Roman Republic Challenge?

[Baranor]

Anyone interested in a Roman Republic Challenge? It's been basically a month since Creator's Day and we haven't had any good community games!

We could also do some team competitions a la the Epic Treasure Hunter battles last year. Anyone know an issue we can use to divide up the troops?

I'm looking for any and all suggestions and interest. I can run the actual game.

[Harwin]

What's a Roman Republic Challenge?

[furious_styles]

I was thinking this recently too, particularly with regard to team competitions. The recent TWL was awesome and generated a lot of play on the server and chat in IRC from what I saw (though real-life forced me to miss the latter half of it). I've been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl lately, and the biggest Crawl server has just started its tournament month, where teams of players compete to earn the most tournament-points for themselves and their team.


Total score for each team is calculated over a huge number of different factors, for example...

• 200/100/50 points for 1st, 2nd and 3rd fastest realtime win
• 200/100/50 points for 1st, 2nd and 3rd fastest turncount win
• 200/100/50 points for 1st, 2nd and 3rd fewest creatures killed in a winning game
• 200/100/50 points for 1st, 2nd and 3rd highest scores
• 20 points for each win with a new god
• 100 extra points for each consecutive win that is not a repeat race or class

There are also a lot of smaller but cool extra ones like...

• 5 points per high score for each race/class combo
• 5 additional points per high score for each race/class combo that is a win
• 10 points for overall high score with a race
• 10 points for overall high score with a class

They also have lots of Crawl-specific ones that you could translate to ADoM, like...

• 10 points for each distinct skill raised to 27 (ADoM: 10 points for a Grand Mastery)
• 50 points for an all-rune victory (ADoM: 50 points for an ultra)
• 200/100/50 points for deepest level reached in a Ziggurat (ADoM: 200/100/50 points for deepest level reached in the ID)
• 5 points the first time you kill each unique (ADoM: 5 points for the first time you kill, say, Keethrax, Blup's mother, Minotaur Emperor, Cat Lord, Bugs, Fistanarius, each of the Orb Guardians, each of the Arena uniques, Emperor Moloch, Andy etc)

or similar.


Something like that, team-based, would translate well to any other roguelike and would be fun. It'd also prevent newbies from being scared away by the prospect of doing something dumb and getting shouted at by their team for screwing them over, as in the Weakest Link challenge, because one person's actions don't directly effect his/her teammates. It's also great for people who like to watch games, as the server is constantly populated with really great Crawl players who are often attempting extreme-tactics, speedrun or other challenge-type games which is very entertaining.

The other cool thing about this format is that it doesn't mean that the best players just dominate everything so that everyone else's effort is wasted. Even a player who's never made it past the ToEF can contribute to his team by trying to pick up those points for highest-scoring unorthodox R/C games, ID diving, grabbing those 5 points for unique monsters, and so on.

[FantomFang]

I'd be very interested in some sort of challenge. In fact, I'd be up for just about any challenge, as they seem to get me over my hangups about continuing with less than perfectly rolled characters

EDIT: I second any sort of team competition. Solo challenges are not NEARLY as fun (half the fun of the TWL '08 for me was the inter-league rivalry, specifically the Gut vs. Grey head-to-head! We should totally have them do some sort of 1v1 challenge consecutively, hehe). So again, Team challenges for the win.

[gut]

> What's a Roman Republic Challenge?

The first RRC game was the noble Rhea, a gray elven
merchant girl who closed the gate and saved the world.
Basically, everyone signs up, the mod rolls a random PC,
and we all take turns with the svg based on when we
signed up. It's called roman republic because everyone
can do as they wish when their turn rolls around.

I like the idea of having leagues, but too many confuses
me. Two makes for a good rivalry, 7 makes for a headache.
We haven't really argued about any topic lately, except
maybe the Shield of Raw Steel, and no, not even I want
to play on THAT team : ) We could do a simple C vs L
challenge. Two teams roll play to be as evil or as lawful as
possible.

I dislike points systems, as being too confusing. I would
prefer simple gate closings or ultras. I'm up for just about
anything though, I love these things... and yeah, make
sure you create a 'flame war' thread to go along with the
challenge.

[Harwin]

> What's a Roman Republic Challenge?

The first RRC game was the noble Rhea, a gray elven
merchant girl who closed the gate and saved the world.
Basically, everyone signs up, the mod rolls a random PC,
and we all take turns with the svg based on when we
signed up. It's called roman republic because everyone
can do as they wish when their turn rolls around.

I like the idea of having leagues, but too many confuses
me. Two makes for a good rivalry, 7 makes for a headache.
We haven't really argued about any topic lately, except
maybe the Shield of Raw Steel, and no, not even I want
to play on THAT team : ) We could do a simple C vs L
challenge. Two teams roll play to be as evil or as lawful as
possible.

I dislike points systems, as being too confusing. I would
prefer simple gate closings or ultras. I'm up for just about
anything though, I love these things... and yeah, make
sure you create a 'flame war' thread to go along with the
challenge.

What happens if I take my turn on an RRC and die?
I assume the character survives, but a dead players counts against the team?

[furious_styles]

The thing about only assigning points for gate closings or ultras is that you or I (edit: this is in response to gut, to clarify, I forgot to quote the post) could just sit down and knock out wins for as long as we have time to spare, but a new player could play for weeks and never accumulate any points, which makes it offputting to newbies. The reason something points-based and with smaller but more achievable goals appeals is that it seems much more inclusive to the full spectrum of player skill levels. That aside, giving people lots of different targets to shoot at means there will be a lot more variety in playstyle and will be more fun to watch - it isn't just about who can stomach grinding out the most wins.

Your points about team numbers and sizes are valid, though I suspect that would be more a function of participation if something like this were to be run - I doubt we'd have enough players for the number of teams to become overwhelming even in the worst case.

[Harwin]

I'm personally more interested in a challenge game that doesn't hold everyone else up if I'm slow.

I've got enough real-life commitments that competitions like TWL which required you to run within a 3-day period are tricky.

The point system is (I think) appealing in that way.

[Ascaron]

I would be up for a challenge like what furious_styles is suggesting. Points for different team activities sounds good (I think I would try win, then do a deep ID dive, as ID-diving is my one of my favorite things in the whole of adom )

Or I would die before reaching the casino. Either way, it's all good!

[furious_styles]

I'm personally more interested in a challenge game that doesn't hold everyone else up if I'm slow.

I've got enough real-life commitments that competitions like TWL which required you to run within a 3-day period are tricky.

The point system is (I think) appealing in that way.

Yeah, this is another good thing about it. The Crawl tournament runs for a whole month, so even if you only want to play for half an hour a day, or have to budget time around work or family, you can still make a solid contribution, and no-one will shout at you for keeping everyone else waiting - it's just another way in which it's more broadly appealing, in this case to people with varying amounts of time to commit. Being a smaller community, we may not be able to sustain interest for a month, but the same benefits apply over a shorter frame of time.