Sil: What are your least liked features of Sil?

[debo]

If you really hate them that much, and your builds tend to be heavy melee/evasion to start, something as simple as buying one less point of each and putting all the XP in Will can go a long way to resisting the drain when you do run into one.

[BlueFish]

I've had it with purple molds. I'm going to take the one-time, short term hit of thinking I'm "cheating", and remove them permanently from my game. The builds I play don't find the early game easy. The flat percentage chance that your character will be hobbled by one at 150 or 200 feet before you've found 2 radius light, and hundreds of feet before a likely means of restoring it, I'm just done with it. The early game is hard enough as it is.

[taptap]

No, but they can be subtly opposed. As every programmer butts their head against a few hundred times in their lives, an elegant "design" doesn't necessarily translate to the best user experience.

I really would be careful what I wish for - when the changes you propose lead to wildkhaine, clouded, hm etc. to win with 15 artefacts a little too often, the result will be more likely a generally increased rarity of artefacts. The system should allow you and me to find enough to get by but prevent the few from finding too much at the same time.

For this discussion: Artefact creation depends on depth as well as far as I know, so all questions of principle aside the likelihood of finding artefacts goes up as I go down, whether I miss a few unrevealed artefacts or not. Skipping floors early / midgame might lead to missing a few artefacts but it gives you more time to spend to in deeper depth where you find more. It is imo more completionism than actual experienced scarcity of artefacts because of "not fully exploring" floors that leads to this argument.

Preserve ON even in the limited version would penalize the use of staffs of treasures as there is a premium on not revealing artefacts. General preserve ON takes the sting out of many fun situations where you try to lure enemies away even if you are too weak to handle them because they are sitting on or close to an item you want. Removing this experience would make pacifists, which I find currently very fun to play, dull - as you get a chance to find everything again as long as you explore more. This applies to a certain extent even to the limited version of preserve ON as you hear the enemies from afar with Listen (i.e. you get to decide before revealing any potential artefacts around and below them). Basically, pacifism would change from calculated risk taking, positioning, luring, strategic noise making to complete avoidance.

[BlueFish]

What do you mean by "serves designers more than players"? The designers are trying to make a fun game. The players want to have fun when playing. Their goals are not exactly opposed to each other.

No, but they can be subtly opposed. As every programmer butts their head against a few hundred times in their lives, an elegant "design" doesn't necessarily translate to the best user experience.

[decoy]

I'd like to say in response to people complaining about Lore-Master that it's only the existence of Lore-Master that keeps me from listing "the ID minigame" among my least liked features of Sil.

Yes, I absolutely love being able to spend experience to "opt out" of the "ID minigame." Not my idea of fun, so I appreciate the ability to opt out after a few hundred feet.

My least-liked feature is the randomness of the lower levels. I've had amazing games where the difference between an amazingly fun game and yet another corpse at 300' was one lucky find of a nice weapon or lantern or something. I realize that if it were easier, the winner-board would be even more overrun than it already is, but I do end up effectively "throwing away" probably dozens of characters for every decent run.

EDIT: whoops, I meant upper levels, not lower levels. Early levels is perhaps more clear.

[locus]

Level feelings are the worst, most gamey nonsense. Definitely don't want them in Sil.

I dunno how "realistic" it is that artifact generation density goes down over time, but if it has good gameplay effects it has good gameplay effects. The only issue I can see is that excessive level-generation artificially reduces artifact density because you'll create a bunch of artifacts and drive up the artifact counter. Maybe fighting stair abuse is all to the good but it seems bad to do it with opaque mechanics.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Can you be more specific? I know persistent dungeon roguelikes like Nethack would make no sense with "preserve". But the design differences between persistent dungeons and effectively infinite and non-persistent dungeons are pretty clear. I think it unfairly minimizes the importance of "preserve" as a design consideration to chalk it up to arbitrary culture based on what you're used to.

I remain convinced that a preserve=off mode serves designers more than players.

