Dear Room Modders...

Please stop making rooms that require I have a teleport to enjoy.

Seriously.

I understand that mods are totally optional add-ons to the game. At least, until GLG decides to make an entire patch/expansion that incorporates them. And that's what really bothers me about this trend, which seems to be slowly growing as modders turn more attention to rooms. I'm worried that we're going to get more and more rooms that are taken straight from mods and added to the core game. Which is totally fine, except that this means more and more rooms that need a teleport to fully enjoy will be present.

I know that the argument for these rooms is that many people feel that having a teleport is a requirement to play the game "right", and seeing these rooms will encourage newbies to pick up a teleport skill for their next run, so they can see what they're missing out on.

Newsflash: You should not need a teleport to play the game right.

Seriously. How many teleport skills are there in the game? Five. Two of them very bad (Knightly Leap, Invisible Geometries), two of them in skill trees of rather limited scope(the same), two of them only in straight lines (Geometries, Rocket Jump), two of them requiring extreme level investment if they're not in your archetype (Mysterious Ways, Xeuclid's). If we throw in random teleports that gives us Froda's, which we'll have if we're going for Xeuclid's anyway, and the Spatial Instability Infusion, which is available only in limited quantities even with Alchemy.

And yet, as rooms that "require" a teleport become more and more frequent many players will feel more and more like they "have" to take one of those five skills to enjoy the game. Many people who have posted here confess to being completion-a-holics. Yet, if there are a lot of these rooms in the game, in order to enjoy playing the game the way they love they'll be forced to pick from one of only two or three skills to get that experience.

When they come down to their sixth run trying to decided whether they want Burglary or Artful Dodger, even though they're sick of both, they may very well just decide to go play something else. And we don't want that. For pity's sake, there are 41 skills in this game, all told. That means that less than 1/8th of them have a teleport, 1/10th if we discount the Leap, which is not always enough for some of the rooms I've seen.

Exploring every part of the dungeon is one of the basic pleasures of the game. It shouldn't fight with skill variety, which is the other big pleasure. People should not be restricted to keeping one of four skills around if they want to see every part of the dungeon, especially when there's so many skills to choose from.

Disclaimer #1

I'm not complaining about hidden walls or needing AoE/knockback. Both of these are much more common than teleports, you can get them from everything from Demonology to Archeology to Maceology to the Obvious source.

Disclaimer #2

I know that there's always been a risk that random teleportation could just leave you stranded somewhere with now way out, and that is something that makes keeping a teleport around wise. But the really determined can get off of small islands or locked hidden rooms using debug mode, the rest of us just take it as another part of the game. Don't penalize them for wanting to play that way.

Disclaimer #3

This is not a call to strip all such rooms from your mods now. I'm fine with these rooms every once in a great while. I'd just rather not see them all the time.

 

I haven't actually scanned the XML, partly because room XML makes my head hurt, nor have I played the game without ID since the expansion rolled, I didn't want to break existing savegames and I haven't touched DoD much recently (I blame Bastion for being a crazy good distraction, plus my general lack of large amounts of free time.) I guess I had just gotten the impression that the vast bulk of ID had been rolled in, and that has four or five rooms that are really only fully explorable with a teleport, and I assumed they'd be around.

I am glad to hear that GLG doesn't like the idea of having such rooms in the main game, as I think there is a large subset of players who would be really turned off by them. In which case this post is maybe not as necessary as I thought...

 

Vampirism's Batty Form acts a pseudo-teleport in a few cases as well so that's one more, but that skilltree is a game-changing one that you have to build around.

 

Well those at least also have other viable ways to reach them at least. Like batty form, knockback and other things...

 

What Null said. Island rooms fall under the category of Knockback rooms in my book.

 

I think Nicholas just needs more sleep.

Still, it was because of Nicholas' treasure islands that I learned to always have some sort of teleport on hand.

 

How do you feel about something like The Vaults of Maslech, where it comes included with a skill that has everything it needs in it to handle the new rooms and also has a large, up-front disclaimer that the mod has many of these rooms (and is specifically designed around you having access to such)? There are other things you can do instead (since Unfettered Psychoportation is just long-cooldown Invisible Geometries with no mana cost, Subsonics is replaceable by nearly any large-area spell, the trap finding can be covered through a variety of other sources...), but Delver puts many of these features into one package so you can spend the rest of your build picking what you want, instead of picking three skills to make sure your bases are covered (and there are only so many mathmagician tinker viking demonologists anyway).

Good lord that's a lot of parentheses.

 

You either use your normal build and have the game be nearly impossible or you trivialize any of them by wasting levels and a skill. So I really dislike that design.

 

I think that there should be hidden secret rooms for folks that have a dig or wall destruction ability, but it should not be a major part of the mod, there shouldn't be 100% completely hidden rooms. it's okay to have some walled up passages, but the player should be able to navigate through a room without having to break a wall.

 

But it's not impossible with a normal build. Most normal builds can handle 90% of what VoM throws at them. Only when you get into some very deep floors (or mysterious portal areas) can you not get around things, and those are still beatable with some smart play.

 

But you suddenly have to change your build so that the dungeon itself, not any of its hazards is not impossible. There's no real way to anticipate it and it isn't a weakness of the build that kills you it's bad room design.

 

Did you not read what I said?

90% of VoM is completely handleable by a normal build. The other 10% can be handled via intelligent play.

 

Well I did but it's not true. Maybe 50% can, 50% can't be handled by intelligent play because guess what it requires a teleport and you don't have it.

 

I actually like VoM as a mod. It puts all the parts in one nice little package I can switch on and off. If I want the enhanced, more explorationistic gameplay I can toggle it on for one game, but if I just want vanilla Dredmor, I can have it easily enough. As I said in the OP, my biggest concern was that a lot of teleport-centric rooms would wind up in core game files, something Gaslamp is apparently avoiding (wisely, IMO.)

 

I'm looking through my files. There are literally 8 rooms that are unsolvable if you don't have a teleport. Out of 119. The earliest comes on floor 7. And you can probably just go around with a displacement glyph, or going back upstairs and down again a different staircase.

 

Well I was talking about those rooms which may be unsolvable, not the total of all rooms.