Sil: What are your least liked features of Sil?

[Derakon]

I like it. Very much in keeping with how people in Tolkein react to the Rings of Power, which are the only overtly malicious magical items in the series, to my knowledge.

[half]

The game messages are: "Are you sure you want to discard your current torch (Y/N)? You throw away the Wooden Torch." So even if it's slightly odd, at least it's clear to the player what's happening.

That is a good message for glossing over this mechanic.

Going on what Scatha said earlier, I'm thinking of changing the curse messages in Sil to something like "It seems to be cursed, preventing you from removing it" to "You cannot bear to part with it."

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I like the way you have picked a light mechanic that avoids the problem I mentioned, but even in your setting it is pretty odd for removing a torch to cause it to disappear. If I'm going to do something odd like that, I'm happy to just solve the problem at its root.

The game messages are: "Are you sure you want to discard your current torch (Y/N)? You throw away the Wooden Torch." So even if it's slightly odd, at least it's clear to the player what's happening.

[half]

I like the sound of all of these.

To add to that slightly...

I like the way you have picked a light mechanic that avoids the problem I mentioned, but even in your setting it is pretty odd for removing a torch to cause it to disappear. If I'm going to do something odd like that, I'm happy to just solve the problem at its root.

[half]

Playtesting the next version of Halls of Mist, I find I'm really happy with my three clocks: Torches (including powerful ego torches; taking off a torch destroys it), Mist Phantasms (that start to appear if you spend too much time on a dungeon level, and give no rewards to the player) and the ever increasing Min Depth (+1 when you take the stairs down). I like how there are both strategic and tactical level clocks.

All of the clocks make perfect flavour sense, which helps telegraphing the mechanics to the player. It's my own weird fantasy multiverse, so I've been able to mold the flavour to fit the mechanics.

I like the sound of all of these. You are entirely right that having your own setting helps a lot in allowing flexibility in choosing thematic mechanics.

[HallucinationMushroom]

I personally like the way the clock works.

However, I think a good alternative might be to let the player budget the clock however they see fit. Just tell the player, "Look, you have this many turns until you must enter the throne-room." Replace minimum depth with recommended depth to nudge players that this is where they really ought to be at. It keeps the clock, keeps player autonomy and nudges players that this is what they ought to be doing.

This could tie in with why we are trying to get the Silmaril anyway. We need to fetch yon Silmaril to win fair maiden, or light up our bedroom to read, or something... but if it isn't accomplished by x amount of turns, then it doesn't matter anyway.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Sil actually started with this, but it didn't work so well. One issue is that it needs to be really telegraphed to the user. If they don't understand what is going on, they'll definitely won't react to the game being difficult by diving, but will stay where they are. Even then, unless you actually make it more difficult to be shallower than deeper, they will tend to stay shallow. If you do make it more difficult, then as Patashu says, why not just have forced descent?

Tight food or light clocks have similar issues. You really have to telegraph the game mechanic (which tends not to make any real-world sense, like your food version and thus breaks immersion) and even then players will die by not diving enough. They will also feel it is less heroic to be dying to lack of light and hunger. Light also has troubles with not allowing permanent light, and with the fact that good play would involve frequently turning your light off.

Playtesting the next version of Halls of Mist, I find I'm really happy with my three clocks: Torches (including powerful ego torches; taking off a torch destroys it), Mist Phantasms (that start to appear if you spend too much time on a dungeon level, and give no rewards to the player) and the ever increasing Min Depth (+1 when you take the stairs down). I like how there are both strategic and tactical level clocks.

All of the clocks make perfect flavour sense, which helps telegraphing the mechanics to the player. It's my own weird fantasy multiverse, so I've been able to mold the flavour to fit the mechanics.

[evilmike]

The reason why NetHack works (and IIRC why Rogue works, though I forget its exact mechanics) is because they don't allow replaying of levels. As soon as you allow that, you have to find some more artificial means of pushing the player along, or else accept that players can break the difficulty by playing at an overly-slow pace.

Rogue basically forces the ironman challenge on you, except it's even harder. Each level has one random stair (which you do not start on). Until you find the amulet you can only go downwards, with the amulet you can go up or down. Levels are non-persistent. Grinding IS possible but only with an extremely rare combination of items.

Nethack is very exploitable. Levels are persistent, but it doesn't really matter... with enough effort, you can pretty much do whatever you want.

[half]

Offtopic for now, but my biggest pet peeve is still the invisible forced descent clock. Can't it be a birth option that decreases score? Even a cheat option would be nice. Id like to only be constrained by the food/light clocks at first, and encouraged to advance with the marginal exp gains.

I couldnt ever get into sil because of this reason. I was forced to dive/die before I figured out AI for things and good builds. I dont mind dieing from my lack of skill, but dont force pseudo-ironman on a new player.

Decreasing marginal experience gains would convince me to go deeper, but many people need more inducement. They would see decreasing experience meaning that they just have to scum for longer. I don't think it is enough on its own.

In general, players left to their own devices typically want to wait until they are safe in order to continue down. This is exacerbated due to permadeath -- it is just the rational decision. They weigh this against boredom, but this just means that they grind until they reach their boredom threshold, so you pretty much guarantee that all the players of your game are near their threshold most of the time -- not a good thing. This is worse again when you consider that in Sil some builds are not very viable. If someone has such a build, I think the kindest thing to do is to force them to a difficulty level that is challenging and interesting (perhaps too challenging) and then kill their character, so they are free to start again and try new things. This works particularly well in Sil as it is shorter than Nethack, Angband, Crawl, and Adom.

In general, one of the key features of the forced descent is that it keeps the play at a challenging level, which is good for overall player enjoyment (even if the moment when you are killed is not fun).

