The making of a well-designed "Rest Until Healed" system:

@ArchoX
As DragonRider mentioned in the first post: "The problem is that adding a traditional nutrition system to Dungeons of Dredmore would be pretty hard at this point because food already serves an entirely different purpose. It wouldn't make much sense to have it serve as a means of speedy regeneration AND a means of not starving to death; those mechanics would interfere with one another too often."

Moreover, I personally found the hunger system of other roguelikes to be more tedious than fun. Imagine if you only had stale bread and water in real life. Then would you wish you didn't get hungry?

 

@Yippers: Why would increasing monster spawns cause the player to "move through tension?"

If your character is built to take out groups of enemies (i.e, Promethian + Blood Mage, Vampirism + counter strike + some skills to channel enemies, etc), increasing monster spawns will just make the game easier, not harder.

 

@Tacroy
By increasing monster spawns, I'm speaking more of increased strength of spawns (rather than more of them). The most memorable moments from my Dungeon Crawling days was the running away. Encountering somebody like (http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=Sigmund) meant using up your teleport scrolls and hoping to land near a staircase.

 

I would also like to raise the point that resting (space bar spam) currently does affect cooldowns. Archeology, for example. In many ways, we're addressing the same issue: the meaning for outside-of-combat cooldowns. It's not fun to wait. It's obviously optimal to wait forever and ever. Which raises the fundamental question: Should waiting be a part of the gameplay? Should waiting be a limited resource (food)? Should waiting be a risk? And even: Should waiting be instantaneous?

 

Yeah, the lack of a survival-related cost to resting, waiting out cooldowns, and grinding are all basically the same issue. The resting side of it just rears its head the most often. All three problems are solved by introducing an in-game cost to time spent, whether it's in the form of a food clock or something completely different. However, I am firmly of the belief that using time spent by the PLAYER, outside of the context of the game itself, is not acceptable as a deliberate counterbalance for any of that.

A good roguelike player will try to take pretty much every possible advantage when it comes to helping their chosen character survive in the dungeon. It's unreasonable for a designer to expect otherwise. When playing optimally means playing in a way that isn't fun, that's the clear mark of a design issue.

 

@DragonRider "When playing optimally means playing in a way that isn't fun, that's the clear mark of a design issue."

Absolutely. I think those words epitomize the idea behind this whole discussion rather well.

 

I also think that final game score should somehow be related to total number of turns passed

 

I think it needs to be simple. Not a fan of hunger or being forced off a level (increased spawns, deadly enemies, etc.) or any complicated system that would change the way the game is played.

My suggestion is:

1) Hold down the space bar for turns to progress. Turn progression automatically stops if player takes damage. This prevents you from accidentally killing (or seriously injuring anyway) your character if you are poisoned, acid damaged, attacked by a diggle, etc. etc.

2) Turns should have (of they don't) some *small* impact on final score to encourage players not to dally unless they need to.

3) Food should be a little more evenly distributed. Instead of 20 types of cheese that all heal within a few points of themselves it would be better to have 20 types of cheese that run the gamut of being able to heal few points to a ton of points with those higher level food items tending towards deeper levels.

 

I don't believe anyone has mentioned this, but there is one large disadvantage to spacebar spamming: more monsters are spawned after X number of turns, based on difficulty: every 240 turns on Easy, 200 turns in Moderation, and 180 turns on Going Rogue.

I've read (but cannot confirm) that this actually spawns more monsters on all the Dungeon levels, so the longer you take and the more steps/spacebarring you do, the more monsters you will meet both on the current level and on all future levels.

Now granted, this doesn't solve the basic problem or negate your suggestions, but it should be taken into consideration.

 

@Marak Monsters spawning on all levels was an artifact from an earlier patch. The current patch only spawns monsters on the current level. It is still possible to turn your current level into a monster zoo, but too many monsters will crash your game.

 

Eh, that mostly nullifies my point then. Spamming "rest" and spawning like, 4 new monsters that you may or may not run into isn't really a punishment for spam resting

Well then, carrry on.