Linley's Dungeon Crawl

Linley's Dungeon Crawl (often called Dungeon Crawl or simply Crawl) is a roguelike game in a fantasy setting. Though NetHack has inspired many features of Crawl, the two games are very different.

Origin

The creator, Linley Henzell, made slight changes to the NetHack General Public License to create the "Crawl General Public License", thus Crawl is free software. Crawl does not contain any source code from NetHack.

Henzell created Crawl in 1995 and continued to improve the game until 1999. After that, he allowed a group of contributors to develop new versions of Crawl. Development stalled in 2003 with the release of Crawl 4.0.0 beta 26. The last developer, Brent Ross, proceeded to produce versions of Crawl 4.1 alpha until 2005.

A variant called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has displaced the original game (somewhat analogous to how NetHack displaced Hack). This variant integrates various bug fixes, interface improvements, statistical tweaks, and new dungeon branches. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is also free, under the GNU GPL V2 license. Most Crawl players now play Stone Soup.

Differences in development

The development of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is quite open; the developers use a Git repository that provides public read access, they chat on a public mailing list, and they seek new contributors. Much play of DCSS is on public servers, and the most recent development version is normally available.

NetHack's DevTeam has recently also moved to having an open version control repository.

Comparisons

Crawl and NetHack seem very similar in some ways. Note: as Stone Soup has gone through over 15 years of active development, differences will be noted in itallics.

• The goal in both games is to retrieve a special thing from the dungeon. NetHack players seek the Amulet of Yendor, while Crawl players want the Orb of Zot. To open the way to the special thing, the player must perform the invocation ritual in NetHack or must collect runes of Zot in Crawl. Then one must return upward, carrying the special thing out of the dungeon.
• Crawl and NetHack both use persistent levels, although Crawl has two significant areas with non-persistent levels (the Abyss and Pandemonium). You may take stairs to revisit levels, and strategic use will help the survival of the player.
• Crawl and NetHack both feature a similar fantasy settings. Expect to find elves, dwarves, orcs, kobolds and such in both games. Both games have magic items like scrolls, potions, rings and amulets.
• Crawl and NetHack both allow you to attack monsters with melee attacks (by walking into them), ranged attacks (by shooting or throwing something at them), or magic (by zapping something at them).
• Crawl and NetHack both have traps. Step on the wrong square, and it might teleport you or worse, for example.
• Crawl and NetHack players may starve to death unless they eat corpses. *Food has been removed in modern Stone Soup.
• Crawl and NetHack both have bones levels, although they are sharply different in nature: NetHack bones save the entire level, including monsters and items, and a weak ghost, while Crawl bones do not save the level layout, monsters, or items, but contain a player ghost that has powers similar to the deceased character. *While recent Stone Soup versions have locked ghosts behind a closed door due to trolling, prior versions let ghosts roam free.
• Crawl and NetHack both have various dungeon branches.

Differences in gameplay

Players who try both games will immediately notice these obvious differences about the dungeon.

• Crawl does not start you with a pet! In fact, allies (as they are called in Crawl) are extremely rare to find, although summoning spells (which create temporary allies) can potentially fill that gap.
• Crawl generates larger dungeon levels than NetHack. In Crawl, the @ remains in the center of the map while the dungeon scrolls around the adventurer.
• While NetHack starts out with distinct, separate rectangular rooms connected with corridors, Crawl starts out with more complex level designs, such as adjacent rooms, parallel corridors, pillars, and multiple staircases to the same level.

Crawl characters have better vision, too. If you give enough attention to the first dungeon branch in both games, you will notice the difference between NetHack's dark corridors and Crawl's lit corridors. If you play Stone Soup, your characters will see very well around corners, because of the Permissive Field of View. Vision in Stone Soup is symmetric, so if you can see the monster then the monster can see you. But Crawl limits the radius of vision; a Crawl player may be unable to see monsters on the other side of a large room, but NetHack players always see as far as possible in lit areas.

However, Crawl has subtle differences from NetHack that seriously affect how one plays the game. This presentation of the differences may be overly general, not to apply in all situations, so beware.

