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[popsofctown]

Dungeon Crawl is a roguelike game, a genre of single player PC games much like old school RPGs, except with an emphasis on randomly generated maps and the brutal finality of death.  Several players in this forum have been playing it and discussing it. 

Dominion challenges our concept of how fun a multiplayer game that easily divides into single player can actually be.  As a result, I've designed a 1v1 competitive format for Crawl so that people in this forum can add some rivalry to the single player experience. 

If you're reading this and you haven't played Crawl at all, you should know that:

1. Crawl is free to download.
2. Crawl is open source, free as in speech.  This makes it incredibly unlikely that glitches are a gamebreaking aspect of competing.
3. There's a built in tutorial which is rather good
4. No one on this forum that we know of has beaten it yet.  The game is designed around the risk that any attempt to beat the game could rather likely result in permanent failure. 
5. There's lots of luck involved.  Combined with 4, this means that if you download the game, play the tutorial and kick the tires around for a couple hours you stand a chance against anyone else.
6. It's totally turn based, you can step away from the game at any time
7. You can probably play from work or school if you want to, without downloading.  The interface is slightly less friendly though

That's about as much space as I'd like to spend selling the game to people.
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The format for matches in the tournament is based on drafting.  It is analogous to choosing which type of engine or whether to go BM in a Dominion game.  Unlike a dominion game, a game of crawl takes much longer than an hour, so mirror matches need be thrown out.


When your match starts with another player, I will generate two random "character configurations".  A character configuration includes a starting species, the background (class) to choose, the starting weapon to select, and what religions the character is allowed to worship.  Everything but the last is a natural part of creating a new character, the last is an external rule to add more strategy to the competition: the character will be prohibited from worshipping gods besides the 1, 2, or 3 randomly selected.   

You and your opponent will each secretly decide which character configuration you consider more powerful and PM the choice to me.  If your choices match, those two configs are thrown out and a new pair is used and the process repeats.  Eventually, you and your opponent will select different configs as being more powerful.

Once that happens, you are assigned the configuration you chose.  You get to do exactly 3 runs with that configuration.  You have ten days (tentative deadline), can do it whenever you like, and simply report your results by PM honestly.  Only the most successful run counts.  Whichever player has the most successful run wins the match.


The successfulness of a run is defined as follows:
A run that wins the game is always more successful than one that doesn't.
A run that ends with more runes collected is more successful than one that ends with fewer.
Runs that end with the same number of runes, but different types of runes, may take priority over eachother, roughly based on difficulty.  As follows:

Icy
Obsidian
Iron
Bone
Golden
Dark
Glowing
Magical
Fiery
Demonic
Slimy***
Silver
Barnacled or Gossamer or Decaying or Serpentine

***If one of the gods in your configuration is Jivya, who allows you to take the Slimy rune without combat, then the Slimy rune is treated as having less priority than Barnacled.  It still counts as a rune though, so 4 runes including slimy beats 3 runes no matter what those three are.

If things are still tied, the deepest floor of the main dungeon/zot reached breaks the tie, for failure runs, and lower turns taken breaks the tie for successful runs.
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I'm aiming to get 4 people for round robin, who's in? 
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I found a download link here: the official site seems to be down, but since it's an open source game it's naturally easy to find a copy anyplace.  http://sourceforge.net/projects/crawl-ref/

[Grujah]

/in.

Maybe to speed up the process, make configs in batch of 3-5 ? (also, morgues would be nice).

[popsofctown]

3-5 pairs at a time is probably a good idea, I guess.

[Jorbles]

In to die first, lvl 1 v lizard.

Or maybe I'll die to a tuff ghost. I will definitely die anyways.

[Jorbles]

I don't like the only random gods rule though. I think crawl is hard enough as is.

Edit: Unless all random gods chosen were viable. I'm not sure how to determine if gods are viable though.

[shraeye]

interesting...I'll take a look at Crawl.  For a complete newbie to all roguelike games, will I be totally lost?

[Grujah]

interesting...I'll take a look at Crawl.  For a complete newbie to all roguelike games, will I be totally lost?

3. There's a built in tutorial which is rather good

[shraeye]

can somebody with internet skilllzzz help me find a link to download this?  Is it the same or different as Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup?

[WalrusMcFishSr]

Sure I'm /in. Expect my results to be a little underwhelming though haha

[shraeye]

I found this and can read in a bit.  Hopefully I can figure out how to play from this:

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=Playing_online

[Grujah]

It is the same as Stone Soup.

You can download it here.

http://crawl.develz.org/

It's just that their website found the most unfortunate time do go down; it should be back up soon, I hope.

[Jorbles]

Will we be playing on our own boxes or on one of the servers? (Or both)

[Grujah]

locally.

[popsofctown]

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is one of the most newbie friendly roguelikes.  I only learned it three weeks ago or something.
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It's Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, current version is 0.13.  I should have put Stone Soup up there, but I try to refer to the game as Dungeon Crawl when I can since Stone Soup was something they appended to celebrate a new version they were particularly proud of (0.10, maybe), and they might change that to something else soon.
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You can play on your own box, or on Webtiles. 

