Sil-Q Review

[Quirk]

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

Exceptionally good to have you posting. I've very much enjoyed your comments on your ladder characters.

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.

Hopefully a slightly more reasonably costed version can find its way to be a fixture in places other than the ascent!

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 like to find a way to bring some variant of Sharpness back - probably at a much cheaper cost. Songs are hard to balance though as you usually gain the benefits of only one of them at a time, while you slowly lose Voice, and you attract more foes. This requires quite a lot of raw power to overcome, but enough raw power and a song tips over into an obvious pick, and a song that is an obvious melee pick in the endgame risks outshining simple useful options such as Trees and Freedom. Mastery also exists at present in a somewhat endangered position: the Song needed to make it good exists primarily on Lorien builds which don't really need it, and on the too-rare Elbereth archer. A more combat effective song in a similar position really would serve to virtually obsolete it.

Song of Overwhelming - Song of Fierce Blows at the start - began as an attempt to provide guaranteed effectiveness without the huge investment needed for Mastery. It failed; it did not offer enough over Song of Staying, and even if it had there was no ladder to get there. The ladders are Elbereth, Silence and Lorien and none of them work well for a non-stealthy melee character.

I may reconsider whether it is possible to make a melee ladder Song in making a fresh attempt at the Song tree. It is a little difficult in that moving on to the next Song requires the last to be outshone. Lorien is a clear upgrade on Silence, Mastery is an expensive and initially slightly dubious upgrade on Elbereth, but Slaying/Staying/Sharpness don't scale all that well over most of the game, and Challenge/Staying/Overwhelming have not done much better. My main idea at present is to keep the territory the ladder needs to reach short, so investing in a new song is not so daunting. Perhaps we can see more prerequisites return in time, but songs will need to be a little more popular first.

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.

On some level I like the notion of descending with robe and staff, but the approach really works only for the dedicated pacifist, and there aren't that many of us.

I would be tempted if I got to playing properly with level generation to reintroduce items which were more explicitly tailored to flavour than gameplay. I would rather though have Angband filled with things crudely made by orcs than broken elf-things. The latter is tolerable as long as it suits gameplay but it irks my inner simulationist.

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.

Athelas! Yes. I would prefer to do more with herbs and less with potions, though I do love the way Orcish Liquor works. This would be a potentially hefty rebalancing though, and in truth there's a limited supply of Tolkien-faithful consumable magical substances.

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.

This is largely why I have weakened them so. I feel traps that the player is expecting are fair, provided the consequences are not too ruinous and in alignment with player expectations. If the player can choose to take the risk and has means of mitigating that risk, the player largely has themselves to blame when the trap shuts. Currently, traps spawn in places with no underlying logic, and a player who has fallen through a floor or damaged their armour simply through underinvestment in Perception or a poor roll is entitled to feel a little upset.

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.

This is a not unreasonable stance, though I am not sure he would necessarily flee the player when the player comes into his very own lair. He did not flee Fingolfin at the gates, for all he took his sweet time coming up, and I don't think second-hand Valar would be enough to scare the originator of the attack on the Trees, for all he may have feared Tulkas. Still, I'd listen to other opinions on it.

[Quirk]

Hi half!

Thank you for all the kind words. Thank you also for making such a great game. I believe a lot of the aesthetic resonance you note in me exists precisely because Sil is such an unusual and opinionated game: the game has principles and it is true to them. Beginning from old Angband, it strides strongly toward a descent that Tolkien might have described, while enabling a rich strategic sensibility with a flavour very unlike its predecessors. Where I have succeeded, it is by understanding the game's principles.

There are flaws in some of my additions, and particularly in some of the earlier ones where I was a little too keen to latch on to whatever feedback I could get. I strive to keep on improving. I've talked at length on most of the topics here, so I won't go back and cover the same ground, though I will note again that the experience for scaring monsters was in hindsight a mistake, and if I do decide in future to attempt to make the Elbereth pacifist a little more viable it will be through less clumsy means.

Lastly, I hope that when you and Scatha find time to return to Sil development that you feel free to lift and improve any ideas in my little fork that you like. I have enjoyed your creation immensely.

[half]

Hi Quirk,

I haven't had time to try Sil-Q yet, but have enjoyed reading this thread and finding our more about it. Like Scatha, there are things I like and things I dislike, but my overall impression is being impressed that you *get* so much of the underlying aesthetic and reasons behind many of the choices we made, so as to be able to improve it at all by our lights. That is no easy feat. It is difficult to pick up someone else's novel and make a whole lot of changes and find that they agree with even a tenth of them, and I think the situation is similar with unusual, opinionated games like Sil. The people behind mpa-sil shared some, smaller, part of the aesthetic with Scatha and I, while you share a different and larger part.

Here are a few quick comments on things that have come up in the thread.

Deathblades: are there for the reasons Scatha mentioned, and also because they are cool. This probably wouldn't be quite enough to include them (especially not with a not-so-Tolkienian name), but the extra reason is that they are a subtle homage to the Dungeon of Doom: the first roguelike I played and one that had a few really nice ideas and hasn't been remembered by the community (perhaps because it was on Mac). I'm willing to bend things a bit more than usual to get in a homage, but future developers should feel no need to bend things to allow a homage they don't personally connect with.

Blunt weapons: I never intended these to be balanced with swords, as I think they simply are less good for combat (prior to plate armour), and they aren't used much in the source material. I included them because they are mentioned in a few places and I'm happy for them to exist and just be worse. The same goes for broken swords, curved swords and filthy rags. To a lesser extent, we were happy to have swords be a little better than other things for most characters so that most characters ended up with some kind of sword (like in the books) rather than spread equally between all kinds of different weapons.

Scaring monsters: Apart from the monster that kills you, you always manage to deal with the monster in some manner (be that sneaking past, fleeing, scaring, or killing). You get half the experience for each monster on first encountering it because that is easier to implement than getting it upon dealing with the monster. I'm happy with killing it being the only thing that grants extra experience. As why is scaring it off the level any better than scaring it into another room? or to sneaking past, or putting to sleep, etc.? If I were changing anything, it might be to drop the extra experience for killing it -- you already are rewarded with the items. (this would obviously require increasing experience a little to compensate)

Early game: As Scatha said, we had an approach of making it feel more magical and more complex as you descend. But the downside is more mundane and simple at the top. The mundane is bad for new players and the simple can be bad for old players. I'm willing to believe that we overdid it and should have left a bit more excitement for the first levels.

Other things: It's great that you found and removed many small bugs, and make various changes that were overdue (e.g. removing the need to be hungry before Morgoth, doing something about Song of Slaying in the throne room, and doing something about Momentum).

As I said at the top, it is great to see that you understand so much about what the game is trying to do, and have continued in that spirit.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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!).

[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...

[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.

[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.

[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.