Sil: What are your least liked features of Sil?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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."

[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.

[taptap]

I like a somewhat abstract mechanism to force descent. The other way that occurs to me would be downstairs only - which I admire as a challenge - but I am not able to achieve that and it doesn't work well for different builds (singers when the only corridor is blocked by molds)... imo the standard approach of people not socialized into grinding is most likely scout / clear a floor and go down, but not do it, go up, go down, do it again there might be something useful here, do it once more, who would voluntarily do that?

New curse messages: Like it for gloves of treachery or fury / vampiric weapons (items with a kind of benefit) but the -1 dex ring?

[emulord]

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.

The roguelike Alphaman had a great clock for that. The Grinch was going to release a nerve toxin in a week, so you had to stop him before that time.
There was also a food and sleep clock, which tended not to matter as much.

[emulord]

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.

However, you still have weight limits, reasonable drop limits, and exp limits. The last one is not true in Angband, so theres less "oh I should wait to dive til i can get a new spell" incentive. Plus you can still run into purple molds, worm masses, situations to kill you, etc. Grinding forever is not the optimum strategy and any roguelike player worth his salt knows that.

I don't want to scum forever, I just want to not be forced quite as quickly while I'm learning the game.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

The roguelike Alphaman had a great clock for that. The Grinch was going to release a nerve toxin in a week, so you had to stop him before that time.

Larn was probably the first roguelike with a time limit like this. You had to find a cure potion for your ailing daughter. Larn is one of my all-time favorite games.

[Patashu]

However, you still have weight limits, reasonable drop limits, and exp limits. The last one is not true in Angband, so theres less "oh I should wait to dive til i can get a new spell" incentive. Plus you can still run into purple molds, worm masses, situations to kill you, etc. Grinding forever is not the optimum strategy and any roguelike player worth his salt knows that.

I don't want to scum forever, I just want to not be forced quite as quickly while I'm learning the game.

Forges (including enchanted and the artifact forge) and artifacts can be generated any time you reload a level, making scumming until you have a full set of artifacts optimal play if there is no clock.

[Derakon]

Perhaps the player could select from a range of time limits at the beginning of the game, then? And of course these would impact their score. So you could have a leisurely time limit, then the current limit, and then a strict one.