Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

[TheMeInTeam]

Has anybody else tried this?  A few friends talked me into playing it recently.  It's a roguelike with D&D inspirations that's free to play online.

In running it for ~20 hours or so I have to say I'm very impressed.  Probably more challenging than FTL though my experience in the latter might cause me to be biased.  Lots of possible encounters/different things to account depending on gear/race you play/etc, very punishing mistakes, yet the best players are able to pull off win streaks.

If you can get past the graphics the replay value seems to be incredible.

[rho21]

Yeah, I've played a bit, a fair few revisions ago. Even managed to win one. It's certainly much tougher than FTL, though a large part of that is because a victorious run takes many many times as long.

Having played several other "true" roguelikes (i.e. games actually like rogue, rather than games like FTL with elements of that style), it's definitely my favourite. I particularly like that it got rid of selling loot, it really streamlines the game compared to something like Diablo.

The only thing I find a significant negative is how much isn't well explained in game, such as the nature of the branches, where it's safe to make a stash of items, that sort of thing.

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah I've had to lean on the Wiki and videos quite a bit. I still don't know how to do some of the time-saving commands, need to learn that in the near future. I think if I were truly experienced I could run a 3 rune game faster than I can do unmodded FTL, just because DCSS goes as fast as you can handle giving it inputs. Speed runs clock < 1 hr on it, but speed runs of Dark Souls do that too. Still, given a typical FTL run is a few hours I think fast players might be able to 3 rune somewhere in that neighborhood.

That said, there are more encounters in the timeframe and plenty more opportunities to screw up and die as a result so I'd still estimate DCSS to be harder on that criteria.

[Herman Gigglethorpe]

I used to play a lot of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, mostly with melee characters like the Minotaur Berserker.  Never won, though.  The gods and races are pretty creative, but at heart I'm still more of a Tales of Maj'Eyal player.

[TheMeInTeam]

It took a few weeks of on and off training because I'm not a super patient player, but I'm starting to win:

http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue/T...032510.txt

http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue/T...043709.txt

I've still a ways to go before starting to approach something resembling a decent chance of winning each game, and even more to get to the point where I have some confidence on a 15 rune game, but at least making progress. These are considered low tier species but I'm always doing nonsense like this when learning games.