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[Evilpotatoe]

Just an idea, but thinking again about what I was writing about assemblies / exotic / uniques :

In DoomRL, you don't make your choices gradually, depending on the stuff you find / enemies you face / kind of area you explore

An interesting example is the "sectors" you explore in FTL.  You can choose between this civilian one, pretty calm, or that rock sector, filled with agressive brutes in an hostile environnement.  Or between this peaceful engi sector, or the Mantis hive... or a dark slug nebula.
There is two interesting points here.

• First, you can choose what suits the best your current situation ("my ship is crippled, I'll choose the peaceful route" VS "I'm ready to farm, send me the bad guys !")
• Second, when you start the game (and everytime you enter a new sector), you see the global map, which gives you a (very basic, yet existing) overview of the whole map, with green / red / purple sectors (roughly like peaceful / agressive / treacherous places).

I can imagine putting this into DoomRL or JH. Here are a few crude examples which, in term of gameplay, seem relevant to me

• Putting several stairs types in some / most / all levels.  This wouldn't even need to create new level types, this could just give you some hints about what you may find : melee pits, arachnotron cave, few rooms lost in the middle of lava, maze...
  If you put this (let's say, in current DoomRL version), it will make the game easier, since it will give the player more control over what it will have to face (e.g. : I choose an alarm level rather than an arachnotron cave, or I prefer a level with a nuke to a maze).
  Btw, the cool part is not making the game easier. It's that once the player got this new advantage, it can be offset with new difficulties !  More dangerous levels, even more deadly caves, or mazes, or time-limited levels (nukes are fine, but IIRC, lava/acid ones aren't dangerous at all, except for the new Halls of carnage --remember how pityful were the old ones ? Sluggish lava, free supercharges... errrk!-- :)
  
  The idea here is not to tell the player that some stairs leads to a cave with 13 demons, 48 acid titles and 19 covers, of course, but rather choosing between some "kind of levels".  time limited, fire blasted, more calm but unrewarding...
  concrete example : a chance to get both paired levels stairs could be a start.  Problem is, when the pair is "the wall" vs "Containment Area", I wonder what would make me choose the Area
   
• Giving the player information like FTL's global map.  In DoomRL, for example, I always hope I'll get Hell's armory, since Shambler's head is usually harder to get in DL.
  Knowing whether you'll get Spider's lair or Halls of carnage could make a difference.  It currently wouldn't make a big one, since most paired levels don't have much difference.  But what would it be if you knew, when starting the game, what exotic you'll find in Hell's armory, what unique will be in the vaults ? What decisive items may be found ?  Suppose the list of all uniques and exotics generated is displayed when you start the game.  It would change your way of playing, wouldn't it ?  Now, if some items (lets say melee weapons), have more chances to appear in melee caves, or if better exotics appear more often in dangerous places (alarm level, maze, etc.), you might try to explore thoses places to find this NecroArmour, or nuclear laser rifle advertised a few levels earlier.

Without getting into complete information (Of course, giving full items list would be too much, and lose a lot of the thrill produced by random levels generation and its exploration), I think it would be interesting to know some informations at the start of the game, or of the episode.
Examples could be knowing which rare mod lurks in HA, or the kind of armory it is (Slaughterhouse, with lots of demons and N! demons, and good melee weapons, gunshop, guarded by a horde of formers, but with 2 exotic pistols and 2 ammo boxes, Explosives area, with a missile launcher and shockwave packs ?, etc.).
Depending on the number of parameters, and the control / information the player has over it, some may even be chosen at start, like the class/traits.  In Civilization, you can choose the age / land masses and other parameters of your world.  In doomRl, you could choose which area of the complex you are gonna explore.  It's what you do in AlienRL, IIRC (I did only sacrifice a few chars to it, since I can't play ascii, but I loved the idea of different towers, with more ammo / medkits / whatever).

I'm throwing it as-is, because I'm more interested in the game-design aspect than "requesting something precise for next doomRL version, or JH".
Thinking about it, I think it's really a good game mechanic, which deserves some reflexion, and would need only some polishing to make it into the game.

[emulord]

Great ideas. Maybe advance knowledge of stair type could be a perk for intuition 3

[Shadowfury333]

Cogmind does this. Given that it's also a range-based rogue-like with little focus on stat increases over positioning, it seems like it's a workable idea for DoomRL as well.

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

Fun fact - DoomRL has both a tile and a sprite for alternative stairs. For a time I played around the idea of flavored dungeon branches - with their own special levels and their own level type distribution. Only problem here is they would be a hell to balance.