Noooooooooo

[harfatum]

Some prep items could be placed on a random low-level enemy. If you didn't kill that monster naturally, you would be forced to eat the popcorn if you wanted the item.

[The Avatar]

Then that kills level based preps like the troll heart.

[Darvin]

Anything that makes you "work" for your prep would inherently make back-loaded preps like the Trisword too good while making front-loaded ones like the Fine Sword stupidly bad.

If there's a specific item that's an issue, then it needs to be addressed. Otherwise, preparations should stand; the whole idea is letting you take the one item you really want into the dungeon without having to scum for it.

[The Avatar]

If only that was possible in the Alpha.

[q 3]

For what it's worth, I think it would work out well enough to just recognize/reward different levels of preparations. Beat a dungeon with less than 200 gold worth of preps, get a bronze medal. Use less than 75 gold worth of preps, get a silver medal. Using no preps gets you a gold medal. Balance dungeons around purist runs, albeit at an appropriate difficulty level - a purist victory in a vicious dungeon should be possible without scumming, but it will require a very good strategy, perfect or near-optimal play, and a little bit of luck. Preparations in effect become the selectable difficulty level. (Of course, this would require that the gold value of preps be adjusted so as to actually reflect their relative worth. On the other hand, cheaper but inferior preps would actually have a purpose - you might select the 25 gold bank prep over the 50 in order to stay under the limit.)

[Bloggorus]

[The Avatar]

I'm still unsure why I wouldn't take tons of preps into your *FINALLY* nerfed vicious dungeons, as you'd have to nerf them for a non scum run, just to get free wins/gold/class completion. I say add some sort of Gold Bonus or something.

[Bloggorus]

I see it as more of an incentive to go back and tackle easier dungeons with self imposed limitations, rather like what we have seen already you do, Avatar.

Eventually Vicious will be nerfed, because the dungeons are broken.

But giving incentive to go purist or use minimal preps might be a way or giving a 'vicious style' challenge whilst keeping the dungeons friendly for new players.

I would even suggest adding 'vicious' debuff preps at the end game, with rewards for finishing easy dungeons with crippling disadvantages.

[dislekcia]

[Nandrew]

Ohhhh, hey, you know what? Judging by the tileset and the terrain generator, it looks like that screen was taken from Grimm's Grotto. Correct?

I've never mentioned this to, er, ANYONE, but Grimm's is one of the dungeons (actually, I think the only dungeon) where I snuck in and deliberately tweaked the alg as a "throwback" to the alpha generator. It's been like that for a while. I kinda wanted it to emulate the retro Ranked dungeon in a few ways that most "modern" dungeons wouldn't.

Now that monsters tend to bias towards corridors, lock-ins here will become more noticeable and frequent than before.

As mentioned by others, preparations can usually bust this problem (and purist runs obviously don't waste a gold investment), but if necessary I could bring the generation here in line with the rest of the game. It's just nostalgia, after all.

Oh, but as for most other dungeons, we've noticed some rather hilarious-looking generations and those will be tweaked to (hopefully) become a little more amusingly rare.