• Skills are much more important in Crawl. In fact, the game is based around them. Instead of 4 (or 6) granular levels of training, Crawl instead has numerical skills (up to level 27). Your class only defines what skills you start with, and your race defines your relative aptitudes for skills as well as inborn mutations. However, the direction you go with those is entirely up to you.
  You can, for example, start as a Hill Orc Fighter, learn spellcasting from scrolls, read a spellbook, and spend the rest of the game as a spellcaster. (Stone Soup allows you to train any skill at any time, even if you have nothing to use it. The scroll step was also removed, much earlier). However, characters who try to fight monsters without enough skill are even more doomed than in NetHack: wielding a mace with low skill against a hydra is a very quick death, for example.
• Gods are both more numerous and unique. Instead of 3 alignments, Crawl features 12 (26 in Stone Soup) gods. A large majority of gods are not assigned at the start; Crawl players will pick a god of their choice in the very early dungeon (requiring the god's altar to do so). Each god is noticably more complex, having multiple unique abilities and/or passive buffs. While most lack any noticable conduct, gods are powerful and distinct enough to be a defining aspect of your character.
• There are few incredibly nasty bad items in Crawl. There's nothing like the scroll of amnesia (although an item by such a name with a good effect exists!) or the possibility of a confused self-genocide. While some potions are still decidedly bad (eg degeneration), blind item usage is still common. *Stone Soup has revamped many dedicated "bad" items so you won't just throw them away, making items a lot nicer. For example, the slowing potion was changed into completely immobile, yet tough and poison resistant, tree potion. Curses have been removed, and during their existence, their only effect was to be stuck to the player.
• The identification game is dramatically streamlined. By corollary of the above point, Crawl players are much more likely to blindly consume items (especially scrolls) in order to ID them. There is few, if any, special 'tricks' like price identification. The other reliable method of identify, the scroll of identification, requires blind use to find. Meanwhile, all consumables in Stone Soup are identified on use, even if they did nothing. In addition, modern Stone Soup auto-identifies armor, weapons, jewellery, and wands completely when you step on their tile.
• Crawl encourages the player to advance downward quickly, while NetHack players may linger on upper levels. Once a level is cleared, there is little reason to remain there. NetHack players like to linger to regenerate or to sacrifice at an altar, and may encounter several battles even when traveling up through the dungeon. Of course, players of both games will travel up to escape monsters or to visit their stashes. * Stone Soup has disabled random monster generation, and older versions would spawn extremely out of depth monsters if you stayed too long.
• NetHack restricts shooting to eight directions. It is a tradition that will not disappear; it enhances strategy greatly by allowing monsters (especially those annoying unicorns) to be out of your line of fire. Crawl has a targeting system that allows you to shoot arbitrarily nearby targets within your field of view, plus all of the extra controls that such a system requires. Stone Soup's symmetric vision allows you and monsters to trade shots around corners. Instead, many of Crawl's spells have unique targeting systems: Lightning Bolt bounces off tiles, Frozen Ramparts freezes enemies adjacent to walls, and Starburst fires in all 8 cardinal directions (whenever you like it or not). Many spells have a comparably shorter range as a result.
• NetHack has containers. While Crawl players are dropping items on the ground, NetHack players like to place them in chests. In compensation, Crawl has an elaborate "stash" system that tracks the location of all objects ever dropped or even seen on the ground, allowing you to return to their locations quickly. *In modern Stone Soup, items can never be damaged, and once-seen items are never picked up by monsters. Crawl has continously streamlined inventory management: all items are now weightless, and they often remove 'unecessary' items or mechanics (which remove items in the process).
• NetHack seems to give more emphasis to arbitrary uses for objects than Crawl. In Stone Soup, there is explicitly only one mechanical use per item, and even in Linley's Crawl there weren't that many. You drink potions, but can't throw them at enemies. You can zap wands, but are unable to engrave or break them. Throwing anything other than dedicated Throwing weapons deals no damage. It is in a single use that depth is derrived; you can zap a wand of flame as a low-level damage spell, or to create sight-obscuring steam over water, while it being the most common wand naturally creates strategic decisions.
• Characters and monsters in Crawl are much more vulnerable. For example, even a well armored early-game minotaur fighter may find 1/2 of their hitpoints knocked off by a (comparatively) measly ogre. And all lategame, non-undead characters must deal with the effect known as torment, which cuts current HP in half. Intrinsic resistances are very difficult to come by, only obtainable via the rare and risky mutation system. Most players rely on extrinsic resistances from items instead. Resistances have three levels, the last of which still does not provide complete protection. On the other hand, monsters also end to have resistances less often, and AC protects against almost all attacks.
• The game hinges less on finding a few particular items. There is no item that provides a property like NetHack's reflection. Weapon enchants are plentiful and purely for combat, while armor intrsinics are only generated randomly. And there is no wishing, so nothing is guaranteed. On the other hand, the game lacks instakills such as "The poison was deadly..." and the touch of death, so intrisics like magic / poison resistance are not strictly necessary. Artifacts are nice, but not necessary. Random artifact weapons are very comparible to their enchanted non-artifact counterparts, with unique 'unrands' being incredibly rare and not necessarily powerful.
• Magic is generally much more powerful and accessible. Since any character can learn (almost) any skill, magic is accessible to most characters. Even low-level spells can provide useful or potentially life-saving effects. On the other end of the spectrum, high-level magic is by far the most damaging thing in the game, with the most powerful spells doing damage on the order of 7-8x what an endgame melee weapon will do. In turn, most high-level player deaths will be due to a spell, not to melee.

