The Castle Doctrine Forums

While I certainly applaud the courage and effort it takes to drop back and reexamine the core of Castle Doctrine's game design, I feel that there's still a fundamental mistake that needs to be corrected.  Namely, the root of CD's major problems is that the reward structure encourages building houses that are as close to unsolvable as possible.

Look at it from the homeowner's point of view.  A successful house is one that nobody can rob, because it keeps your money safe.  The ideal result of a robbery isn't so much that the robber dies to your house, but that the robber leaves and never returns.  Dying is a nice perk, but dead robbers have a nasty tendency to reincarnate and try again, while a robber who is bored or frustrated enough to ignore your house will leave it alone for good.  Needless to say, this style of house is not fun for robbers, as evidenced by the various styles of uninteresting top houses.

As long as the homeowner's goal runs against the game design's goal, the homeowners are going to win in the long run.  No matter what changes Jason makes to the setup, people will tend towards optimal house designs, and that means they're going to make houses that are as frustrating as possible to rob.  v6 had combination locks.  v7/8 had ridiculous puzzles.  v9 is still too new to have settled to an optimum, but I guarantee it's going to be something that people don't like.  None of the changes in v9 altered the core problem: homeowners are optimizing for houses that aren't fun to rob.

I won't claim to have found a perfect solution, or even a great one, but I have an idea for somewhere to start:

1. Thematically, establish a Bureau of Population Reduction, who enacted the Castle Doctrine in response to food shortages.
   --  This gives us a convenient excuse for mechanics that otherwise seem a bit odd: the ultimate goal of CD is to get people to kill themselves, because that's what the BPR needs to do.  That is a good thing for the game design, because it lets us embrace a classic roguelike premise, best formulated (by the Dwarf Fortress community) as Losing is Fun.  Far more so than being bored away from a house, at least.

2. When a player dies to your house, half of the loot they dropped (rounded down) is automatically collected by the BPR, who store it securely until you have a chance to collect it from them.  (i.e. until you return home)
   --  This gives players a "nest egg" that survives being robbed, reducing the penalty for "letting the robber win" while still increasing the house value with each failure.

3. When a player ignores your house, they file a complaint with the BPR, who fine you 1/10th of the amount they have stored (rounded up).
   --  By penalizing the nest egg, we discourage houses that robbers ignore.  That kind of house is, nearly by definition, exactly the kind of house we don't want to have.

4. When a player successfully robs your house without using any tools, an additional 1/10th of the amount stolen is deposited into the BPR account of both players, as a bonus for taking/encouraging extra risk.
   --  Since we reward the homeowner, they want the thieves who are determined enough to solve the house to be able to solve it "properly".  And since we reward the thief, they want to solve it that way, too.

The end result of all of that should be that homeowners optimize for an ideal roguelike experience: Very dangerous, fun to attempt, and difficult but not impossible/unreasonable.  It probably needs some tweaking, but as I said, it's a starting point.  The most important thing is that it's a major step towards reversing the current situation, making the homeoners work towards Jason's goal for the game, not against it.

(This post was heavily based on one I made over on reddit that I felt needed to be mirrored over here for greater attention.  Incidentally, the "anti-spammer" question here doesn't reflect the v9 prices yet.)