Sil-Q Review

[wobbly]

Ok I'll pay that song of delving is good right from the get go. Not sure I have the patience & concentration to put this kind of build through at the moment, but the principal is sound:

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=22209

[Quirk]

Ah! I also took Delvings on my last Lorien pacifist, in the competition. I personally think knowing where your next stairs are is a very substantial advantage for a weak stealthy character, but I am more inclined to pacifist play than most.

I was imagining with characters who do a lot of damage but hit less often. e.g. a STR 4 dwarf in a hauberk. This matters because the difference between characters is often much bigger than between weapons.

I think the STR 4 dwarf in a hauberk was often at a substantial disadvantage before as late game enemies became more and more capable of overwhelming the protection the armour offered. There was definitely a bit of intentional buffing going on.

It might have become a necessary-for-the-throne-room at that point, except that people have herbs.

This is a very real concern with Whirlwind Attack, yes: when people do get stuck in situations where they feel they want or need the effect, the herbs exist. The herbs are also quite flavourful so I am reluctant to drop them.

I think it would be potentially viable as an early game skill, when people don't know which herbs are which and when they're getting surrounded by orcs. Prerequisites don't help it at all. There is some difficulty in making a skill that you have to jump through hoops for worth it. The top four skills in the Melee tree in Sil 1.3 were Rapid Attack, Two Weapon Fighting, Knockback, and Whirlwind Attack. Rapid Attack is good but requires a high melee score to use well, Two Weapon Fighting is niche, Knockback is extremely niche (I think the only build that it's really sensible on is using Polearm Mastery) and original Whirlwind Attack is useful only if you're playing suicidally.

I would argue that if you swapped any of these with Power, Power would see more play than the original skill. Power is often even better than Strength. I don't think this means that we must move Power up the tree - thematically it fits nicely at the start - but the top of the tree needs to be worth the cost in terms of prerequisites and more valuable for the right build than just buying more Melee points. Ideal is a skill that does something reasonably cool which is also an effective pick (e.g. Zone of Control, Sprinting, Listen), but these skills are quite hard to find - particularly since I don't want to make a Morgoth-killing skill.

Any skill ideas you want to bounce off me will get serious consideration, this is certain.

[Quirk]

Sharpness thoughts:
Losing 2 armour dice for normal sharpness and all for Angrist is a bit awkward.

I'm contemplating "sharp" and "famously sharp", with all the weapons in the whetting spell as well as Angrist being the latter. (I don't believe anything in canon indicates Angrist should necessarily be sharper than the others).

"Famously sharp" would negate all armour, but also gain no damage sides from strength, because a weapon that cuts through rock doesn't require much strength to use. Rebalancing the weapons shouldn't be too hard from there - famously sharp polearms would be poised to become most dangerous, but upping their weight to make their criticals rarer would reduce this.

"Sharp" would negate just one armour die; this would make it weaker than a brand, but that would make it better balanced for lesser artefacts, egos, smithing, etc.

[Infinitum]

Don't like those two tbh. Armor Dice reduction is just a flat damage increase by another name unless you scale it off the # of enemy protection dice but at that point reducing sides is a cleaner solution imo.

Famously Sharp sounds like a lot fof added layers of complexity for something which isn't really needed in the game at the moment? It would also get back to the current hammer problem of people forging one supersharp weapon for use against statues and use whatever against everything else, no matter what penalties you give them otherwise. Also, Angrist is describad as if not sharp then.. hard? It's notwehorty enough for a unique effect imo.

Then Lúthien rising forbade the slaying of Curufin; but Beren despoiled him of his gear and weapons, and took his knife, sheathless by his side; iron it would cleave as if it were green wood.

[Scatha]

Sharp and famously sharp is quite elegant. If it played well enough I'd be in favour. (To make 'sharp' more distinct from extra damage it might be good if there were a couple more monsters with no protection at all; currently I think the only ones with substantial health are whispering shadows and distended spiders.)

