Depth vs. Complexity

[Derakon]

Buzzkill: you know what also is good? Specific examples. Polemics against the current state of the game are all well and good as long as they properly support their thesis.

[buzzkill]

I didn't read every post in this thread, but I did read some of them and skimmed most of them. Simplicity is good. That is to say that complexity simply for the sake of complexity is bad. I'd also wager that simplicity for the sake of simplicity is also bad.

As we all know, what makes for a good and interesting Vanilla is going to be different for every player. You can try to appeal to the masses (do the masses even favor simple simplicity?), but then you're trying to hit an ever moving target, and never ever hit it in the center.

My suggestion would be to, rather than trying to simplify things arbitrarily or by consensus, to simplify the things that would bring Vanilla back in line with what it was before. Re-simplify the elements that were at one time simple. Remove complexities that were (nearly) needlessly added. For one who thinks of Vanilla as a constant, I find my own reasoning hard to argue with. Those who feel that Vanilla is really whatever it happens to be today, may genuinely disagree.

[Derakon]

For reference, I don't plan on Pyrel having any remotely different gameplay mechanics compared to v4 until after 1.0 gets released. Of course things will be different if only because different algorithms are being used (as in fizzix's new dungeon generation system), but certainly I won't be setting out to change the fundamental rules, and I'd ask any developer who wants to do that to please wait until we finish the engine first.

Also and again, I want to draw a line between an intricate game with many interacting entities, and one that has complicated rules. ToME 2, Kamband, ZAngband, and so on all had a heck of a lot going on, but most of the game used basically the same rules as Vanilla did. They're, for the most part, good examples of adding depth (through additional content) without adding complexity (through additional mechanics).

The goal is not to have a sterile game where everything is basically the same. Far from it! The goal is to have a game where the player is constantly encountering new scenarios and has to adjust, adapt, and push their skills. What we don't want is for the player to feel lost and helpless, like they're blindly pushing buttons and pulling levers on a gigantic black box, hoping that a good result comes out the other end. Ideally, each new scenario should follow something like this outline:

* What is that? I've never seen that before.
* Whoa, it does <A new thing>! That means that when I do <X, Y, or Z>, they'll have <different results than usual>!
* Now I have to completely rethink my strategy!

In contrast, the bad version of the above would look something like this:

* What is that? I've never seen that before.
* Whoa, it does <A new thing>! Uh, how does that work? I'll try doing <X>.
* Uh, that might have been less effective than usual, but it's kind of hard to tell. Let's try again a few times.
* Okay, yeah, X isn't working very well. So now what do I do? Try Y?
* Etc...

You can certainly have games where the goal of the game is to understand and characterize a complex system. And those games can be quite fun! But the problem with that kind of game is that once you've finished characterizing it, you're done -- there's no more game, you've found the solution. A game that wants to have replayability will need to find ways to challenge the player that aren't just figuring-out-the-system. Either that, or it needs to procedurally generate new systems, but that level of meta-game-development is a daunting task.

[Magnate]

Honestly this doesn't bother me at all for pyrel. The bigger question is whether the people working on the code can come into agreement and make a finished game together (perhaps very different from V) or whether we'll split off and make our own games individually once the base is complete.

I don't rate its chances if we don't get some sort of consensus!

The biggest question I have with combat is how to handle multiple blows for both players and monsters. Right now the player gets X multiple blows for one turn of combat and a monster gets N (possibly) different blows. I don't like this for a lot of reasons. Mainly, I don't like multiple blows and shots because if there's one thing that very quickly becomes complex (and life or death crucial) it's trying to evaluate complicated fractional action speeds. In other words, for simplicity all actions including attacks should take the same amount of time. Later we can talk about increasing only movement speed, but I think global speed increases, as occurs in V, is absolutely out of the question if simplicity is desired.

Ok, my position is:

1. I'm totally in favour of making monster attacks operate on the same rules as player attacks. To-hit, damage, blows, whatever.

2. I don't have any problem with multiple blows. Humanoid monsters can use exactly the same blows calculation as the player, for whatever they're wielding. Non-humanoid monsters can have balance and heft values assigned to their 'weapons'. The current system of monsters having up to four different attacks can easily stand to be replaced by on-hit procs. If we want a carbon copy of V we can use procs in order, otherwise we can choose at random or use any other system.

