Depth vs. Complexity

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I'm probably still the only one who has played Halls of Mist mystics in the last version. That's an example of board complexity going way over my enjoyment treshold!

Ironband mana increases board complexity a lot, especially when mixed with the tight torch and mist phantasm clocks. The board complexity feels just about right for semi-spellcasters, but with full spellcasters it seems to rise above my pain treshold...

Maybe I just need to get used to it. And the player can easily adjust the board complexity by choosing a different class.

(EDIT: I'm not sure whether I should call this strategic or board complexity. I'm talking about using your resources in an optimal way to solve the various problems on the board. The scale is only one dungeon level, so I hesitate to call it strategic complexity. Maybe it's a borderline case.)

[Magnate]

I'm probably still the only one who has played Halls of Mist mystics in the last version. That's an example of board complexity going way over my enjoyment treshold!

Ironband mana increases board complexity a lot, especially when mixed with the tight torch and mist phantasm clocks. The board complexity feels just about right for semi-spellcasters, but with full spellcasters it seems to rise above my pain treshold...

Maybe I just need to get used to it. And the player can easily adjust the board complexity by choosing a different class.

(EDIT: I'm not sure whether I should call this strategic or board complexity. I'm talking about using your resources in an optimal way to solve the various problems on the board. The scale is only one dungeon level, so I hesitate to call it strategic complexity. Maybe it's a borderline case.)

Nope, that's pretty clearly board complexity. Strategic complexity is about *when* stuff happens - this level, next level, 5/10/20/50 levels time.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Shops are an enjoyable source of strategic complexity. By making item prices correlate with their real worth as closely as possible, you create interesting choices for the player.

Does Vanilla still have random discounts? They're a cool way to shake things up a little and to force the player to consider new options.

[Magnate]

Shops are an enjoyable source of strategic complexity. By making item prices correlate with their real worth as closely as possible, you create interesting choices for the player.

I don't really see this. If you're talking about selling, there's now a pretty big consensus that no-selling makes for a much better game.

So you must be talking about buying. Since you don't know what the stores will stock, how can it be strategic? (The stuff that you do know they will stock is not really important enough to make a strategic difference - the whole reason we have some stock guaranteed is because it's pointlessly tedious if it's not available.)

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I don't really see this. If you're talking about selling, there's now a pretty big consensus that no-selling makes for a much better game.

So you must be talking about buying. Since you don't know what the stores will stock, how can it be strategic? (The stuff that you do know they will stock is not really important enough to make a strategic difference - the whole reason we have some stock guaranteed is because it's pointlessly tedious if it's not available.)

I'm talking about choosing how to spend your gold in the shops. Should you buy powerful one-use items or is it better to choose a slight permanent increase in combat ability? How should you prepare for tough uniques? Should you rather save money for buying something pricier later?

In Mist this kind of preparation and making the right shopping choices is essential for survival. But it may well be that shops work much better in Mist than in Vanilla because your town visits are limited, and you can almost never afford to buy everything you want.

[Magnate]

I'm talking about choosing how to spend your gold in the shops. Should you buy powerful one-use items or is it better to choose a slight permanent increase in combat ability? How should you prepare for tough uniques? Should you rather save money for buying something pricier later?

In Mist this kind of preparation and making the right shopping choices is essential for survival. But it may well be that shops work much better in Mist than in Vanilla because your town visits are limited, and you can almost never afford to buy everything you want.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that in Vanilla that kind of strategic complexity is about the equivalent of "oh look, that group of snagas contains an orc shaman - some board complexity at last".

Stores do work much better in several variants, but personally I very anti the game of shopping so it's not the kind of strategic complexity I enjoy.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

For many people the enjoyment of Angband comes from turning your brain off, killing monsters and enjoying the slot machine feeling. Does building a more addicting and colourful Tolkien-themed slot machine count as "Depth"?

EDIT: Hey, isn't the V4 item system with prefixes exactly that, making the randomized item drops even more colourful and cool.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

One more point in the same vein: combat systems can be fun in many ways, and tactical depth is only one of them. An elegant system that produces surprises or "realistic" outcomes is fun even if it wouldn't add any tactical depth.

