

Weapons and armor are indestructible and cannot be taken from you (although they can be temporarily degraded). A basic threat-level system will warn you when you're facing a dangerous enemy, so you can generally always see the danger coming, and there are many different ways to escape a dangerous encounter. Being killed without warning is almost unheard of - the game will always warn you if you're about to do something that may have adverse consequences. anti-frustration: Crawl tries to make cheap shots as rare as possible.(There's still a lot of dungeon, so you'll never be lacking in places to get experience - the question is whether you'll survive the attempt.) Skill grinding is also impossible for the same reason, as your skill points come directly from your experience - you can't improve your skills without challenging and defeating monsters. anti-grinding: The only way to gain experience in Crawl is to defeat enemies, and there is only a limited number of enemies per dungeon floor.

This is a reversal of the class-based gameplay in most other roguelikes. Race, on the other hand, makes a huge difference in what a player can do: a vampire plays very differently to a minotaur, for example. It's possible for a player to change their character's role entirely over the course of a game. emphasis on race over class: character classes in Crawl are little more than a starting package of skills and equipment.emphasis on playstyle: The game tries to accommodate many different styles of play, which is one reason why the game has such a huge roster of races, classes, and gods - and also why this roster changes with each new version, as the dev team tries out new ideas and discards flawed ones.emphasis on simplicity: The dev team prefers to simplify rather than complicate the game mechanics, and often remove features from the game if they're turning out to be cumbersome, repetitive, or redundant.emphasis on game balance: Crawl goes to lengths to avoid the problem of Unstable Equilibrium, mostly by carefully limiting the resources available to the player, and their usefulness.Along with NetHack, Angband, ADOM, and ToME, it is considered one of the major modern roguelikes, with a large fanbase and active player community and devteam.Ĭrawl sets itself apart from other roguelikes with a number of distinguishing features: , as quoted by the Dungeon Crawl knowledge bots under "fair."ĭungeon Crawl (called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup in full, or Crawl or DCSS for short) is an open-source roguelike game, based on the late 1990s roguelike Linley's Dungeon Crawl.
