The other day I was searching for something to do while training and found something that made me think.
Crusade against no-brainers
A very important point in Crawl is steering away from no-brainers.
Speaking about games in general, wherever there's a no-brainer, that
means the development team put a lot of effort into providing a "choice"
that's really not an interesting choice at all. And that's a horrible
lost opportunity for fun. Examples for this are the resistances: there
are very few permanent sources, most involve a choice (like rings or
specific armour) or are only semi-permanent (like mutations). Another
example is the absence of clear-cut best items, which comes from the
fact that most artefacts are randomly generated. Furthermore, even
non-random artefacts cannot be wished for, as scrolls of acquirement
produce random items in general. Likewise, there are no sure-fire means
of life saving (the closest equivalents are controlled blinks, and good
religious standings for some deities).
Anti-grinding
Another basic design principle is avoidance of grinding (also known as
scumming). These are activities that have low risk, take a lot of time,
and bring some reward. This is bad for a game's design because it
encourages players to bore themselves. Even worse, it may be optimal to
do so. We try to avoid this!
It's the philosophy of Dungeon Crawler, Stone Soup.
Namely, two of it's Major design goals:
-
meaningful decisions (no no-brainers)
-
avoidance of grinding (no scumming)