3. I do understand your concern about global speed increases, though I don't share it. I think the game engine ought to support them, but am not going to die in a ditch over them. If you wand 'speed' rings to separate into rings of movement and rings of extra attacks, that's fine with me.

I do think it's worth it to set out some basic guidelines for ranges of hit points and damage amounts. Then we can figure out what we need for granularity. Perhaps the Sil folks can give guidance?

I think we should stick with roughly where we are, normalising player hp to monster hp (not the other way round). This way we limit the amount we need to change - we can leave weapon dice alone for a while, for example. I suspect we'll need to reduce top-end monster hp, as Leon did in O and S (where Morgoth has 10k hp rather than V's 20k).

So we're talking about roughly 10x the current scale of player hp.

[Magnate]

For example, Magic: the Gathering has oodles of content, but very few cards introduce entirely new rules for how that content works. I wouldn't say that MtG is a simple game, but it has a fairly strong depth-to-complexity ratio

I don't agree with this claim. Every single block (trio of sets) of magic cards introduces at least one new mechanic, often three or four. There have now been, what, 15 blocks or so? (I'm about five years out of date but they're still producing a block per year IIRC.) That's at least three dozen extra mechanics on top of the basic rules - that's a crapton of complexity, once you consider the interactions *between* all these different mechanics.

Of course, there are tens of thousands of *cards*, but that's not really the point. If it's not a bog-standard 2/2 beastie for 3 mana then it's got some degree of complexity above the basic rules.

(I'm not disagreeing that it's a fantastically deep game, but it is hugely complex.)

[Magnate]

It's hard not to agree with everything everyone's said in this thread. But I'm going to try.

I think that for some people the opacity and complexity is the attraction. The whole thing is not just a game. It's a puzzle to solve, and an unfolding mystery. And I'm not talking about mystery in the pretend-there's-a-Santa-Claus fake-retention-of-innocence sense; it's more like there's so much complexity you can't get your head around it all. For these people, it's the mastery of all that that is the challenge, not getting individual game wins.

For those of us posting in this thread that mystery is well and truly gone, but should we take it away for new players?

(Note: That last is not rhetorical - I am undecided)

Well I'm glad someone posted something sensible.

For me, the magic went out of D&D when all the stats and stat bonuses and skill checks were homogenised in 3E. It certainly made the game less complex but for me and a lot of players I knew it lost a lot of charm too.

I get the same feeling reading most (but not all) of the suggested changes. Linearising stats and re-working elements to be more consistent are both things that have been on the to-do list for a long time, but I don't buy the combat simplification at all unless we're just going to have three weapons: the rapier, the big hammer and the balanced one. If you think that having only three weapons in the entire game loses something in flavour, perhaps it's also possible to see that having loads of weapons which all boil down to the same three dice also loses something.

I actually think symmetry is nice, but I think we could do that without chucking everything out. I see no reason why monsters shouldn't have balance and heft scores for natural weaponry.

(I know I usually agree with Derakon and rarely agree with Nick, but this is not a joke post!)

[Derakon]

I actually object to the original thesis, on the grounds that I've always had more fun playing ToME and other zany variants than Vanilla Angband.

Don't get me wrong, I think V's simplicity is in some ways a strong point (e.g. no wilderness = more focus on gameplay). But I've felt for a while that V suffers from a serious Lack Of Interesting Stuff. I want a game that's complicated and crazy and self-contradictory. I want to play weird classes with weird capabilities. I want more monsters, more item types, and more spell effects than I can shake a stick at. Simple games can be habit-forming, but it's hard to make them involving.

I think this is sort of orthogonal to the division between depth and complexity. To my mind, you're talking about amount of content, not about the rules for how that content interacts. For example, Magic: the Gathering has oodles of content, but very few cards introduce entirely new rules for how that content works. I wouldn't say that MtG is a simple game, but it has a fairly strong depth-to-complexity ratio, and that's the thing you really want to strive for in designing a game. Frankly Vanilla has a crapton of content too, but it's often not very well-differentiated. I mean, sure there's over 500 monster races in the bestiary, but is fighting a snaga really all that different from fighting a cave orc?

