I fear this is a bit rambling and long and in no particular order (and
if I forget and write "Crawl", I mean DCSS, not pre-DCSS Crawl; the
distinction, along with the older game, is basically dead).  I've
mostly steered clear of discussion of what I think Crawl gets wrong,
since you aren't looking for bad ideas.


While it would be a lot of work to get something similar into NetHack,
DCSS's wizard mode offers an astonishing range of functionality - it's
entirely straightforward, especially with the freeze-time function, to
set up any map and game situation you want. It's been an enormous aid
in debugging stupid bugs in our variant. About the only part of
NetHack's wizard mode that's equally effective is being able to create
arbitary objects by wishing them up. In particular, it can read a
morgue file (dumplog) and do a reasonable job of recreating the
character.


After Junethack last year I came to feel that one merit NetHack has is
it tells more of a story. I had my 5th Valkyrie ascension that June,
it wasn't appreciably different to any other, but it was easy to write
up an account of the memorable incidents - whereas conversely DCSS
ascension reports often seem to come down to "worked down the dungeon
to D:11, went to the Lair, went to the Orcish Mines, etc" even though
you'd think the moments of terror and near-death experiences would
give a bit of narrative structure, and Crawl's morgue file contains
all manner of annotations about things as they happened rather than
just showing you the state of play at the end of the game. This isn't
much use as feedback since NH already gets it right and I can't really
account for what it is that means NH gets it right.


The other thing I think Crawl gets wrong is - sure, it's good to
eliminate repetitive activities that give a benefit for no cost or
risk (I'm looking at you, alchemy) but sometimes the dev team seems to
have an almost absurd fear of Hypothetically Optimal Man, to the point
of damaging the game for players who wouldn't dream of doing
whatever-it-is for a million turns.

Of course where one draws the line is somewhat arbitary - if I do it,
it's sensible preparation, if you do it, it's grindy, and if he does
it, it's scumming - but while I didn't agree that "pudding farming is
its own punishment", I can kind of see why one might say it.


Autoexplore. I don't autoexplore as much as many Crawl players, but
I'd still find it invaluable in NetHack for two reasons. First of all,
finding odd corners of the level (especially since in NetHack, by
default, you can't tell the difference between a dead-end corridor and
one you've only gone halfway down.) Secondly, autoexplore arranges for
you to see every new object that drops (as in NetHack, to see into a
stack, you have to stand on it). This is invaluable with Ctrl-F, but
even without, it woud be extremely useful just in terms of being sure
one has seen all the loot and had an opportunity to think about it.

However, a friend of mine has RSI, and literally cannot play NetHack.
Autoexplore (and interlevel travel and Ctrl-F) mean that a game of
DCSS has enormously fewer keystrokes in it.


Which brings us neatly onto Ctrl-F. It would be less useful in
NetHack, where you tend to stash objects; Crawl decided a while back
to spare the player stowing every potentially useful object upstairs,
and never lets monsters touch an object you've seen, which I have
mixed feelings about - typical of modern Crawl, it's logical from a
Doyleist point of view but a bit of a stretch from a Watsonian one.

However, it would still be extremely useful in NetHack to review your
stash or just to be able to answer questions of the form "I wonder if
I've found an XYZ?".


Interlevel travel completes the trifecta; Crawl makes it work by
having every level in memory and plotting the shortest overall route,
desirable with large levels and multiple stairs between levels, but
NetHack's single staircases mean it could get away with just taking
the stairs in the right direction on the current level, some kludgery
around Rodney's Tower, Medusa, and the Castle aside.

It's normal in Crawl to just type GD0 ("Go Dungeon level 0") after
exiting the orb vault. You still have to fight any monsters you meet,
but it helps a great deal. The same would surely be true of exiting
Gehennom on the ascension run.


Difficulty is the main reason I ended up playing Crawl. NetHack and
Crawl are similarly difficult, but for radically different reasons.
Crawl's difficulty basically all comes from monsters; at any stage in
the game there are monsters that pose a serious threat, almost any
monster can be a problem under the wrong circumstances, and things can
go wrong with horrifying rapidity.

Now, monsters don't have to be the only problem you face - that's
perhaps something not ideal about Crawl - but it's in sharp contrast
to NetHack where there comes a point, potentially quite early, where
the next threatening monster you face will be Rodney. In that Valk win
I reached it, through good fortune, on Dungeon level 2 - coming up
from a trip to Minetown, and certainly an extreme case, but hardly
desirable gameplay.

This seems to me to be down to a number of factors - negative AC is
extremely effective, the player never misses after a moderate amount
of the game (to-hit bonuses are available in large quantities, Luck in
particular), and you can alchemise up any number of hitpoints you
like. Even the monsters that can mess you up by some special ability
normally have a counter - lizard corpses, arranging to have the right
resistance before you meet dragons (which isn't hard to do), just not
standing next to the water, etc.