One example of "simulationist depth" (or whatever we want to call it) is adding Rolemaster criticals. EDIT: This kind of detail in the systems does not increase comprehension complexity much, because memorizing the critical hits is not relevant for making good tactical decisions.

Angband's systems don't necessarily need to be tactically or strategically interesting, they just need to be "fun". That kind of thinking might even be close to the original Moria/Angband philosophy -- didn't the designers draw inspiration mainly from Rolemaster and AD&D?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

We might find out sources of comprehension complexity by reading "Newbie needs help" posts.

Things like this may be the worst stumbling blocks:

• Players don't know about Word of Recall. That's a seriously unintuitive mechanic.
• Players don't know that in this game you are supposed to run away all the time, and to always plan your escape. Players don't realize that switching the dungeon level has almost no cost, which changes the whole strategy.
• Players have no idea about which monsters are actually dangerous, and no idea about what kind of objects you need to be better protected from them. This kind of comprehension complexity is built into the game on purpose (monster memory).
• Slightly more experienced players start to ask When should I dive?, having no knowledge about the dangers on the deeper levels. They ask on the forums what kind of resistances they need before they can dive. In most other games you don't need to choose how fast you dive, so this sort of comprehension complexity is unique to Angband.
• How do I improve my damage per turn in combat? (Newbies don't even know to ask this, they just use real life knowledge to wield long swords rather than daggers.)

We may find that some items on the list are things that we actually want to keep complex, because dealing with that complexity is a big part of what playing Angband is all about. Some items on the list may be cured by making more intuitive systems, others by improving documentation and creating a tutorial mode.

EDIT: Perhaps the system that produces most comprehension complexity is actually the stairs system and infinite dungeons, not the combat system? (Taking into account Word of Recall, having to learn that you need to run away all the time, and "How fast should I dive" questions.)

[half]

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?

Our approach was to keep the numbers as small as possible for a game that includes a bit of randomness. One key decision was that HP was not going to represent dodging, but just endurance. So AC (called evasion in Sil) increases with experience, but HP (called health in Sil) doesn't. This just makes sense to me and was something I'd always wanted to see in a pen and paper RPG system, so I decided to try to balance around that base idea.

A typical starting hero in Sil has around 35 health, but could be as low as 20. Monsters have health on a similar scale:

Bat ~ 3
Orc ~ 20
Troll ~ 40
Ancient Dragon ~ 125
Morgoth = 500 (though would be lower if you were meant to kill him)

I found that on this scale, I could fit in things like +1 damage side to the damage dice per point of strength (while still having about 8 plausible strength values). I also had enough flexibility to make 20 or so weapon types that were all different to each other (this was something I really wanted to try after being frustrated with how similar they all are in D&D and Angband). This was aided by the system making 2d5 quite different to 1d10, by weapon weight mattering a lot, by having penalties to hit on unwieldy weapons and bonuses to evasion on parrying weapons like swords. I probably didn't need quite so many extra ways to change a weapon, but they were all there in the weapon stats in Angband, though largely unused.

I'm really quite against high number integer damage (e.g. 9,999 damage hits in Final Fantasy). I like to keep it at a scale where each point matters.

When I'm inclined to make Sil combat more complicated, I remind myself of how many systems there are that are good and much less complex. For example the power/toughness in Magic the Gathering, or power/toughness with no healing in the Assassin's Creed card game. This makes me think: oh, maybe I could have a game where shortswords do 2 damage, longswords 3, greatswords 4, and leather subtracts one damage, and mail subtracts 2... Ultimately something on these lines might be too simple for a game with so much focus on one-to-many combat, but given how many windshield kills there are in most roguelikes, I do have to wonder if a system like this could work!

[half]

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.

One key similarity is between rare objects/artefacts/monsters in Angband and cards in MtG. If a card isn't in the game you are playing, its complexity is irrelevant (at least to play: drafting or deck building doesn't have this feature). The same is true for artefacts. There isn't much problem having 200 of them behind the scenes if only 1 appears each hour of play.

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.