Aside: one of the design goals behind Pyrel's engine is to make it as easy as possible to add well-differentiated new content to the game.

I think that for some people the opacity and complexity is the attraction. The whole thing is not just a game. It's a puzzle to solve, and an unfolding mystery. And I'm not talking about mystery in the pretend-there's-a-Santa-Claus fake-retention-of-innocence sense; it's more like there's so much complexity you can't get your head around it all. For these people, it's the mastery of all that that is the challenge, not getting individual game wins.

For those of us posting in this thread that mystery is well and truly gone, but should we take it away for new players?

This is a fair point, and I do fondly remember exploring dungeons where I had no idea what the rules of the game were or what I might stumble across at any moment. That kind of mystery has a huge impact on the gameplay...until you master the game, anyway.

Put a different way, novel content is what creates that sense of mystery, and when you run out of novel content, the game becomes just a system to optimize. You can create novel content by fundamentally changing the rules, but that increases rule complexity. Better is to find new ways to use the existing rules.

So for example, if midway through the game, you find a monster that gains power from being surrounded by his minions, say, that's a brand-new interaction that creates a completely different experience of play. The way you approach this fight will be completely different from any other fight you've done up to this point. But the rules for this new content can be simply rendered as "monster's skill += (number of adjacent minions) / 2". The player quickly understands the rules of the game, but where things get difficult is in figuring out how to turn those rules to their advantage.

In other words, a game that has depth has complex play, but needn't necessarily have complex rules. To the extent that rules inhibit accessibility while not improving depth, then, they should be modified or discarded.

[fizzix]

Of course, I expect that any changes along these lines would quickly be rejected by the player base as straying too far from Vanilla.

Honestly this doesn't bother me at all for pyrel. The bigger question is whether the people working on the code can come into agreement and make a finished game together (perhaps very different from V) or whether we'll split off and make our own games individually once the base is complete.

The biggest question I have with combat is how to handle multiple blows for both players and monsters. Right now the player gets X multiple blows for one turn of combat and a monster gets N (possibly) different blows. I don't like this for a lot of reasons. Mainly, I don't like multiple blows and shots because if there's one thing that very quickly becomes complex (and life or death crucial) it's trying to evaluate complicated fractional action speeds. In other words, for simplicity all actions including attacks should take the same amount of time. Later we can talk about increasing only movement speed, but I think global speed increases, as occurs in V, is absolutely out of the question if simplicity is desired.

I do think it's worth it to set out some basic guidelines for ranges of hit points and damage amounts. Then we can figure out what we need for granularity. Perhaps the Sil folks can give guidance?

(I'm going to drop all discussion of stat potions, we can have that talk in another thread.)

edit: @Therem: At the end this comes down to a design choice. For ToME (i'm talking about DarkGod's tome here, not sure if you are also) I find that the skills and abilities that have a clear and obvious effect are good, and the ones that have an obscure mechanic (i.e. spell crit %) are bad. There's obviously a balance here, but if I had my druthers, I would start with a simple system that gets progressively more complex as the game or player's abilities progress. So you start with a simplified dungeon game and then you go to a variant/campaign with more abilities. You make sure that the simple game is a complete experience.

[Therem Harth]

I actually object to the original thesis, on the grounds that I've always had more fun playing ToME and other zany variants than Vanilla Angband.

Don't get me wrong, I think V's simplicity is in some ways a strong point (e.g. no wilderness = more focus on gameplay). But I've felt for a while that V suffers from a serious Lack Of Interesting Stuff. I want a game that's complicated and crazy and self-contradictory. I want to play weird classes with weird capabilities. I want more monsters, more item types, and more spell effects than I can shake a stick at. Simple games can be habit-forming, but it's hard to make them involving.

In other words... YMMV.

Edit: to be a bit clearer, I would say I prefer complexity and depth not just to simplicity and shallowness, but also to simplicity and depth. I like games where I can't keep all the rules in my head at the same time.

[Nick]

It's hard not to agree with everything everyone's said in this thread. But I'm going to try.