Regarding the Edain, I think you might be thinking of success the wrong way (which is partly my fault). Most players will never be able to win with them, but you can succeed without winning. See how deep you can get, and try to beat that depth. Can you get all the way to 500 ft? To 750 ft? In a future version, I will probably put a success message on death if you get the furthest you have so far with a given race, rather than the generic failure message.

Regarding stats, we'd actually defined 0 in a stat as the average for the Edain (the allocation of stat points on top of this is because you are a hero, not a typical person). We therefore really want to keep the default 0s for Edain. If anything, we'd make them easier by making the other races less good and the monsters less good. But we don't think that is required. We want to be able to give great players a serious challenge to win and Edain do that pretty well.

[half]

For what it's worth, what I eventually want to experiment with in My Own Variant™ is having an "alarm level" in the dungeon that would increase with time, which in turn determines the difficulty of the monsters that you face, but not the rewards that you get for beating them. So if you hang around at dungeon level 1, the game starts pulling in harder and harder monsters to fight, but you still get level-1 rewards. Getting the balance on this right would be tricky, though.

Sil actually started with this, but it didn't work so well. One issue is that it needs to be really telegraphed to the user. If they don't understand what is going on, they'll definitely won't react to the game being difficult by diving, but will stay where they are. Even then, unless you actually make it more difficult to be shallower than deeper, they will tend to stay shallow. If you do make it more difficult, then as Patashu says, why not just have forced descent?

Tight food or light clocks have similar issues. You really have to telegraph the game mechanic (which tends not to make any real-world sense, like your food version and thus breaks immersion) and even then players will die by not diving enough. They will also feel it is less heroic to be dying to lack of light and hunger. Light also has troubles with not allowing permanent light, and with the fact that good play would involve frequently turning your light off.

[taptap]

3) Track the amount of food the player has found.

There are hunger items in the game! And there is sustenance + mind over body. This approach would make hunger impossible and sustenance an opportunity for grinding - an opportunity Angband socialized players wouldn't fail to exploit. In fact, even balanced the game attacking the player by starvation looks way more ham-fisted to me than a somewhat abstract forced descent. So even if balanced, you would lose one interesting mechanic / decision area to make a substitute for forced descent.

And for light: there are several more or less common permanent light sources in the game.

[Patashu]

For what it's worth, what I eventually want to experiment with in My Own Variant™ is having an "alarm level" in the dungeon that would increase with time, which in turn determines the difficulty of the monsters that you face, but not the rewards that you get for beating them. So if you hang around at dungeon level 1, the game starts pulling in harder and harder monsters to fight, but you still get level-1 rewards. Getting the balance on this right would be tricky, though.

This is mechanically almost identical to a forced descent mechanic.

[Derakon]

If there is no descent clock then reloading a level indefinitely will keep getting you more food, more light, etc. allowing you to sustain yourself, and more equipment, more artifacts, more consumables, etc. giving you an incentive to scum forever. We're back in Angband territory.

Instead of forcing the player to descend by the current method, would it be feasible to simply stop generating light/food at overly-shallow depths? That is:

1) Decide on a total amount of food that the player should have over the course of the game. Call this F.
2) There are 20 levels. Therefore, over the long run, each level should have F / 20 food.
3) Track the amount of food the player has found. When they have found F / 20, newly-generated levels at dungeon level 1 cannot have more food. At 2F / 20, dungeon level 2 stops generating food. Et cetera.

And do something similar for lights.

Functionally what this means is that if you want to hang around at shallow depths, you can, but you'll be forced downwards eventually because you won't have the food or light to continue.

The biggest problem with this approach is that players will not connect the "not enough food/light" problem with the "at too shallow of a depth" problem. This is presumably why Scatha and Half decided to use the solution they did -- I don't pretend that the approach I suggested is especially novel. Sil's current approach is hamfisted but also very hard to misunderstand.

The reason why NetHack works (and IIRC why Rogue works, though I forget its exact mechanics) is because they don't allow replaying of levels. As soon as you allow that, you have to find some more artificial means of pushing the player along, or else accept that players can break the difficulty by playing at an overly-slow pace.

For what it's worth, what I eventually want to experiment with in My Own Variant™ is having an "alarm level" in the dungeon that would increase with time, which in turn determines the difficulty of the monsters that you face, but not the rewards that you get for beating them. So if you hang around at dungeon level 1, the game starts pulling in harder and harder monsters to fight, but you still get level-1 rewards. Getting the balance on this right would be tricky, though.

[Patashu]

Offtopic for now, but my biggest pet peeve is still the invisible forced descent clock. Can't it be a birth option that decreases score? Even a cheat option would be nice. Id like to only be constrained by the food/light clocks at first, and encouraged to advance with the marginal exp gains.

I couldnt ever get into sil because of this reason. I was forced to dive/die before I figured out AI for things and good builds. I dont mind dieing from my lack of skill, but dont force pseudo-ironman on a new player.

If there is no descent clock then reloading a level indefinitely will keep getting you more food, more light, etc. allowing you to sustain yourself, and more equipment, more artifacts, more consumables, etc. giving you an incentive to scum forever. We're back in Angband territory.

[emulord]

Offtopic for now, but my biggest pet peeve is still the invisible forced descent clock. Can't it be a birth option that decreases score? Even a cheat option would be nice. Id like to only be constrained by the food/light clocks at first, and encouraged to advance with the marginal exp gains.

I couldnt ever get into sil because of this reason. I was forced to dive/die before I figured out AI for things and good builds. I dont mind dieing from my lack of skill, but dont force pseudo-ironman on a new player.