Roguelikes

[zespri]

Roguelikes are one of the game genre that I was always drawn to, but could not play somehow. Countless times I would download nethack, or tome, or angband, spend some times reading manual, generate a character, get killed in about a minute and put it off with intention "to get into it" which somehow never happens until I download it all over again and need to read manual again because I already forgotten what was in there.

Now, I bought Dungenon of Dredmor, and I had quite a bit of fun with it. However many people who I talked to commented: "what the deal just play any roguelike they are all superior in terms of mechanics and "features" to Dredmor. And there are tiles, if you can't stand ASCII.

So I decided to give it a try. The first task for me would be to actually choose a roguelike to play. After reading some internet I settled on DCSS as on being most newb friendly.

And now, I'm going to say a heresy. I really-really want to switch off permadeath. You know what I'm talking about. In Dredmor, there is a permadeath checkbox, and if you start your game when this option is unticked, it allows you to reload your latest save, before you died.

Some poor guy on the Dredmor forums dared to mantion that he played with permadeath off. Boy, was he told off! I don't understand, if an option is there, it means that *some* people like it, they don't have to be scorned!

Anyway, it's not the point. The point is, is there any easy way to trick DCSS into saving and loading games? I'm sure I could do this by scouting for the save files, manually copying them, etc, but I'm so damn sure, that there must be other people who liked this option, so there must be a patch or something to the DCSS source, that would allow this option.

Any ideas?

[Orelius]

Heretic!  You now must draw from the deck of punishments!
Wraith has been drawn!  You lose an experience level.

There's probably a massive jump in difficulty from dungeons of dredmor to any other roguelike.  Dungeons of dredmor has severe limitations that don't allow you the freedom to do important things that you would need to do in other roguelikes.  I've heard that dungeons of dredmor only allows you to attack or be attacked in four directions rather than the eight that every single other roguelike has.  Sounds like an absolutely terrible idea to me.

Dungeon crawl stone soup is perhaps one of the least time consuming roguelikes I've ever played because it has some very very nice features like auto-explore - just click it and it does movement for you until it notices something of interest.  I could perhaps clear a dungeon level within ten or so minutes with little effort on my part. 

Disabling permadeath is perhaps one of the worst things I've ever heard from anyone who has ever played a roguelike.  Playing a roguelike without permadeath is like trying to breed two sterile mice and wondering why nothing is happening.  It also makes the game extraordinarily easy as you can now know which scroll does what, which ring does what, etc. in advance.  You don't suffer from any previous mistakes, because you'd already know the result.

TL;DR: Bad idea.  Don't try to circumvent permadeath because you probably won't need it and it ruins the fun.

[Cyborg]

It also makes the game extraordinarily easy as you can now know which scroll does what, which ring does what, etc. in advance.  You don't suffer from any previous mistakes, because you'd already know the result.

TL;DR: Bad idea.  Don't try to circumvent permadeath because you probably won't need it and it ruins the fun.

So your argument is that lack of knowledge over what some event or item does that causes you to lose the game (also known as Hours of Effort shat down the toilet) is what makes these kind of games fun? Frankly, if the reason something is fun is because you don't understand the rules… that's great for you. For me, a game truly stands on its own when the decisions you are forced to make a player are done willfully and purposefully, and the results of those decisions determines whether you win or lose. To each their own; it certainly isn't "heresy."

[Orelius]

Uh, I don't think I've said anything like that.  I never said anything about not understanding rules.  In this specific case, scrolls, rings, pendants, etc. are unidentified until you find some way to do so, so you do not know the result of a scroll, rings, pendant until you test it out or spend a scroll of identify on it.  This occurs for each game, so there's no way around it.  I'm saying that you'd be able to easily circumvent these problems and issues if permadeath were to be removed. 

My statement of "heresy" was in jest and in reference to the original post.  I don't get where you got that direction from.

