[OT] Roguelikes?

[Beorne]

Originally Posted by Endoperez

Dungeon Crawl is awesome.

Yes, I've taken a look on the manual and it seems so. What are the main differencies/improvement in playing between Dungeon Crawl and Nethack or Adom?

Thanks.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by Beorne

Yes, I've taken a look on the manual and it seems so. What are the main differencies/improvement in playing between Dungeon Crawl and Nethack or Adom?

In Crawl, identify is a rare commodity. You test scrolls, potions, wands and even magical weapons by using them. Scrolls of remove curse and potions of healing are pretty common, so once you have several scrolls you can probably fix whatever happens, and random potion is often a heal.

In Crawl, you can't sell to shops. Together with the first one AND the fact that magical items have descriptive adjectives (glowing, runed etc), this means that you don't carry half the dungeon with you.
Also, no blessed items and no way to bless items. Useful scrolls are always useful.

In Crawl, you can't sacrifice monsters at altars. You have to please the gods through your actions. That can be 'p'raying, and then killing everything that moves and mutilating their corpses, or not poisoning your opponents, or leveling up. Xom often notices you when you level up. It isn't always good...

In Crawl, you only improve skills when 1) you use the skill and 2) you have free experience. To become better at what you do, you just keep doing it. To learn new stuff, e.g. spellcasting when you're a warrior, start by reading scrolls when you have spare exp.

In Crawl, I haven't seen a single cockatrice, gorgon, Banshee or any other creature that will kill you unless you had the Amulet of Protection Against Gorgons. There are some nasty surprises, of course, but I haven't seen any instant deaths.

In general, you aren't rewarded for doing boring stuff, and your choices are only limited by aptitudes and your ability to stay alive. Aptitudes tell how easy it is to learn skills, lower is better.

[Gokufan1988]

I've played Dwarf Fortress, ADOM, Crawl and Nethack in that order.

Dwarf Fortress is fun and complex in dwarf mode, but I wouldn't really call it a roguelike. It's sort of like a cross between The Sims and the Caesar/Pharaoh/etc. games. Adventure mode is definitely a roguelike. It's alot of fun and has cool concepts, but it feels incomplete compared to the other games I mentioned.

I never really got into Nethack and ADOM. Compared to Crawl they're a lot less random and more spoiler reliant.

I've made it to, but not beat, the endgame in Crawl. In a lot of ways Crawl feels like a turn based Diablo with greater playstyle variety. As other people have mentioned, there aren't any moments like "you weren't wearing item a when creature b attacked so you auto-die". Unfortunately, what it does have are moments like "you ran into Sigmund with a wand of draining on level two of the dungeon and there was no possible escape." You can get screwed by the RNG more easily than in the other two. Also, I find the that the tile verion of Crawl with a real GUI really does add to the game, tradition be damned.