I think that for some people the opacity and complexity is the attraction. The whole thing is not just a game. It's a puzzle to solve, and an unfolding mystery. And I'm not talking about mystery in the pretend-there's-a-Santa-Claus fake-retention-of-innocence sense; it's more like there's so much complexity you can't get your head around it all. For these people, it's the mastery of all that that is the challenge, not getting individual game wins.

For those of us posting in this thread that mystery is well and truly gone, but should we take it away for new players?

(Note: That last is not rhetorical - I am undecided)

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I really like that simplified combat system, Derakon.

[Scatha]

Of course, I expect that any changes along these lines would quickly be rejected by the player base as straying too far from Vanilla.

I don't know what to say to this. Status quo bias is well documented, so it's likely some people will always be change averse, and I'm sure that a small fraction of the player base would reject it for this (however old versions will still exist). If it genuinely makes the game better, however, I'd be pretty confident it would increase the size of the player base in the long run, from a combination of increased retention of new and existing players, increasing recommendations, and perhaps enticing back players who tried the game and rejected it.

[Derakon]

Regarding the v4 combat system, I think that it could still be used if we're willing to sacrifice some degree of granularity. For example:

Each weapon is classed into one of three categories: light/medium/heavy. Light weapons are finesse weapons; heavy weapons are prowess weapons, and medium are balanced. All weapons roll 1 die on hit (e.g. 1d4, 1d12, 1d20).

For each point of DEX, you get one additional blow with a light weapon, .5 additional with a medium weapon, and 0 with a heavy weapon. For each point of STR, you get an extra die roll with a heavy weapon, .5 extra rolls with a medium, and 0 with a light. Round down.

Thus a rogue with a 1d6 rapier and 4 DEX would get 4x 1d6 blows; a paladin with a 1d6 hammer and 4 STR would get a 4d6 blow; a warrior with a 1d6 shortsword, 2 DEX and 3 STR would get 2x 2d6 blows.

Slays would be like guaranteed STR bonuses. I think it'd also be interesting to have weapons that don't do extra damage against a given "race", but do give other bonuses, like never missing or causing the race to take a penalty on skill checks (e.g. orcs being afraid of Orcrist). I'm not sure what to do about crits.

Enemy "weapons" would work similarly, but they might have multiple weapons to choose from. For example, a dragon's claw attack could be a light-weight weapon while its bite would be heavy, so if it chooses to bite you, you have to take one big blow, while the claws would be two lesser blows. Of course different effects might be attached to those blows as well. You'd show the monster memory as e.g.

Mature Red Dragon ('d')
STR: 4
DEX: 2
CON: 3
INT: 3
WIS: 4
Bite (heavy, burn) 1d8
Claw (light) 1d6

Of course, I expect that any changes along these lines would quickly be rejected by the player base as straying too far from Vanilla.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

For Halls of Mist, I'm striving for asymmetric simplicity, where the player is very different from the monsters.

In my vision, the player is a complicated object with 15 skills with percentage scores. Monsters are much simpler, but many have special abilities that don't have to fit the mold.

I can afford to make the player much more complicated because the UI is designed to show all that info easily.

For monsters I prefer binary abilities like armored/not armored. Binary stats are easy to memorize. Having to 'l'ook at monsters all the time is boring.

If you are supposed to make constant combat decisions based on things like monster's evasion and armor rating, those scores should be visible all the time. That's a serious UI design challenge. I prefer to keep things asymmetric instead.

[Scatha]

Nice post. I think this is a useful language, and you do a great job of identifying changes to consider.

You're right that Sil has done pretty much all of these; this is because keeping complexity under control was a big part of the development aim. (The ideal is to find mechanics which are both simple and deep, and I think we often achieved that, but we have some tradeoffs where there is more complexity than we'd like, and some where we rejected an otherwise better rule on simplicity grounds.)

I think it's obvious that everything in your list should be done. What's not obvious is the best way to do each one (and you may want to defer doing them until you've worked that out). We made decisions about these in Sil, but there are lots of good possible solutions for most of them.

Edit: I'm just slow posting. This crossed with fizzix.
Edit2: Almost everything fizzix said sounds sensible to me! Getting to choose where to allocate points from stat potions stands out as a relatively dubious idea (in terms of complexity cost) in a field of excellent ones.