something else, which makes it tougher to decide. My favorite example from this are the Crawl Gods. There are so many to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Do you choose the one that covers your weaknesses so you are more well rounded? Do you choose the one that complements your strengths, turning you into a deadly force to be reckoned with? Do you take the slow and steady god that will have huge rewards later for your patience now, or do you take the god who trusts you early with his power, but never really grows into anything game-changing?
Bonus point: Good and Evil. This is one that Crawl loses in favor of ADoM. Crawl’s good and evil is bland at best, with “good” gods who help slay undead, and won’t take demon followers. It is there, which is good, but you don’t generally have many actions that slide you one way or the other on the cosmic good and evil scale, other than the act of existing as undead or a demonspawn.
In ADoM, you could rob stores, kill the innocent, heal the wounded, spare a life, save the mad, gamble, commit acts of cannibalism, donate your money to good (or evil), sacrifice your enemies, sacrifice your friends, save a little girl’s puppy, or eat it in front of her. One of the first things you can be asked to do by the sheriff of the first town is to bring an outlaw leader to justice. One of the first things you can be asked to do by the leader of the criminal town is to slay said sheriff. It’s truly interesting, and your Lawful/Chaotic alignment has an effect on the game.
So, in summary, I think a good design philosophy for my roguelike is as follows:
1) No no-brainers. Decisions should be interesting, and have an impact
2) Said decisions should be plentiful
3) The player should see sources of death coming with enough warning most of the time to react (ie, you shouldn’t see a message about a monster picking you up and throwing you out a tower window unless you could be expected to know that that monster could do that. It should never happen immediately on the monster coming into line of sight. Also, no monster should do more damage in one turn than the player has HP, unless the player could see it coming)
4) (duh) The game should be fun. any and all rules can and should be modified if they add tedium, encourage farming or scumming, or inhibit players from enjoying the game.
With that in mind, I will probably commit a crime against my own philosophy in my first roguelike, and follow the design and layout and predictability of Mystic Towers. I think I might make a goal of mine to eventually move away from pre-defined layout, but to start with, I don’t have to try to code a map generator that way, and I know that the original layout was tailored to the tower, with the right number of spells and location of items to ensure an enjoyable game, and it seems wrong for my tribute to stray from that.