Pan Dispersal
Players have been dissatisfied with Dungeon Crawl's extended endgame for some time. This document specifically focuses on Pandemonium (or 'Pan'), the endless realm of demons.
Pandemonium's primary problem is shared with much of the rest of extended: most of it is not challenging. Dungeon Crawl is at its best when it's presenting the player with life or death tactical challenges, but due to the scale of Pandemonium, if most of Pan's encounters had even half a percent chance of killing the player, very few characters would survive. As a result, most of Pan's encounters are unsatisfying, repetitive filler.
To some extent, this problem occurs in other areas of Dungeon Crawl as well. Pandemonium exacerbates the issue by adding extra length to the end of the game, by sharing many enemy types with other parts of Extended (Hell's demons), and by using largely repetitive, uninteresting level layouts. It's an endless dungeon, but Dungeon Crawl is not a game that's short on dungeon to start with!
There are parts of Pandemonium that are cool and exciting. The randomized Pandemonium Lords are a very distinctive, flavorful enemy, and the unique lords (e.g. Cerebov) are well-loved by players. There are a few other enemies and vaults that are exclusive to Pan, and the Holy Pan level is fairly distinct. It would be nice to preserve some or most of those through any changes.
The plan here is to move Pandemonium's runes and fun elements. Rather than being intended for play after the end of the normal game, they'll be included as 'opt-in' extra difficulty in the main game.
This is a mix between a planning document and a brainstorm. Many important decisions remain to be made before this can make it into the game. For example, we might end up with 15 runes, 13, or 18.
I'm aware that other crawl variants have done something similar, but I haven't played them so am not familiar with details. This is inspired by a suggestion from hellmonk.
When they enter certain branches, the player will be prompted to invoke the wrath of the Lords of Pandemonium. If they do so, that branch will become considerably harder, and a named Lord of Pandemonium will guard a rune at the bottom.
These rune challenges are intended to be risky, but doable for a strong character. They should not require or encourage the player to hold off on the branch until they've gotten enough xp from other areas to trivialize it. Taking one of these challenges should lower winrate for an average player, but they should still feel 'fair'.
The Wrath of Pandemonium should have a branch-wide effect. Below is some brainstorming for possible effects. These suggestions are not balanced against each other or, really, at all - they're just initial numbers to get thoughts moving.
- Enemies have +50% movement speed.
- Enemies do +33% damage (elemental?).
- Some enemies travel with 'illusions', like rakshasas.
- Enemies have death curses.
- Sound travels twice as far.
- All enemies start awake and wandering.
- Zot traps everywhere!
- All but a single up-stair and down-stair per floor are turned into hatches.
- Up-stairs seal every time you enter a level if there are at least 9 non-firewood enemies in a connected area. They unlock after 81 turns.
- As above, but they unlock once you kill 9 enemies instead.
- You can't read scrolls in this branch.
- Demons randomly spawn on your head.
- Wandering jellies eat items.
- Teleportitis (stacks with the mut).
- Extra time pressure of some kind?
Depending on how many of these ideas (or other ideas) are viable, we might just have one of these as the only 'pan effect'. We could alternately assign specific effects to certain branches and/or to certain pandemonium lords. Or, we could fully randomize.
Whatever effect applied to a specific branch would be announced to the player before they made their choice, to give them hopefully enough information to decide whether they're ready to face that challenge.
It would be good to have some of these effects appear as visible, non-dispellable enchantments on monsters, to make it clearer what's happening.
As mentioned above, we don't want players to easily hold off on doing a challenge until it becomes trivial. This can be accomplished at least three ways.
Some branches are quite challenging to skip. Skipping Lair, for example, is a challenge conduct, since there's so much XP and items there that doing other areas first is harder. Vaults 1:4, Depths, and perhaps Elf might also fit in this category.
Other branches are already challenging enough that you might not do them in a normal 3-rune game anyway. Even if you delay doing them, they'll likely still be challenging when you get there. Slime and Crypt could be good contenders for this category.
The third approach is to explicitly gate on progress. This is surprisingly tricky, and I'm a bit leery of trying it. Some options:
- Only allow entering the challenge if you reach the branch in under X turns. If you pass that time, disable the challenge and the rune. (But a DDFi^Makh is enormously faster than a DEFE^Veh - can you really set a time limit that works for both?)
- Only allow entering the challenge if you reach the branch at an experience level under Y. If you pass that XL, disable the challenge and the rune. (XL apts likewise vary significantly between, say, humans and demigods, and it feels awful if you pass the XL midway through the challenge, but otherwise you need another mechanism to keep players from starting the challenge & wandering away to do something else...)
It'd be quite thematic to move the named lords of Pandemonium to guard the challenge runes. They'd have to be scaled down, of course. We could either change the existing lords to be weaker, or we could do a sprite recolor and make weaker siblings for them. Beware the wrath of Nobol Mol!
They shouldn't be affected by the challenge bonus - it's only every other monster in the branch that gets buffed by them.
The lords will probably live in vaults with a few friends, which would be a technical challenge for level generation (since this would depend on whether or not the player took the challenge) and would also give some extra XP. Neither of those seem like enormous challenges, but it's something to keep in mind.
There's quite a lot of elements I've skipped over. Let's talk about what happens to other things here.
Orb run only, for now. Perhaps someone else can find a better use for them.
Orb run and weird vaults. They might be suitable friends for the pan lords in their challenge vaults.
The Holy Pan encompass vault seems like a pretty good wizlab, if we scale the threat down a bit.
Some distinctive/iconic vaults, like lemuel_hellion_island, could be moved elsewhere. We could rework and repurpose them for the pan lords' rune vaults, or as elevator vaults in the appropriate Hells.
The proposal above is a sort of dynamic difficulty setting. Why not just have difficulty settings when you start the game?
We certainly could. To a certain extent, species/background choices already function as difficulty settings, and we might move further in the direction of formalizing start-of-game difficulty choices. However, one big advantage that in-game difficulty options offer is context. Players have much more information once they're already playing, and it's much easier for them to make informed decisions about how hard they want the game to be once they're already playing, rather than trying to make a decision in advance.
It seems worth trying, at any rate!