You may wipe all your ghosts before your first run, and you may wipe all your ghosts before each run if you wish.
You may NOT cherrypick ghosts from your own files and remove them.
You may NOT make suicide characters that have the intention of producing weak ghosts.
You need to decide whether you want to wipe ghosts before run1 before you find out what background you will be playing.  Waiting to find out you're playing a caster and then wiping your ghost files is frowned upon.
If you chose to wipe all, it's okay to wipe run 1 or run 1&2 based on what kind of ghost was created.  Before run 3, you must wipe both previous runs or neither, cherrypicking is considered non-kosher in crawl in general.


With sample size 3, it is probably easier to win if you wipe before the tournament.  Ghosts contribute to risks without providing item drops, it would seem doubtful the bit of experience is worthwhile.  I'm recommending everyone wipe their ghost files and play on their own boxes, but I don't want to impair anyone who prefers to play on Webtiles (where ghosts are mandatory) from participating.  They can play but expect to have a slight disadvantage.
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I'm not budging on the random gods, I think it is an important way of adding more skill to matches without increasing the sample size of games.  I'm not sticking to viable gods, I don't even intend to stick to viable classes: every class but wanderer can be picked (forgot to mention that exclusion, but wanderer is excluded because it conceals more pregame information than other classes).

The runs may be harder than normal crawl runs, but you don't have to beat the game, you have to beat the other player, who hopefully you outsmarted into picking an even weaker god.  Lower average power level is a good thing in terms of administrating a tournament, if we have a twelve rune run, a twelve rune run, and a thirteen rune run against a 3,6,14, that will take ages for us to get results back.

If you truly think things are corrupted such that progress is nigh impossible, I encourage you to cheat the system, max out Stealth, and see how deep in the dungeon you can get without dying and hope to win on 0 rune tiebreak.  You run the risk of someone clearing shoals at least once, or even dashing into spider pit with rPois and grabbing the last rune, then dying.  All this is to point out that in a competitive format weak gods don't ruin the game because success is redefined, just like Sea Hag - cultist game where 12 VP might be a winning score.

[popsofctown]

I'll let signups simmer a bit to see if heron has posted yea or nay on his participation, and see how shraeye feels about the game.

I can make myself available on instant message if you need help with anything.  I'll put a download link in the OP right now.

EDIT: by right now I guess I mean when I'm at a different computer, the library pcs aren't playing nice it seems.

[Jorbles]

I'm not budging on the random gods, I think it is an important way of adding more skill to matches without increasing the sample size of games.  I'm not sticking to viable gods, I don't even intend to stick to viable classes: every class but wanderer can be picked (forgot to mention that exclusion, but wanderer is excluded because it conceals more pregame information than other classes).

What if it's a class that starts with a god? Berzerker's for instance. I'm pretty sure there's others.

[popsofctown]

Religious backgrounds will get 1-3 gods, one of which will always be the god that they start with.

Except the species Demigods, no matter their background they can only worship Xom, Lugonu, Cheibrados, Beogh, or Ashenzari. 

[Grujah]

Except the species Demigods, no matter their background they can only worship Xom, Lugonu, Cheibrados, Beogh, or Ashenzari.

What?   

[shraeye]

i moved around a few times; the Webtiles thing doesn't seem to actually have the tutorial.  So i'm probably quite lost.  I have no idea what a religion is.  Unless getting swarmed by monsters and dying is a religion.

[popsofctown]

Except the species Demigods, no matter their background they can only worship Xom, Lugonu, Cheibrados, Beogh, or Ashenzari.

What?   

I mean it, if you worship Sif Muna as Demigod I will immediately DQ you.

[popsofctown]

i moved around a few times; the Webtiles thing doesn't seem to actually have the tutorial.  So i'm probably quite lost.  I have no idea what a religion is.  Unless getting swarmed by monsters and dying is a religion.

Check the OP for a download link.  Webtiles does indeed lack a tutorial and lack hints mode.

You'll figure out what a religion is naturally if you make it a few floors without dying.

[WalrusMcFishSr]

I'm assuming there's a policy of 'no practice runs'? Considering it's built into the round structure anyway, and we're all on the honor system.

BTW, just one hit KO'd Sigmund on Dungeon:2 with my sneaky Spriggan Assassin, there's a good feeling

[WalrusMcFishSr]

Also, when generating the build match-ups, you might consider discarding any viable vs. non-viable. I don't trust myself to go against the game's opinion yet so I would just pick the viable one each time. Maybe sticking to viable v. viable or non-viable v. non-viable would speed up the process.

[shraeye]

PSA: that download link in the first post came along with a potential malicious threat.  One should be careful that their computer is protectable before downloading.

[popsofctown]

Also, when generating the build match-ups, you might consider discarding any viable vs. non-viable. I don't trust myself to go against the game's opinion yet so I would just pick the viable one each time. Maybe sticking to viable v. viable or non-viable v. non-viable would speed up the process.

I'm gonna use large batches to keep things going quickly.  I'll post several pairs at a time and wait for pms on all the pairs, the earliest one that produces disagreement is the one I'll use.  Viable vs. non-viables should be pretty easy choices for the players and not add much thinking time.