I like this idea, and would love to see more things like this in roguelikes. There is a minor aspect of this behind the scenes in morale calculations in Sil: monsters in LOS of other monsters of their type get a morale bonus, and this is quadrupled if the monster they see is a leader of their type. Also, these bonuses are turned to penalties if the monster they see is fleeing. This leads to nice holding, routing and rallying behaviour of monsters. This is fairly complex rules-wise, but is not really a problem as the player doesn't need to know the rule: it gives fairly intuitive and dramatic behaviour -- especially if they kill the captain and see all the little ones fleeing.

We also considered a new monster flag for captains and the like which would be like leadership in Wesnoth: monsters of the same type which are adjacent to the leader get some fairly large bonus to combat (or you could use LOS again). This might even be nicer than the version you mention.

In my view, one of the main advantages of roguelikes over other RPGs is positional tactical combat. Adding to the positional nature like this really plays to their strengths. This is why we have Flanking, Charge, and Zone of Control abilities in Sil. Giving things like this to monsters too would be great. Halls of Mist has a lot of unique features that try to enhance positional play.

[half]

It's kind of hard to explain why making changes to Angband is such an unpleasant experience - either you live through it, or you read a couple of years-worth of barracking to get the flavour. But if you call it somethingelseband, everybody says how well you've done to fix all those stupid flaws. You really couldn't make it up.

I completely understand, having lurked here for years before Sil was released. It is hard to believe the anger and hate that can be directed against the people who are using their free time to help improve a game. Players can easily be their worst enemy by derailing game development and making the developers feel bad about themselves when they are actually improving the game. I'm thankful that the Sil player community is so nice!

[half]

I think global speed increases, as occurs in V, is absolutely out of the question if simplicity is desired.

In Sil, there are 4 possible speeds: 1, 2, 3, 4. This is a simple linear system with speed 3 being 3 times as fast as speed 1 etc. Standard speed is 2. Speed boosts and penalties are all +1 or -1 to speed. Player speed is capped to [1, 3] and most monsters are speed 2 or 3. Incredibly fast monsters are at 4. Potions of speed 'only' make you 50% faster than normal, which is still an insanely large boost. There is an incredibly small amount of permanent speed boost and most play throughs won't have it. Even if you do have it, it is not as amazing as it first appears, since it doesn't help with the most important battles where you would be at speed 3 due to potions anyway.

I find this works well. It is more fine-grained than early Angband (which I think had speeds 1, 2, 4, 6), and much less fine-grained than modern Angband.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

One key similarity is between rare objects/artefacts/monsters in Angband and cards in MtG. If a card isn't in the game you are playing, its complexity is irrelevant (at least to play: drafting or deck building doesn't have this feature). The same is true for artefacts. There isn't much problem having 200 of them behind the scenes if only 1 appears each hour of play.

I would love to see a *band that picked randomly 10 player special abilities out of a deck of 100. Those ten would be your character development options. For each ten character levels you'd get to pick one from the list.

The board game Agricola uses a mechanic like this, and it's super fun. I love games where I have to craft a strategy based on a random starting point. (Sil's Christmas presents functioned like this!)

[half]

Ron Edward's Sorcerer, a roleplaying game, uses opposed pools of d10's. You don't add the rolls together. Instead, you player with the best single die roll wins. If there's a tie, count the second die.

That sounds like a lovely system to play with in person -- I imagine it would be quite exciting to make challenges. It reminds me of the White Wolf system which was also interesting. Each skill level is between 1 and 5 and each stat is too. A skill check involves rolling a d10 for each point of the relevant stat+skill level. For each die showing a number above the difficulty level you have a point of success. Often you only need one success to win. (there are a couple of other details too...)

When designing combat in Sil, the logic was like this:

1d20 + melee_score vs evasion_score + 10 (= D&D)
2d10 + melee_score vs evasion_score + 10 (= modified D&D)
1d10 + melee_score vs 1d10 + evasion_score

This last one was equivalent to the middle one, but is *so* much more elegant due to its symmetry. It also led me to make the evasion increase with experience like the melee score, which is much more realistic and much better gameplay than D&D (where low level fighters in a duel miss each other 90% of the time and high level ones hit each other 90% of the time...)

I ended up using this for all skills, making skill checks opposed, symmetrical rolls. However, it turned out that 1d10 v 1d10 made each point of melee and evasion a bit too good (i.e. coarse-grained), so combat was (somewhat inelegantly) changed to 1d20 v 1d20.