I assume that famously sharp weapons would not be player forgeable. I have a slight worry that if they were too good it would make high-STR characters unappealing.

[Quirk]

Don't like those two tbh. Armor Dice reduction is just a flat damage increase by another name unless you scale it off the # of enemy protection dice but at that point reducing sides is a cleaner solution imo.

Ideal would be to have different mechanics for sharpness and bluntness.

Famously Sharp sounds like a lot fof added layers of complexity for something which isn't really needed in the game at the moment? It would also get back to the current hammer problem of people forging one supersharp weapon for use against statues and use whatever against everything else, no matter what penalties you give them otherwise. Also, Angrist is describad as if not sharp then.. hard? It's notwehorty enough for a unique effect imo.

Double sharpness is currently unforgeable, and only on Angrist. Nobody is forging anything for use on statues, particularly since blunt weapons work perfectly well there at present. Angrist is described as sharp, but when compared with the "Glaive of Gaurin whose gleaming stroke / did rive the rocks of Rodrim's hall", or "Celeg Aithorn who shall cleave the world" I don't see any particular reason for it to be considered sharper.

All the other famous sharp weapons are just "sharp" which is to say they halve enemy armour protection; Angrist ignores it.

[Quirk]

Sharp and famously sharp is quite elegant. If it played well enough I'd be in favour. (To make 'sharp' more distinct from extra damage it might be good if there were a couple more monsters with no protection at all; currently I think the only ones with substantial health are whispering shadows and distended spiders.)

I assume that famously sharp weapons would not be player forgeable. I have a slight worry that if they were too good it would make high-STR characters unappealing.

Oh god no. We'd keep them out of player forges as we have Angrist's sharpness.

Vampires, wights, shadows, horrors, maybe giants seem possible targets to reduce armour and increase HP. Trolls I can see going either way. Wolves maybe but they would need altered throughout. Shelob is definitely hard to pierce, men and dragons certainly should be well-armoured.

Edit: cave trolls probably should be more armoured than they are now. It was a scaled troll that notched Boromir's sword in Moria. So - not trolls in general. Hill trolls of the sort featured in the Hobbit and giants would likely work. I kind of want to have an interaction that can be engineered between hill trolls and sunlight now...

[Scatha]

Vampires, wights, shadows, horrors, maybe giants seem possible targets to reduce armour and increase HP. Trolls I can see going either way. Wolves maybe but they would need altered throughout.

Of these, Wights are the ones which feel most wrong to me to reduce armour for. That's partly from a feeling of being unconvinced how many strokes from a dagger could stop them, and partly from mechanically liking there being some critical-resistant foes with moderate armour.

Shelob is definitely hard to pierce, men and dragons certainly should be well-armoured.

Shelob is hard to pierce, but that seems to be related to her age. I think it argues for Ancient Spiders having high protection, and speaks less to the other spiders (including First Age Shelob!).

[wobbly]

Just double checked with loremaster & every monster seems to be currently setup as xd4 armour? Maybe there are some exceptions but it appears to be set to that pattern. So -1 die for sharpness is going to be fairly literally +1d4 damage unless you're planning to rework the armour on everything.

[wobbly]

I assume that famously sharp weapons would not be player forgeable. I have a slight worry that if they were too good it would make high-STR characters unappealing.

It would take a lot to make low str the go to. The mid game is much more of a pain & it's hard to get a more solid setup for 950' then Dramborleg and hador shield. There are stronger and flashier setups but that just does every enemy with the minimum amount of hassle. Troll guards have big hps not armour & big weapons get through ancient serpent armour via sheer brute force. 5 str (or 8 buffed with rapid attack) is the goal there and the black blades are 5lbers too I think.

[Quirk]

Just double checked with loremaster & every monster seems to be currently setup as xd4 armour? Maybe there are some exceptions but it appears to be set to that pattern. So -1 die for sharpness is going to be fairly literally +1d4 damage unless you're planning to rework the armour on everything.

