Forum:Should we have some sort of "ordinary level" page?

< Forum:Watercooler

I got stymied when trying to figure out where on the wiki commit ae3e5d28 should be documented (to save a click, it adds some food and helpful items in chests to early levels in the Dungeons of Doom). As far as I can tell, there isn't a place that summarizes all the quirks of "ordinary" room-and-corridor level generation (odds of various dungeon features, closets and Vlad trapdoors, the basic rules for monsters and objects initially generating in rooms, fake bones piles, and now things like "bonus items") in one place. Does such a page exist that I am forgetting, or if not, where should that information go? Some ideas that occurred to me:

• Mazes of Menace? Too broad, I think, that is more about overall dungeon structure and level generation details are too narrow for it.
• Pages for the individual bonus items, such as Chest to describe the special generation on early levels? Could work, but would be difficult to discover, and can quickly get annoying when there are more than a few types of special generation. For instance, the random food item added in this commit could be either a food ration, cram ration, or lembas, and it would be icky to have to put very similar text on each of their pages.
• A new page such as Ordinary level or Room-and-corridor level? Perhaps, but could get confusing since a number of quests have "ordinary" or "room-and-corridor" filler levels that do not obey the same rules as Dungeons of Doom levels. And I can't think of a name that sounds great.
• Dungeons of Doom (which is currently a stub) expanded to include notes about non-special level generation within that branch? Probably my preferred choice, though still not immediately obvious that you should go there to look up level generation info.

--Phol ende wodan (talk) 22:50, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

You raise a pretty good point here, and I'm not entirely sure how to approach it myself - for the moment I favor something close to option #3 of the bunch, though I think we could probably use the dungeon level article instead of that one; no matter what ends up happening, I need to de-stub that DoD article before the year's out. I'll think on it more and come back around. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 05:28, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Dungeon level is a discussion of mechanics based on depth, which I guess technically many Dungeons of Doom level generation mechanics fall under, but not all of them. E.g. random monsters and objects per room rate is independent of depth, so it would be a little odd to shoehorn those into that page. I think for now, to avoid having to remember I have to come back to the bonus items change, I'll put these notes on Dungeons of Doom; then if the decision is to move them somewhere else later, they can be. --Phol ende wodan (talk) 12:23, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, that should do for the time being. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 13:11, 19 December 2024 (UTC)