Philosophically, I'd intuitively side with you on this, but I can accept half's and Scatha's point of view, also. My take on it: generated dungeon levels and any objects on them are much more "real" in Sil than the vast infinity of dungeon levels that the RNG is potentially able to create.

If you choose not to explore a level, there will be consequences. Skipping a level is a wasted opportunity. Sil is not really about infinite dungeons in the same way as Angband is. (I thought Sil was Angband with a time limit, originally, but turns out it is something else.)

Gameplay-wise I just accepted that switching levels prematurely is supposed to have a little cost in Sil. I guess that will impact my playing, but I'm not sure whether the impact will be positive or negative. I'll have to actually play the game a lot more to find out.

[Derakon]

What do you mean by "serves designers more than players"? The designers are trying to make a fun game. The players want to have fun when playing. Their goals are not exactly opposed to each other.

[BlueFish]

Maybe for us veteran Angbanders it is harder than usual to treat dungeon levels as something more than an abstraction. People used to other roguelikes treat dungeon levels with more respect.

Can you be more specific? I know persistent dungeon roguelikes like Nethack would make no sense with "preserve". But the design differences between persistent dungeons and effectively infinite and non-persistent dungeons are pretty clear. I think it unfairly minimizes the importance of "preserve" as a design consideration to chalk it up to arbitrary culture based on what you're used to.

I remain convinced that a preserve=off mode serves designers more than players.

[BlueFish]

The point was that the behaviour depending on whether items had been in-game-identified, which I found completely unpalatable, could be avoided. I was trying to find a better preserve mode, not build up a strawman!



Thanks, this section was really helpful for me to understand the intuition driving the idea of preserve mode: the idea that levels are just an abstraction which realise the idea of a huge dungeon stretching on and on.

This suggests another alternate version of preserve mode which I'd be much happier with: preserve artefacts unless they've been seen (rather than identified). This has much less potential to distort behaviour, since you'll never know what it is you're not seeing. The only distortion I can think of is that it might make you reluctant to use Staves of Treasures on a level if you're worried you might be forced off. You might reduce the radius of Treasures (something we'd wondered about anyway) if this was an issue.

Yes, this would be good, and would solve 90% of the practical issues with how the current system penalizes players for not fully exploring levels.

It's not clear to me that is better: Sil has reasonably small levels, and I think they can be taken more at face value than as abstractions, but I appreciate the idea of wanting something in that direction.

Thanks Scatha. Sil's levels are I suppose relatively small compared to Vanilla, but the time limit makes the opportunity cost of exploring them larger than Vanilla. I do not believe that Preserve=off works better in Sil than in Vanilla; in fact I believe the opposite. In Vanilla, players who are truly worried about it can, at no cost to them, explore the levels. Even this though was found to be sub-optimal design, because it encourages a boring style of play, for no practical benefit.

Sorry, when you referred to making the first couple of artefacts more likely I thought you meant ensuring that artefacts could reasonably be found early in the game (which is also an issue), rather than making sure everyone has some across playthroughs.

However, I don't think that there's a real distinction between making the early ones more common and the later ones less common (with an appropriate shift in baseline rarity). It's all trying to deal with the problem that you get the best stories when there are somewhere between, say, 4 and 12 artefacts you come across over the game, but that some characters explore a lot more than three times as much of the dungeon as others, so we don't want to make the number of artefacts found linear with the amount of dungeon explored.

This seems an overly complicated design which provides little of practical benefit, as far as I can see. To intentionally design out the intuitive and realistic correlation between "number of items found" and "amount of dungeon explored", seems like it should be addressing a real problem with game-play. I'm not sure this addresses any problem other than a "gut feeling" of the designers that it's more correct or elegant.

Even the way you and half explain the design considerations point to the problem - you're not trying to penalize players for not exploring parts of levels. You're only trying to control the number of artifacts *found*. Whatever artifacts are lost without being seen is a side effect and not intentionally designed. It may be "baked in" to the balancing on some level, but it still introduces a motivation for the player to fully explore levels which is more gaming the system than playing the game and creating a compelling story.