Not everything has armour, and we're discussing stripping the armour off a couple more things. It will be 1d4 in most cases though.

I find myself pausing and wondering if it's okay, but currently calculating how much bonus damage sharpness will do against any enemy involves knowing how much armour they have, and it's quite hard to evaluate in a vacuum. I guess this is also true for bluntness. In both cases it's currently clear that it will be more beneficial against heavily armoured enemies, and this is not true of new sharpness, which is a small concern - new sharpness would only care if there was some armour capable of being pierced.

Reducing damage sides for bluntness by 1 incidentally reduces armour by 20%, not 25%, which is a small nerf. I still think it feels reasonably elegant but I'd need to look at weapon power.

[Quirk]

Zooming out...

In reality, sharp weapons are better against unarmoured opponents and blunt against armoured. Some dispensation can be made for magical sharpness.

However, we're discussing this in a context where blunt weapons consist of the warhammer, the quarterstaff and the sceptre. The first is undoubtedly a battlefield blunt weapon. The other two are dubious - one was an effective poor man's weapon against the lightly armoured, the other not even a weapon and existing only in tiny numbers. They are also relatively ineffective in Sil.

Perhaps it's better to look at the weapons harder and consider what would make them make more sense. I am not sure crowns and sceptres should be anywhere near as common as they are, or even if they should exist at all. Quarterstaffs and staffs with magical effects also coexist oddly.

[Infinitum]

Well, I guess Gandalf wore a staff in the canon but didn't he use Glamdring for actual fighting? Making staffs equippable in the offhand and only provide passive bonuses (ie effectively making them shields) could be one way to go about it (pretty sure I've seen it suggested a couple of years back).

Either that or severely cut weight, maybe add a to-hit bonus and give them a niche as critical-oriented defensive two-handers, but that also seems a bit meh tbh. Sceptres and staffs could probably be folded into one cathegory, especially as the Sceptre egos make more sense as Wizard staffs anyhow.

EDIT: Ooops, meant Quarterstaffs. Hope the context was clear enough.

[Quirk]

Well, I guess Gandalf wore a staff in the canon but didn't he use Glamdring for actual fighting? Making staffs equippable in the offhand and only provide passive bonuses (ie effectively making them shields) could be one way to go about it (pretty sure I've seen it suggested a couple of years back).

Either that or severely cut weight, maybe add a to-hit bonus and give them a niche as critical-oriented defensive two-handers, but that also seems a bit meh tbh. Sceptres and staffs could probably be folded into one cathegory, especially as the Sceptre egos make more sense as Wizard staffs anyhow.

I think you are entirely right with regard to Gandalf and Glamdring. Gandalf's staff is mostly used for magic. In the Hobbit he makes a light on it in Bilbo's dining room (it is called a wand later in the book on more than one occasion, perplexingly, when he does so again, but it is used several times for light). If any staff in Sil follows Tolkien, it is the staff of Light.

He breaks the bridge the Balrog stands on by smiting it with his staff so hard the staff also breaks, but he uses Glamdring to actually fight the Great Goblin and the Balrog.

It is however an assistant to the magic rather than a key part of it - most of Gandalf's explosions and telekinesis and reading of thoughts don't make use of it at all.

There is a tension between Sil's inherited Angband-consumables and the way things in Tolkien work. A staff actually enchanted to perform great magics on its own I imagine would function like the Palantirs, or the Rings: limitless in effect, but requiring effort from the user to master it (and in the case of the Rings, exacting a slow and subtle cost).

Perhaps the bigger answer here would be to ditch the idea of blunt weapons as such, retaining only the hammer, to slide melee weapons into a single smithing category, and to rework staffs and artefacts in general to better approximate attuning to and attempting to master a difficult to control item. This line of thinking takes me quite far from original Sil, though, which is a tendency I've always tried to rein in before.