[Awod]

I like seeing how far I can progress, so without permadeath you'd always pass. Guaranteed.  Which would be a bit of a put-off, at least for me. Granted I can understand why you'd like to avoid it, like falling in a pittrap or something else that may lead to an instadeath - especially one that would have difficult to prevent can be frustrating at times.

Still never had an ascension, one day.
(play slash'em, like the interface more)

[Cyborg]

Uh, I don't think I've said anything like that.  I never said anything about not understanding rules.  In this specific case, scrolls, rings, pendants, etc. are unidentified until you find some way to do so, so you do not know the result of a scroll, rings, pendant until you test it out or spend a scroll of identify on it.  This occurs for each game, so there's no way around it.  I'm saying that you'd be able to easily circumvent these problems and issues if permadeath were to be removed. 

My statement of "heresy" was in jest and in reference to the original post.  I don't get where you got that direction from.

Okay, my experience with that kind of thing is that the act of identification is what causes the dice roll for randomness, although I suppose it would be broken either way if you could just reload if you don't get something you like. Okay, I agree with that.

It sounded like you were serious about your heresy comment because most of your post was a little bit condescending towards players that are not playing hardcore style. I think it's legitimate to play any single player game in any way that is fun for you. Personally, there are a lot of things about permanent death that are really unacceptable, such as when the game crashes or your Internet goes down, you could lose many hours for something that's really not your fault. That happens in a lot of games. I think it's fair if someone doesn't want to play that way. Let's use Diablo series as an example; don't you have a character on hardcore mode but more on normal mode?

[zespri]

My opinion is that if I can reload I can learn faster. I might start anew later on when I get better grasp on the game, but while I'm learning I'm bound to do a lot of silly mistakes, and I don't want to be punished for them it just slows down my progress/understanding and is not fun.

[Orelius]

Well, I'm sorry that I came off that way, and, in retrospect, I think I could have worded that better.
though to be honest I think too many of your posts come off to be personal attacks lololol

Regardless, back to the topic in question:  I don't think that there are any mods or plugins that disable permadeath - If you want to not lose all your progress upon death, you'll probably have to go through the hassle of manually saving and then copying the game data.  It's frustrating, but it's better than nothing.

[zespri]

No offence taken, you absolutely do have a point. It's just that there are other points as well =)

I might enjoy looking at the source code if I can get that to compile, and patching it myself. It's more painful in terms of initial time taken, but much nicer experience during the play. The reason I want to reload is not to know what kind of ring that ring is before I looked at/took it, but mostly to avoid unnecessary YASD.

[Orelius]

I've noticed that there are very few YAADs in crawl (ones that you can not avoid).  And even then, it's difficult to die unless you are fighting off level mobs or do not know the quirks of certain monsters and items.

I'd suggest taking a look at the wiki for information; it's immensely helpful.

[zespri]

Got DCSS to compile - good sign, may be now I'll be able to "hack" it.

[arcee]

I'm a big fan of DoomRL as another friendly roguelike.  It doesn't have a non-permadeath option, but the game is quite short so I rarely care too much when I lose.  It gets its replay value from a ton of challenge modes and fun items.

Dungeon Crawl is the other roguelike that I feel I should like, but I have never put much time into it.

[zebramatt]

I'm going to throw this out there but perhaps the reason you struggle to get into roguelikes is because a large part of the appeal of roguelikes is that you constantly feel like you might die at the drop of a hat (at least until you're sufficiently skilled at living on the knife edge) - and that pivotal aspect of them doesn't appeal to you?

For me, anyway, dying has always been part of their particular charm. If I want to not die, there's plenty of other dungeon-crawling games which are in many ways much 'better' - but roguelikes always pull me back, no matter how crappy the interface might seem. It's just more satisfying when I do well in a roguelike because I know careless death lurks around every corner.

[zespri]

Yeah, may be. I know I will never play DF, because I'm definitely not into "loosing is fun" crap thing=)

[zespri]

I'm a big fan of DoomRL as another friendly roguelike. 

Yeah, I read that many people like DoomRL too, but I'm not sure that I enjoy Doom theme in a dungeon crawler.