Okay, in summary:
The current behavior:
-- Doubles always start out with a sword.
-- Hitting a disarm token changes whether Beethro has a sword, and changes all doubles in the room to the same state.
My suggested change:
-- Doubles start out with a sword if and only if Beethro has a sword.
-- Hitting a disarm token changes whether Beethro has a sword, and does the same for all doubles in the room.
I still think the second behavior is more logical, but the first is not overly complicated and it is easily predictable. It is also not completely illogical. Additionally, changing the current behavior risks breaking existing rooms. Given these facts, I'm going to change my mind and suggest that it's better to keep the current behavior.
There's one argument I want to address, though:
Jacob wrote:
it has puzzle potential.
Simply having puzzle potential is not a good argument for putting an element or a behavior into DROD. In a game like this, it's important to make everything predictable and logical for the player. It's quite possible to have an idea that would have plenty of puzzle potential, but is still a bad idea, because it's difficult for the player to understand. To take a concrete example:
Way back during the JtRH beta, I noticed a problem with tar-covered tunnels. If an exit tunnel was covered by tar, you could end up standing on top of tar, which caused all sorts of strange behaviour. Obviously, you're not supposed to be able to stand on tar, so I wrote up a few different ways to resolve the problem. One of them was this: Allow tar to cover tunnels, and to regrow over tunnels. A tar-covered tunnel is treated as non-existent. This means that if tunnel A points to tunnel B, and then tunnel B becomes covered by tar, tunnel A will then point to tunnel C, which is further away along the same row, instead.
The problem with this idea is not that it doesn't have puzzle potential. It does. The problem is that it makes absolutely no sense. Logically, a tunnel ought to go the same place all the time. It should not go to a different location just because you block its exit. It's really quite important to avoid this sort of situation -- the
entire basis of DROD is to present the player with a challenge that needs to be analyzed and solved on the basis of the rules of interaction between the game's elements. If those rules become too arcane and bizarre, analysis becomes impossible.
The behavior discussed here is not quite that bad, though. It's the result of a fairly simple rule that I hadn't predicted in advance: doubles always start out armed. As long as that rule is maintained, I'm fine with the current behavior.
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