As for the regalia of kings, I can imagine a crown or even sceptre imbued with great power adorning some dragon-hoard of Angband, but it's hard for me to consider it a natural part of the litter of the upper floors.

[Wiwaxia]

I went to make an account to delurk and comment on this thread and discovered I'd already made one... 5 years ago? God.

First of all, thank you half, Scatha, and Quirk for making such a beautiful game and variations thereof, and for talking in detail about what you did and why. One of the reasons I keep coming back to Sil and to lurking this forum is for the in depth discussions of design and seeing how that plays out in practice and continually changes and adapts. I have enormous respect for all three of you as game designers and especially as game designers who incorporate feedback and changes elegantly, and reading what you have to say to each other on design goals and solutions from slightly different approaches to the same game is a treat.

My two cents on the discussion:
I think I'll go through the song tree in advance of the rework and see a bit more of what I think of it. I haven't played a lot of singers, but my general impression of the tree from what I have played and lurking discussions here is that it splits into three categories. On the high end there seems to be a couple "capstone" songs (Lorien and Mastery) that are expensive, evocative, powerful, and strongly change the way you play that form the center of dedicated builds. On the low end there's a couple songs (Elbereth, the old Slaying) that are good for dabblers but also scale well with more investment and can have builds based around them. (Song of Elbereth and its interaction with morale mechanics, incidentally, is one of the best pieces of game design I have seen in any game I've played.) In the middle there's some solid situational songs (Freedom, Trees, maybe the new Delvings) that are good minor themes for singers and potentially worth the investment for non-singers, plus a lot of songs that don't quite fit well in any role (the ones replaced in Sil-Q and the weaker proposed replacements).
I'll see if this model holds with more firsthand experience.

I just tried a few abortive runs with Song of Delvings after Scatha mentioned liking it. I was pretty unimpressed by it's description on paper but I absolutely love it in practice. Having that additional information to work with is nice for seeing where you might get flanked, planning possible escape routes, and spotting special rooms in advance (I look forward to avoiding wolf pens entirely once I survive deeper). I got consistently killed by rushing to it over more reasonable early-game investments because it's so fun to have.

I would love to see Slaying and Sharpness return to Sil-Q on thematic grounds. I wonder if there's a place for Slaying as a "capstone" song, possibly combined with Challenge as Scatha mentioned so that it proactively drew in enemies to keep up momentum in more sparsely populated areas of the dungeon. I would be worried about Slaying-singer/melee builds outshining non-singing melee, and discouraging the variety of possible builds there, though. It seems like there's still a niche for Sharpness as an anti-protection ability for serpents, kemmenraukar, and their ilk, but I have no idea if that could be implemented in a balanced way.

I'd also be in favor of ditching blunt weapons as a category. Having sceptres as a dedicated stat-stick weapon type (i.e. Sceptres of Power) makes some sense thematically, but my impression is that Sil design doesn't really favor stat-sticks. I agree that sceptres and crowns should be rarer, and possibly special-only.

I have to say I do like consumables as they are from a gameplay perspective, even if they don't make complete thematic sense. I'm still holding out for Herbs of Athelas and maybe Niphredil. I like the Sil-Q trend of adding a bit more variety in items and adding more of interest to the upper levels.

I think the question of ease of detecting and disarming traps is mostly a sideshow to the fact that Sil's trap design, with the exception of roosts and webs, is not great or at least certainly not up to the standards of the rest of the game. I might make a thread on this, actually, if there's not a minimum post limit to do so.

Finally, this doesn't quite fit with the current discussion but a thought about Sil I've had for a while is that Morgoth shouldn't be immune to fear, at least until the player has picked up a silmaril, on thematic grounds. His cowardice, and his fear of Elbereth in particular, is frequently noted in canon and I think that cowardice is a major part of Tolkien's conception of evil in general and the way it is often both seemingly unstoppable and pathetic.