I think this mindset is ported over from Angband, where it's more correct. It's a little weird talking about losing things permanently in Sil, since nothing is permanent -- it only lasts a few tens of thousands of turns. Sure, you might never find Glamdring because it was on the floor on a level at 600' you abandoned, but you're far more likely never to find Glamdring because it just never gets generated. So Glamdring was never really yours to lose.

But a player always wants to feel like there's a chance they'll find it. Preserve=off undermines that, for no practical benefit to the player.

You and half are right that if the mechanic was a complete secret, players wouldn't be upset by it, since they could never deduce for sure that that's what's going on. But it's not a complete secret, and the feelings of players are real, while they're playing.

I understand the elegance of the system from a designers perspective, but a Preserve system (such as the one you propose, or simply Vanilla's system) seems to give you as the designer more control over the players' experience of playing the game. It doesn't seem intentional that leaving levels unexplored has any effect on the number of artifacts a player finds. But I believe it does have a significant effect, all other things being equal.

[taptap]

One-and-half handed weapons

I am not a huge fan of the change to the STR bonus system. I understand that more simplicity was needed, but it ended up being a rather big reduction in the power of throwing weapons (which aren't exactly overpowered anyway) and it made two-handed weapons (at least swords) more or less completely redundant (unless you use knockback). One of the logical problems before was that despite the +2 bonus to damage sides when two-handed often enough you ended with more damage one-handed than two-handed while now you always do more damage two-handed.

So an idea for the one-and-half hand weapons:

What about capping the two-handed damage of one-and-half hand weapons to the max damage it could do one-handed? I.e. a 4 lb 3d3 Bastard Sword would be limited to 3d7 w/o momentum with STR 4 there is no benefit for wielding it two handed anymore and there would be a benefit for taking a Greatsword instead. Basically, wielding it two-handed would give a STR-bonus of 2 for attacks with the weapon. (I am not sure whether there currently is a +4 bonus for knockback for one-and-half hand weapons wielded in both hands or not, reducing this to the 2 points STR bonus given for wielding them two-handed would be fine with me.)

Related topic knockback: I would limit effective STR for knockback to the possible STR bonus for the weapon, maybe with allowance to add two-handed bonus afterwards? There are some balance issues, but knocking back with a dagger feels just wrong. Before knockback almost completely depended on weapon weight, now it doesn't figure at all.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

We get this a bit already with Staves of Revelations when people are hunting for forges, but it's limited by the number of charges they have.

That doesn't sound abuse, but a sensible thing that a person with a Staff of Revelations would do in a fantasy story.

Alright, after changing my perspective on Sil's dungeon levels, I'm pretty happy with the current system. I like how vaults and artifacts use the same system.

[Scatha]

Any kind of level feeling encourages stair abuse, unfortunately. We get this a bit already with Staves of Revelations when people are hunting for forges, but it's limited by the number of charges they have.

You could also think about having a preserve mode for the unique vaults, but it's not so obvious there's a clean rule. I thought you could allow them to be re-generated unless you'd seen any square of them, but then realised that if you're loud enough you might lure monsters out of the vault and realise it was there without ever seeing it.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Two other things that are only generated once are the unique forge and the greater vaults (4 out of 5 of which are where 4 very powerful uniques live and would be very odd to see twice on different levels).

Are there "level feelings" that warn about these, and artifacts? That would make the system completely fair to me, and would be all the telegraphing I'd want. Perhaps the Angband's traditional "You feel there's something special on this level" tweaked to suit Sil's sensibilities.

100% sure level feelings would allow you to game the system, though. Maybe a chance of getting a level feeling that is somehow based on your attributes or special abilities. (And perhaps you've already thought about this and implemented it somehow.)

[half]

Are there other significant mechanics tied to dungeon levels, or is losing any artifacts on the level the odd one out?

Two other things that are only generated once are the unique forge and the greater vaults (4 out of 5 of which are where 4 very powerful uniques live and would be very odd to see twice on different levels).

Maybe for us veteran Angbanders it is harder than usual to treat dungeon levels as something more than an abstraction. People used to other roguelikes treat dungeon levels with more respect.

I think that is right.