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Comment by Cursuviam | Hacker News Reader

I find DCSS's development goals very interesting in contrast to Nethack. While Nethack is widely famed for "the dev's think of everything", DCSS has been on a streak of streamlining mechanics, such as the latest release collapsing all food items to rations instead of the pizza, royal jelly, and others. Though rip wand of healing.

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Even better than one food item: there's a spell library now, so you don't need to manage books, ever

Ugh, that kind of development approach gets my skin crawling for some reason.

Yeah, I find that a lot of the changes made for the sake of “streamlining” just made the game more boring.

Upvoted. In my opinion, this is what broke AD&D 3rd edition relative to 2nd Ed.

And then 4th went and slimlined things even further.

And what a success that was...

I missed that entirely. 3rd Ed destroyed my interest in upgrading; I'd been playing since 1st Edition, too.

If you get a chance, you might want to take a look at 5e; mechanically it's still streamlined, but lots of people who didn't like 3e/4e seem to like it.

Thanks for the tip. My eldest child is nearly old enough to introduce to tabletop RPGs. I'd been planning to start him on Fighting Fantasy though.

Hey, I was a crawl dev from 2009 until whenever I pushed my last commit. Your reaction suggests that you're either unfamiliar with or misunderstand crawl's development philosophy.

Crawl development strives to eliminate grinding and eliminate tedium. Players should never be rewarded for performing repetitive actions. Every choice should be meaningful. This has been the case since the game's revival in 2006 and goes back to the introduction of the food clock in Rogue. A few years back I asked Ken Arnold about the food clock. He introduced it because a timer is a great way of making stupid, time consuming strategies useless. Crawl follows in this tradition.

We removed the requirement that you have a bladed weapon to butcher corpses. Why? Because it's a game and not a murder-hobo simulator. If you need a fix for mindless simulationism you might enjoy Dwarf Fortress, the premier dwarf terrarium.

Just wanna say thanks for your contributions. Are there any other similar games (proper roguelikes or not) you've found as enjoyable as DCSS?

My role was a minor one. The last thing I pushed was a Wang tile layout system that makes the Crypt more visually interesting.

> Are there any other similar games (proper roguelikes or not) you've found as enjoyable as DCSS?

Brogue is the finest Roguelike ever made. By happenstance, pender was my neighbor back when I lived in the valley.

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