Corridors considered harmful

[Krice]

Corridors are just narrow rooms.

[Antsan]

I think in a stealth-centric roguelike corridors could be made interesting. The player character should be inferior in combat to almost anything else, so that fighting one-on-one in itself is already dangerous. Corridors become about controlling less visibility at the cost of having less freedom of movement.

With multi-tile creatures corridors become a safe escape, which doesn't necessarily translate into trivially solved problems – have smaller enemies with higher chance to detect you, for instance, or make any route necessarily go through a room with a bigger enemy.

[mushroom patch]

Right, but with persistent floors and finite resources it could be. Monsters that guard stairs, treasure vaults, chokepoints etc. Or just having to deal with it every time to earn experience at all.

. . .

Throw ranged combat in though and the requirements on the AI to decide whether to rush in, hang back or dive for cover become more complex. I'll post again when I have a working implementation.

Right, I think you're going to have problems with players picking off monsters at range in the guarding scenario.

[Aleksanderus]

Why are you still talking about this bullshit?

This is as pointless as arguing wheter permadeath is a good or bad thing! Come on, everything has good and bad sides, you know?

[Antsan]

Well, while I think corridors are perfectly fine to have in your roguelike I think a discussion about how to make them more interesting is still worth having.
But by my impression maybe not in this forum. What a shame.

[mushroom patch]

Wow, got the coauthors of Corridor Quest up at arms here...

[Holsety]

Why are you still talking about this bullshit?

This is as pointless as arguing wheter permadeath is a good or bad thing! Come on, everything has good and bad sides, you know?

Because corridors are bad and it's worth comparing ideas on what would be better? I shouldn't have to explain this, but good points and bad points don't cancel each other out 1:1, and at some point a thing has so many bad sides it's better to just put it in a box and bury it forever.
Just saying "things have pros and cons, now let's not think about them" is so deviously clever. A really subtle way to post, yet have it be completely without content or meaning or merit.
As an aside, there's no argument about permadeath. If you're against it, roguelikes are not for you.

Well, while I think corridors are perfectly fine to have in your roguelike I think a discussion about how to make them more interesting is still worth having.
But by my impression maybe not in this forum. What a shame.

Don't say such reddit things. You're better than that.

As for what I actually favor, amorphous cavern formations with soft walls (vegetation, fog, etc.) as described by AgingMinotaur seems to me to be the most compelling model for connecting rooms.

As I read  this I was reminded of Incursion's forest rooms, chasm rooms, slime pits, graveyards and kobold warrens.
And I definitely see the attraction. If only they got generated more often.

[Antsan]

Here's another idea to make corridors interesting and dangerous to the player: Add the ability to move past an enemy for giving them an automatic free simple attack. This way players can be way more easily be circled inside corridors. When the game is balanced to mostly generate groups of between 2 and 7 enemies, fighting in open spaces becomes more desirable than fighting in tight corridors, as long as the ability to get away fast is more important than to fight few enemies at once.
The question is how to balance it that freedom of movement is more important than preventing raw damage.

Don't say such reddit things. You're better than that.

I'm kind of sorry. After coming back here after a few years my first impression just was that any topic explodes into fights pretty fast, no matter the topic. I actually did look at reddit shortly after (didn't bother with that before) and at least roguelikedev seems to be a nicer place.

[Aleksanderus]

Why are you still talking about this bullshit?

This is as pointless as arguing wheter permadeath is a good or bad thing! Come on, everything has good and bad sides, you know?

Because corridors are bad and it's worth comparing ideas on what would be better? I shouldn't have to explain this, but good points and bad points don't cancel each other out 1:1, and at some point a thing has so many bad sides it's better to just put it in a box and bury it forever.
Just saying "things have pros and cons, now let's not think about them" is so deviously clever. A really subtle way to post, yet have it be completely without content or meaning or merit.
As an aside, there's no argument about permadeath. If you're against it, roguelikes are not for you.

it was just an example to show how stupid this is...

And also are you trying to say that roguelikes are not for me?! That's my first post you see on this forum and you fucking say roguelikes are not for me!!!

Are you fucking trying to shit on me?

[awake]

Why the fuck would you remove corridors, it's just stupid.

That about covers it. Maybe take this one to the DCSS forums?

[Skeletor]

Interesting opinion.
I have to admit Nethack's heavy use of corridors is one of the reasons I always preferred Adom to it (which is basically Nethack with a moustache as they say).

Corridors force indeed bidimensional tedious uninteresting play, and should be kept at the bare minimum.
I'd just put some perhaps in fixed content, but wouldn't make it possible for the map generator to place them randomly on any map.

[SarahW]

Seems like a non issue to me, I don't design maps based on "generation." Or rather, I didn't use to.

[corremn]

I don't design maps based on "generation." Or rather, I didn't use to.

That make no sense. Please explain.

[SarahW]

I don't design maps based on "generation." Or rather, I didn't use to.

That make no sense. Please explain.

As in I hard code it, there isn't anything random about it. It was more important when I was using booleans instead of variables.

[Skeletor]

No procedural content generation => not a roguelike.