All these elements combine into one final difference, a summary point that applies mostly to Stone Soup:

• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a game streamlined for combat. NetHack focuses a lot of the out of combat, 'dungeoneering' experience. An adventurer's bag of holding might hold many miscellanous tools (musical instruments, magic markers, spare unicorn horn, water-walking boots, junk scrolls to blank later, junk potions to dilute later, huge piles of food, collection of valuable gems) to exploit. Stone Soup calls that clutter.
  
  There is strikingly little non-combat interaction: while strategic character-building has been maintained, identification has been stripped of complexity, inventory management has continously been streamlined, and most other 'creative' spoilery functions do not exist. They fit in well with NetHack's geeky tone and reference-based humor. However, Crawl's DevTeam finds these mechanics a waste of the player's time and effort, or even 'noob traps'. Once a player knows how to dip for Excalibur, Crawl could just cut the process out and give it randomly to the player. Instead of flavor, Stone Soup's focus lies in adding replayability, and making tense scenarios more interesting.
  
  This mentality ultimately comes from the fact that DCSS is a much, much younger game: forked roughly 20 years post-NetHack and actively developed for over 15 years afterwards, in an era where 'spoilers' are commonly used, acceptable, and available - even the game itself features a much more robust database than NetHack.

Differences in interface and documentation

Crawl's tty user interface is better than that of NetHack. NetHack's problem is its old source code and its desire to remain compatible with old Hack and NetHack versions. The default values of some options follow this desire. So color defaults to false, and msg_window defaults to 's' single rather than 'f' full, because older versions had no color and displayed only single previous messages. (At least menustyle defaults to 'f' full instead of 't' traditional. Traditional menus are that primitive type being familiar to Hack players.)

An 80x24 window is large enough to show the entire map of a NetHack level, which assists player awareness.

Crawl's manual is better organised than the NetHack Guidebook. Crawl's manual, a text file, keeps the less important material in appendixes, and shuns long alphabetic lists by presenting things in groups. A separate text file describes the options. Meanwhile, NetHack's Guidebook uses troff or TeX formatting, so that the DevTeam may create pretty PostScript and HTML versions of the Guidebook, not only plain text files.

External links

Crawl links:

• Official Dungeon Crawl site (no longer updated)
• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Continuation of development
• crawl.akrasiac.org Crawl public server
• Dungeon Crawl wiki

External references:

• @ Play: Before Learning to Walk, One Must First Crawl, the @ Play column for Crawl
• Crawlapalooza Part 1, Skills and Advancement, the first article of a series of @Play articles about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.