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Comment by klmadfejno | Hacker News Reader

I think the point about things visually looking bigger than you is important. DCSS (tiles) has the kraken's as pointed out, but there's also the lords of pandemonium. They're just one tile, but they're about twice as tall at as a normal unit, and visually appear much larger than anything you've seen in the first 95% of the game. I thought that was really effective and obviously the simplest.

Here are some of the basic minor lords. They're the ones whose heads are a little taller than their own square.

https://imgur.com/N4a9VaN

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> I think the point about things visually looking bigger than you is important.

Initially, I dismissed this when building my remote D&D app [0] but it's been a persistent question from beta testers. It's the sort of thing that sounds trivial, but isn't - especially if you start with the 'everything is a unit on a grid' assumption.

I still haven't implemented it, but this article has given me some ideas on how I could.

[0] https://tableofsending.com/

This looks cool, but I'd rethink the name. It's clever if you're in the know, but as someone who's pretty in the know, I didn't immediately assume that this is an rpg kind of thing from the word "sending".

I also kept reading your abbreviations as Terms of Service which has a funny but icky implication.

Thank you! That's another bit of consistent user feedback! :)

And I agree. I'm rebranding it for the move from MVP hack -> v1.0 product.

Do you already have the new brand?

You might consider "scrying": "scryingtable.io" or "scryingmap.com" or "scrymap.com" or "scryi.ng" are all available.

Is DCSS any good these days? I remember playing it back aruond 2014 (0.14-0.15?) and beating the game a few times, but it felt like each update just increasingly dumbed it down

If you thought it was dumbed down in 2014, you probably will still prefer another roguelike.

Considering they're removing food completely yea. I do think most of the changes are thoughtful and make sense but sanding all the edges off makes the game seem a little bland these days.

I mostly play brogue currently but I've been getting into angband variants. Sil is probably my favorite of those so far

I was actively playing DCSS at that time, beat the game with every race and every class, did 15 rune and all and I don't think it was getting dumbed down. A lot of pointless stuff was removed but the tactical depth of the game was preserved quite well.

Hm, maybe I should boot it up again and see what's been changed.

I still really enjoy it. I feel like one of their guiding principles is "if doing something tedious or annoying would make you more successful, let's remove that". So, for instance, instead of having to take notes about what's in your stash, you can just search all items you've ever seen and where they're located.

Some people like(d) DCSS because it was a complicated system with lots of entropy that sort of gave an illusion of complicated decisions. A lot of recent design decisions have been around removing decisions that aren't really that interesting if you know what you're doing.

There's merit to both views. I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. The biggest change recently was removing food. On one hand, I've never finished the game without a huge surplus of rations. Food did not affect the game, almost ever, even for trolls and spriggans so long as you were not overly cautious about eating food when needed. Once you understood this, food didn't really serve any purpose in the game for 99.9% of game time. On the other hand, newbies might think its interesting, and overindex on, say, spellcasting to reduce hunger costs and hoarding rations and think its a fun added challenge.

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