NetHack's difficulty seems to me in contrast to stem from basically
undesirable factors, first amongst them typo deaths; in Crawl if you
stand next to the lava and press the relevant direction key it says
"Why would you want to do that?", because it can kill you without
getting that cheap. A lava maze can still be a problem, but it's a
problem because (say) a ranged attacker turned up and you have to take
turns under fire threading your way out of the maze rather than just
backing up or closing them down.

NetHack also is difficult because of the sheer amount of obscure
detail to memorise. This strikes me as particularly a problem with a
vibrant variant scene; however, I'm not sure what to do about it. I
can't imagine NetHack undergoing a sea change to the current Crawl
approach, which is essentially "if the player could find it out in the
source, just tell them" - eg when you see the last flavour of scroll
or potion it autoidentifies, because you could just have looked it up
and been checking them off.

That said, one particular proposal (which ISTR you aren't a fan of,
but I'll try it again) would be an Angband-style monster memory -
persistent from game to game, but populated only by observing what
monsters actually do (ish; numbers like HP, AC etc are learned by
killing enough of the monster). This avoids so radical a change in the
game's approach and preserves the idea of the player making
discoveries through play. Persistent state between games is, I
appreciate, not something NetHack currently does.

I also played a bit of Spork, and while it had difficult monsters,
they weren't as satisfying. Crawl can be pretty liberal with the "oh
shit" moments because you can sensibly carry scrolls and potions in
main inventory [1] and many of those consumables are extremely
effective; I remember contrasting the potion of healing in NetHack
which you stow away to eventually make into a full healing with the
potion of heal wounds in Crawl which you carry around to heal your
wounds in emergencies.

This leads to layers of skill to develop; to recognise when a fight
demands a consumable (at first you hoard them all, CRPG-style, and die
with lots of things that could have saved you; then perhaps you are
too eager to use them and die because you have nothing left), to judge
when to use something like a potion of might or brilliance before a
fight starts (because a force multiplier gives most benefit when used
at full HP), to judge _which_ consumable to use, particularly with a
view to using less widely applicable ones when appropriate in order to
save scarce and generally applicable ones like heal wounds or scrolls
of summoning.

This is all interesting stuff (and I think it is more interesting than
learning a bunch of obscure tricks like confused taming [2]) and it's
basically missing from NetHack; even in that Spork game, some stuff
hit hard but the counters were POFH and AOLS, POFH and AOLS (and,
well, if Baalzebub hits hard, teleports away, and can't be trapped on
the stairs it's certainly a challenge but not perhaps quite what I am
looking for; I forget how I nailed him in the end.)


I think essentially the distinction I would draw is that to win
NetHack I had to memorise a bunch of stuff and develop self-discipline
- in particular, I had to form an idea of which situations demand
attention at every keystroke to avoid typo deaths.

To win Crawl I had to develop good tactics, and this is more
interesting because to use good tactics in different in-game
situations you have to think about how they apply, not continue to
apply the same rule about "never move with a c corpse wielded".
There's never a point in Crawl where I think "I don't have to work to
win this game, I just have to not lose it" - or if I do, it's a sign
of hubris, widely supposed to be the #1 killer of Crawl characters/


I think the other thing we touched on IRL was Crawl's variety of gods
and player species. NetHack's gods are interchangeable (occasionally
one class can pick up a 1-point alignment penalty which they don't
care about because they get a billion alignment from killing monsters,
so functionally identical); each Crawl god has distinct powers (and
god abilities form another part of the "you've got lots of things to
do in a crisis, pick the right one" game), likes and dislikes
(admittedly, many of them like you exploring or killing stuff), and
restrictions.

Some of the earlier species are no more differentiated than NetHack
species (and, to be fair, I appreciate some variants shake it up a lot
there) but even then the greater variety and utility of magic makes
for a lot of difference between species with aptitudes in various
magic schools and monster-whacking minotaurs; and many later species
are radically different from the norm. (I only stopped being actively
bad at Crawl when, after 4 wins, I resolved to play nothing but
kitties (http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Felid) until I won a kitty).


[1] Apropos of which, last June Amy and I knocked around an idea where
you can use a consumable directly out of a sack (or some kind of
limited belt slots, she says, but I'd like not to overcomplicate
it). You lose two turns, but you get the benefit immediately.

[2] I don't think all that stuff's bad - eg throwing the amulet away
if Rodney summons Demogorgon is interesting - and to be fair, I would
be hard put to describe criteria for what qualifies as interesting and
what as an obscure trick.