kill the sargeant to get the shotgun

What if I put a barrel next to him?

Kill imps and take their balls!

"is this barrel gonna blow up in 2 bullets or 4?"

"No pain states. Please don't shoot me while I'm doing this"

"if he shoots me is it gonna do 10 damage or 70?"

It's just as bad in my opinion.

Of course; I always place a multiplayer-flagged weapon if my intention was for an initial enemy pickup.

In general I agree it's best to place the weapon. I'm neutral on using an enemy as an early pickup vs. the placed weapon (E1M1 style). I think it can work but it's got to be thought out carefully.

lol this sounds like straight from the Bemused Evening with Nirvana episode

NO.
IT'S CLASSIC GAMEPLAY 101! KILL MONSTER TO GET BIGGER GUN!

I'm a big fan of getting my early shotgun from a sergeant. Way more satisfying on average to get your weapon from a shotgun piñata, imo.
A sergeant being one of the first things you see, hopefully with it's back turned at least. Pulverizing it with an immediate, early berserk is fun and "clean" too if it doesn't throw off the game balance.
Or, if the shotgunner is far away, you don't really take much damage from it anyway and it still dies in about 3 hits.

I'm still unclear on why this "gimmick" is a bad thing.  The argument seems to be that because RNG is involved, some players will get the kill easier than others, and thus we shouldn't create a scenario where a player has to kill a monster to get their next weapon.

This is a good parallel for the way certain people view the world.  They feel as though everything should be a level playing field, allowing everyone an equal shot.  But that's not how life works.  You can try to make things as "fair" as possible, but in the end some people will always have advantages over others.  That's life on planet Earth, and it's been that way for 100's of millions of years.  So some players have to shoot the sergeant 5 times to get the shotgun?  Ok.  Some people have to struggle extra hard to pass their calculus test, while others with genetic advantages easily pass the test without studying.  Some people cruise through boot camp, while others have a much harder time and barely pass.  Some people kill Baal once in Diablo II and Tyrael's Might drops, while other people have to kill Baal 8,999 times before that armor will drop.  Life isn't fair, dude.


Having a situation where RNG is involved is both cool (because there's an element of chance in either direction) and also very realistic.  No one should feel like they are being a bad mapper for doing what great First Person Shooters have been doing for over three decades now.

For the record, I'd be ok with a sargent you can kill for the shotgun if there's also a free shotgun you can get some other way that doesn't put you in the line of fire of sargents so I can at least choose. I'm just done with these shotguns being the only ones on the map.

You can kill the sargents if you want but I'm gonna get my own shotgun first.

Who actually makes maps like this?

I do dis

I do not agree with any of this.  The pistol isn't bad.  It has low damage, but fires fast.  Doomguy has amazingly fast movement speed.  That's his main weapon against the Doom enemies.  So as long as you move effectively, the pistol is a viable weapon for quite a few of Doom's bestiary.  I regularly switch back to the pistol from the shotgun to conserve shell ammo until I find a chaingun.  Zombiemen, sergeants, demons, spectres, imps, and lost souls can all easily be defeated with the pistol.  Please play E3M1 of Doom from 1993.  You have a pistol and face off against three imps and two cacodemons at the start of the map.  It isn't hard.  Just move and shoot, dodging the fireballs, and the cacodemons and imps will die.  An exhilarating fight.  There's something fun for me, and for other people as well, about struggling initially with the pistol until you can grab a higher tier weapon.  It's like a rite of passage.  Just because it isn't fun for you doesn't make that canonical.

The shotgun never becomes trash tier for me, ever.  I use it even frequently when I have all the weapons in my arsenal, including the SSG.  It's an effective long range weapon, almost like Doom's equivalent of a sniper rifle.  I was recently playing Drip Feed by Iori, and I used the hell out of the shotgun to help me snipe enemies from across the map.

I've been playing Doom longer than you, and I've played a plethora of Doom wads of all types. And yet, I still don't share your view.  I like the pistol, I like to use it, and I like that "gimmick" as you call it.  It's not a dick-measuring contest. Some people just enjoy more than one type of gameplay style. Some people like Hexen and don't like Doom. Some people hate Hexen and love Doom. And amazingly, some people actually like and appreciate both Doom and Hexen, even though their gameplay styles are radically different! Some people like action movies and drama, and some even like action, drama, comedies, and horror. Wild!

So sometimes you get shot up when you are killing the sergeant (by the way "sergeant" is the correct spelling) for the shotgun. Big deal. If the mapper places health intelligently, this isn't a problem.

It's ok to disagree.  You can make your maps such that you downplay Doom's RNG, which was put in by the designers at id Software by the way.  That's totally cool.  Just don't expect others to make their maps in accordance with your prefereces.

This is, quite literally, you contradicting yourself from one sentence to the next. You say you don't agree that life isn't fair, but then give an example of exactly how life is not fair. Some are born with advantages others don't have.  Even if you enacted Socialism on a grand scale, and did away with all generational wealth, people are still born with different genes that give them advantages over their peers.  How on Earth do you not understand that?  You have to be trolling.

Perhaps it gets in the way of your fun, but I enjoy the uncertaintly. Perhaps I get lucky and kill the sergeant without much trouble. Cool. Or perhaps I take a ton of damage from the sergeant and have to play more carefully until I can grab some health. The added challenge is part of the fun for me. Just because you don't like it doesn't make my experience any less relevant.

Once again, this thread is an example of you going into conversations thinking that everyone shares your view and agrees on your base assumptions. Not everyone does. Some people don't worship the shotgun as much as you do. They aren't wrong. This is exactly the same as your "don't use damaging floors" thread from years ago. You aren't politely making a case for something that you enjoy, rather you are telling people how they should map. You have your preferences, and that's awesome! You make great maps, and everyone knows it. But I find it interesting that someone who values diversity and inclusion would lay down mandates on "the correct way" to map.