User:Phol ende wodan/Tubs Comments

Frustration != fun

Yep. Removing frustration and tedium is a main goal of xnethack. I wrote a list describing some here: User:Phol ende wodan/Frustration issues

Secret doors / corridors

Hmm. There are frustrating and non-frustrating applications of these. Finding the secret door to Moloch's Sanctum is not really frustrating, whereas getting stuck in the starting room on DL1 because there are no obvious exits is frustrating. I don't think removing them outright is the way to go, because I have some plans that depend greatly on hidden doors and passages (see User:Phol ende wodan/LevelsScratchpad#The Tomb of the Toltec Kings (Arc locate level)).

Bigger scale, I'd like each playthrough to only see ~1/4 of the total branches

On the roguelikedev subreddit I've seen a pretty wide spread of opinions on what players' ideal scale of a roguelike game is, so that seems pretty subjective. As for seeing only 1/4 of total branches, my main question is is that supposed to be enforced (players literally can't enter other branches) or are all the branches there but optional? Because in the latter case you run into balance issues along the lines of: the branches aren't intended to be required, but they offer some sort of worthwhile reward or loot (of course they do because why else have them), so players who do all the branches have an advantage over those who don't, so it slowly becomes standard strategy to do all the branches as other things in the game are rebalanced around sentiments like "well you should have X in order to deal with Y, it's guaranteed / generated in Z branch after all".

Personally, I also agree with several other devs that we should fix the branches we have to improve them (Gehennom) before looking towards making any new ones.

There must not be an "ascension kit"

Most of what I've seen along these lines is that you can't get a single kit which protects against everything; you can only cover the most important stuff, and maybe have a couple slots free to protect against the stuff that challenges you the most personally. Partial resistances or timing-out resistances ideas have been floated for a while, but I have yet to see a solution that doesn't allow you to pile them all on before or during the ascension run.

Gameplay should be non-modal
Keep the purity of nethack and all the current variants, items are cool, menus aren't.

Uh... how are you proposing to make nethack not have menus, exactly?

Elitism is bad
I don't mean attitude, but features that require knowledge

AKA having a large dependence on spoilers to do well in the game is bad. Yes, it's probably one of the factors which limits the growth of the nethack community the most; in order to get into the game, you generally do have to struggle through at least your first several games of dying to stuff because you didn't know how stuff works, and then after that there are still more gotchas (cockatrice, food poisoning, illness...)

Vanilla philosophy seems to cling to wanting to preserve the sharp divide between spoiled and unspoiled play, but I think this hurts the community by catering to a tiny fraction of players. Most players want to be competent at the game and don't have the patience to figure out everything for themselves. It's not the 90s anymore, either; spoilers are readily accessible.

A general goal of xnethack and nethack4 variants is to reduce spoiler demand by making the game able to give useful information.

Trash is OK
Even with all that, it's still fun to have random crap monsters spawning

To an extent. In vanilla right now, most of Gehennom monsters are boring chaff, and that's not good.

More, smaller, branches - the alignment quests in dnh are cool, the role quests in all variants are cool, the gnomish mines are cool.
Don't want an optimal path through branches, definitely don't want a forced path:
Intro branch, mostly vanilla, should be reasonably short for experienced nethack players.
Hub world, portals to each branch selected for this playthrough, locked behind doors, doors require earlier branches to proceed, etc.

Seems like this is starting to envision something other than nethack...? I don't think a hub world would be very flavorful inside nethack, and I'm not a fan of what sounds like a forced tutorial branch.

Levels should be "flatter", i.e. travel horizontally.

If this means they should scroll horizontally and be larger than 78x20, the main objection here is infrastructure; you would have to change quite a lot of the level, interface, and display code to make this happen; there's a reason no variant has done this.

More level location variety, not sure if this will be noticable/worth the effort?
More dungeon themes, moria is cool, arcadia is cool, filler dungeons get tiresome.

I think the solution is to make more interesting filler algorithms, rather than more special levels which I think is what youre implying here? I'm planning to do a number of different filler algorithms that will currently be used only in the Quest.

Travel is kinda frustrating, provide local-branch-port (checkpoints).
Lock to branch once in, no going home until branch complete, is this just artificially limiting choice?

There probably should be some means of moving around the dungeon that is accessible earlier than the crazy powerful controlled levelport, yes.

Locking in branches sounds like a terrible idea, consider the Mines; it's quite common that you want to complete it partially and then go back and return later.

Role/race selection at start shoehorns playstyle; back to rogue, everyone starts a blank slate

That's... sort of the point?

A.I. can demonstrate idiocy... (if the wand of mm didn't work the first time, it won't work the second. AND STOP HITTING YOUR FRIENDS) might be the hardest thing to improve

Making the AI not hit its friends is actually pretty easy compared to making monsters realize a thing didn't work so they won't try again; the former depends only on the state of the map and monster positioning, whereas the latter requires making monsters remember stuff.

More focus on low-cooldown abilities! These are great and mean you have to think.

They are great, but my main reservation is there doesn't seem to be a nice interface-friendly way to make it work that doesn't involve extended commands, and there's no good way to show how close they are to being usable again.

Bosses SHOULD REQUIRE TACTICS
Bosses that aren't just meatbags are way more memorable.
Give bosses unique abilities with cooldowns, not just more hit dice.
I'd like boss fights to last a reasonable amount of time.

I mostly agree with this, but I don't think you're going to have an easy time getting past many nethack players' assumptions that you should be able to whack something to death in a fairly short window of time given a strong enough weapon.