I think it would add a lot to stealth builds if your stealth increased when you were against a wall. This would change the style of movement for stealth based characters and thus change there style of fighting. This seems like a really obvious idea to me. I am curious if there is a reason it hasn’t been implemented?
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There’ve been quite a few new mechanics added in recently, an overhaul of stealth could be really cool.
Honestly I feel like there are not really any interesting stealth mechanics currently
The coolest stealth mechanic I can think of off the top of my head is passwall stabbing. I guess approaching things while keeping walls between you and the target can also be interesting sometimes.
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like: your stealth goes up temporarely 1 skill level per wall you’re adjacent to.
Just a thought :-/
The big reason not to do something like this is that it would incentivise manually exploring everywhere in very annoying ways, while tactically in combat it would be barely noticeable/meaningless.
Personally I think Stealth is in a pretty good place right now, since some strong players value it a lot and some not at all, meaning the decision to invest is not trivial.
I don’t think traditional RPG (or stealth-oriented games) stealth mechanics would suit DCSS that well, cause in those games you are usually limited by class system or overall game design (fixed encounters you can’t reset, discrete levels that you gotta beat to progress) from stealth becoming totally overpowered (and those limitations often fail completely making stealth super broken anyway), while DCSS design relies a lot on random generation, freedom to reset fights as often as you like and classless system.
Also I think stealth mechanics in modern crawl are pretty sophisticated already, if you take into account how it all interacts with noise system, LoS, monster spawns and behaviour. It’s just not a system where you can press some cooldown and kill anything for free, rinse/repeat, you gotta use gods, spells, darts, nets, consumables for that.
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There’s a setting that lets you auto explore closer to walls:
explore_wall_bias = 0
Adjusts how much autoexplore favours attempting to discover room
perimeters and corners. At higher values, autoexplore will more
heavily favour visiting squares that are next to walls; at 0 it
will not favour them at all. At negative values it will prefer
to stay away from walls. Note that setting this to a non-0 value
generally makes it slower to completely explore a level.
From a combat perspective, stealth only really helps with stab damage for most of the game having to heavily rely on alternate methods to set up the stab attempt and stealth being more a proxy for “anatomy & physiology” than “sneaky sneaky”. Sure you can use it to go ninja runes, but it’s not unreasonable to expect 27 stealth to have a bigger impact on the sneak-stab game than it does currently which is a roll of very heavily weighted dice until something shouts.
Sure you can use it to go ninja runes, but it’s not unreasonable to expect 27 stealth to have a bigger impact on the sneak-stab game than it does currently which is a roll of very heavily weighted dice until something shouts.
It lets you choose what you fight, in what terrain, from which angle, lets you split packs, run away better, cause monsters “forget” about you faster, which is IMO huge for winrate play. Monster shouting alerts to your presence only enemies that are currently in LoS, everything else is alerted only to the shout space itself, which makes splitting packs apart much easier.
“Only really helps with stab damage” is big, considering stab damage is utterly lethal with high Stealth.
Like I’ve said, people disagree on how important Stealth is. Personally I think it’s a sing that it’s in a good place balance-wise.
edit: I know about the autoexplore setting, used it before. Doesn’t really solve the problem, cause it depends on the value you put in, and effect is quite opaque. It basically does something, but it’s hard to say what exactly. And the whole process would be a complete nightmare to explain to new players: “You go into your options and put a line in with value 6, that will make your exploration 20% safer”.
Stealth is huge in making enemies forget about you. When you get a chance, play a melee brute with lots of strength, shadow dragon scales, and a significant (but not extreme) stealth investment. See how different it feels from normal stealthless melee.
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