The better analogy in Doom would be something like corner shooting or gift dropping. And gift dropping is really fucking cheesy (and pretty much necessary for certain challenges) and I wish it wasn't in the game at all. Just like I wish the retarded necessity of going down every set of stairs once before actually going down so you can abuse the shit out of them wasn't in Crawl.
True enough re:better analogy, but the DCSS bit about
needing to go down every stair on D:X before actually clearing D:X+1 isn't true at all. In fact, you'll fuck yourself over a bit because of certain timed portals that trigger when you first enter a level, while you only gain a modest amount of tactical knowledge.
And you can streak 10 wins flipping god damned coins if you flip them enough. Thousands upon thousands of people play Crawl, most playing dozens or hundreds, sometimes even thousands of games. The real question is, if randomness is such a small factor, why don't most of the best players have 50+ game winning streaks? If your chance of randomly being fucked was really only 1-10%, presumably the people who know the game inside out aren't making tons of stupid errors. Maybe 1 in 20 of their games will they make an error that causes a loss.
Indeed you can, but that's why I also mentioned their high win rates. We're not talking about random lucky streaks in the middle of fifty+ games where they're only winning a handful. I'm not talking about random players, either, but rather the players on their irc channel that are specifically known for their skill.
The other issue is that the things required to avoid randomness are insanely onerous. 'l'ook at EVERY ENEMY YOU EVER SEE. It might have an enchanted dagger, which might whisk you away with the first swing.
You're complaining about the need to avoid randomness when the game incorporates a technique to identify what mobs to avoid in melee to prevent "unwinnable situations"? You're also significantly exaggerating just how many mobs you have to 'l'ook at. We're talking about maybe a dozen or two humanoids in the first couple levels, tops. Once you've gotten those first few level ups, an unlucky electric weapon hit won't one shot you, and that's the main brand you need to look out for early on. Distortion is another issue, but I'm pretty sure those are restricted to a handful of uniques.
Yeah, if you do that, the game isn't very random and you can streak some wins. But if you play like someone who isn't fucking insane, it's a significant random risk of essentially instant death for many low level characters and even certain high level characters.
Why is it insane to double check what weapon your opponent is carrying if you can potentially be one shot by a particular enchantment?
Other shit too, like avoiding corners you have to look around from the very edge. Yeah, I could back up and approach the room from the door on the other side so I'll have an extra 5 steps between me and the edge of the room that might have pissed off centaurs with magic bows inside (or maybe that angel with the silence aura- you could open a door and already be within it), but I'm really more interested in making decisions that don't involve pain stakingly backtracking through 100 steps of dungeon to avoid the .1% chance that this door will be the one that fucks me.
So, I take it you never back up into cover in DoomRL because it forces you to move a few extra steps? Angels are late game, by the way, so why don't we assume you'll have a wand of teleportation to use if you won't be able to take him. If item based abilities work, you could also use a ring of teleportation, but I'm not certain if you can or not.
Individually, these risks are trivial. Added up, it's significant. It's certainly more significant than the chance of me going 'Derpa derpa durrrr. I think I'll try swimming today! Oh gosh I died, my bad!'
And skill is what reduces the influence of randomness. It won't eliminate random unwinnable situations, but those mostly occur early on when a death isn't as painful.
Player knowledge boosting the win rate from .0000000000001% to 40% isn't some fucking amazing godsend just because it started out extra low. And I'm not even sure the pros actually have win rates that high- looking at the lists, the best rate from someone with 1000+ games played is 18%. There's some 40% players with a few hundred games, and a few players with even higher rates and less than 100 games played, but I'm inclined to believe they just started new accounts until they got win rates that high for that run of games, and their actual average if they continued to play another 1000 games would be more in the 20% range as well. Not that most of this means anything since you can't tell which players are doing speedruns or challenges, how often, or what versions they were winning on and what things they might have been exploiting.
I'd say that's a pretty damn significant increase and clearly indicates that skill plays a huge part (I know you're exaggerating the numbers). I'd also say that 18% is actually pretty damn good. Keep in mind that due to player improvement, their last few hundred games likely have higher win rates. Not only that, but I doubt they play seriously in every one of their games. They probably fuck around with random builds for the hell of it simply because the game would be boring as hell if they played seriously for every one of those 1000+ games.
If you're playing DoomRL on harder settings or doing certain challenges, you're definitely playing a lot of dice as well. But that's your choice. And when you want a sure win, you've got lots of actual gameplay and options to get there. You don't need to follow a particular build to ensure a win without getting lucky in DoomRL. I was looking at the recent wins list of one of the guys with a decent win %- more than half of them were either spriggans, summoners, or necromancers. Gee, I wonder how he gets his wins every single time. I wonder if that might be because the odds of a Troll Fire Elementalist are pretty shit by comparison.
A build being easier won't eliminate the unwinnable situations that you're complaining so much about. Yes, they're easier to win with, but Grinder can rape any character if they have really unlucky positioning (Well, Spriggans do have innate MR, but at a low level we're talking about maybe 10-12MR points, barely a third of the basic MR ring).
Edit: Responding to the most recent bit as you posted while I was typing.
I'm not arguing Crawl is nothing but a luckfest, but it plays a bigger role than it does in most games.
I'm still not seeing it. I'm not arguing that there's no luck in DCSS, either, but rather that it's well within the the level of acceptance. Unless we base everything around percentages, a low level character (In any game where level is the primary factor in determining hp) will always be under threat of an instant death.
And just because the deaths are front loaded in the first few levels doesn't make them irrelevant. Those levels take the longest to get through too. Nobody pillar dances shadow dragons to death for half an hour. But when you're a level 2 caster? You'll spend a LONG fucking time dicking around to get a single piddly kill quite often.
I wouldn't say they're irrelevant, either, but simply more tolerable. Losing a character that you've played for less than ten minutes is nothing like losing an amazing character you've spent nearly a full day on. You're also exaggerating again when it comes to the time spent pillar dancing and the like, but I primarily play melee hybrids, so *shrug*.