

It's frustrating playing a game with so many numbers yet the output of the systems they feed into are so opaque. I found myself getting into scenarios, wondering, which choice is better along one particular dimension? STR vs DEX? This armor vs that? What are the trade-offs? The only real way to find that out would be to dump the game at its current state and then simulate both choices against a suite of enemies to see how it plays out at least in 1v1 situations, never mind when handling many enemies. You can sort of achieve this by dumping a lot of time and building up intuition via experience, but you still won't be able to say why you chose this over that for all your choices. Part of the joy of being human is understanding systems and working with them efficiently to achieve goals. I watched some of the best crawl players in the world play to see how they approached these very common situations and even there I didn't see as much consensus as I hoped to find given common scenarios. Even after spending a LOT of quality time with the (sometimes incorrect) wiki and in-game lookup system, I realized I would never have an intuitive sense of the effects of my choices wrt stats, skilling, weapon and armor choices, and so on. After getting a few all rune wins I stopped playing largely because it is so opaque. Big fan of DCSS, but this doesn't surprise me.
