Idea: Buy monsterknowledge / get rumors

[NotMorgoth]

If you want to make probing useful, as well as making it give better information, how about making it usable on monsters that have been detected (eg by ESP or detect evil etc) even if they are not in LOS.

Then you might get to learn that a monster would probably kill you without actually giving it the chance to do, and without wasting a turn that you could have been fighting/escaping.

That said, I always look at spoilers/edit files to find monster info, so if that's cheating then I'm a cheat...

[Hariolor]

If you want to make probing useful, as well as making it give better information, how about making it usable on monsters that have been detected (eg by ESP or detect evil etc) even if they are not in LOS.

Then you might get to learn that a monster would probably kill you without actually giving it the chance to do, and without wasting a turn that you could have been fighting/escaping.

That said, I always look at spoilers/edit files to find monster info, so if that's cheating then I'm a cheat...

I was thinking this a couple pages back in this thread. If probing cast detection + gave info on all monsters detected, that would be very useful (the detect could still last only one turn, but the monster memory is permanently updated, maybe?)

---

I think part of the issue here seems to be that there is a line of thought that says dying repeatedly while accumulating information about the game (items/monsters) is a core part of the experience.

The other line of thought seems to be that most of the information should be accessible over the course of one @'s lifetime, and that the challenge is using that information to develop a viable strategy for overcoming the many challenges the game presents.

I'm personally in the second camp, since I feel after a few weeks/months of play, one's attention turns from 'what can kill me' to 'what can I kill'. The ideas like rumors/scrolls/probing are a way to accelerate the learning process to get new players more quickly to the point where they are worried about inventory management and tactics, and less about whether every new letter on the screen might instakill them.

[bebo]

The real question is: give a player a choice between buying the stuff that they need to buy, and spending money in the hope they might find something useful, which one will they choose? Z used to have this 'loremaster' service and I only ever used it for quests and I wanted to know what I was up against. If you're just roaming the dungeon, then it's significantly more useless.

IMO. Bring the counterarguments. (This is where it would be nice to be able to gather stats on how people do stuff in the game and send them back automatically...)

This is sort of like an idea that I talked about with Takkaria on IRC: have scrolls lying around the dungeon which give lore on a particular unique (or a small group of monsters) when read. It should probably be (mostly) depth-appropriate... scrolls detailing Huan or Glaurung would probably not be found on dungeon level 1.

Veterans could squelch or ignore these scrolls but newbies would (potentially) benefit.

I'd be willing to code this feature up if a majority of people think it's a good idea.

I'd actually see this working better if some dev masochistically decides that for some monsters random properties might make the game more fun (I think the game would benefit hugely from this - but then again, i'm not the one that would have to code it );

as it is this feature is not a good money sink, as you need to spend the money / find the scrolls only the first few games you play, and then it's an useless mechanic / tmj issue.

To be more clear, if for example the special attack of the umber hulk in one game might be confusion, and in another sound, and in yet another darkness, the mechanic of spending gold for lore / searching the dungeon for info scrolls would be extremely rewarding every game you play. Of course this would probably require total rebalancing also of ego / artifact resistances and exp assignment (aaaaargh!).

On the other hand we do have squelch available, so the feature might actually improve a lot the playing experience for new gamers, without additional hassle for experienced ones.

I must confess though that i'm in Eddie's camp on this - just give complete monster info from the start

EDIT: i just realized that the thread has more than one page, sorry if this doesn't make much sense - i replied only after reading the first posts (doh)

[ChodTheWacko]

My recent experiences with Angband has been, probing does exactly what it should: It only says 'x hitpoints' on screen, but monster memory is updated with near full info.

It does suck a bit that a monster has to be with LOS, but that's not the end of the world, since you can now tell if monsters are awake or not. (unless you aggravate, and then you are screwed)

- Frank

[Hariolor]

My recent experiences with Angband has been, probing does exactly what it should: It only says 'x hitpoints' on screen, but monster memory is updated with near full info.

It does suck a bit that a monster has to be with LOS, but that's not the end of the world, since you can now tell if monsters are awake or not. (unless you aggravate, and then you are screwed)

- Frank

I thought about the asleep/awake issue - problem is not everybody is going to play a super-stealthy character. If it happens to be true that super-stealthy is the best way to survive (at least at lower levels), then that sounds like a balance issue, as warriors/priests/paladins will be less desirable. As will the noisier races. Then again, learning to play successfully with something other than a HE Thief/Ranger is a whole learning curve unto itself, so it may be kinda moot.

Also, I am sure it will be pointed out that the noisier races/classes tend to have higher HP to balance the lack of stealth, and as a result can accumulate the most complete monster info the most quickly (except priests - ouch).

--

So while I like the idea of tweaking probing, because I have never bothered with it from day one due to its limitations, here's another idea. Maybe just have a calculation run for any enemy whose info screen is brought up that compares an @'s maximum (not current) HP against the max damage a monster can do in one turn (though any combination of spells, attacks, breath, etc). If the monster can insta-kill, the info screen can include something like *you feel you should be wary of this creature* or whatever.

Heck, this could even be tied to wisdom with a %chance to appear in the info that improves with wisdom. The wiser characters get the assessment more reliably.

[Pete Mack]

@Hariolor:
I'm not sure I see your point: some classes have always ben recommended for newbies. And the progression has generally been:
Warrior and/or Paladin: get acquainted
Ranger & rogue: go for broke

Priests and mage are always the also-ran for newbies. Later on, they are extremely powerful. But only when you know which monsters to avoid at all costs. Adding in uber-probing would improve the lot of Priests and Paladins, as they can tell immediately what to avoid at all costs. Probing--with a spell!--from around a corner prior to desperate flight is a hell of a lot safer than the current model.

BTW: it's perfectly possible to play a stealthy Paladin: just try a High-elf, Gnome, or Kobold. At least in this regard, Paladins are no different from other races.

[Donald Jonker]

If you want to make probing useful, as well as making it give better information, how about making it usable on monsters that have been detected (eg by ESP or detect evil etc) even if they are not in LOS.

Then you might get to learn that a monster would probably kill you without actually giving it the chance to do, and without wasting a turn that you could have been fighting/escaping.

That said, I always look at spoilers/edit files to find monster info, so if that's cheating then I'm a cheat...

Perhaps a good compromise would be to make probing an additional activation on a common artifact, such as the Phial. That way you don't kill an inventory slot on a useless meta-game item when you could just consult a spoiler.

Either make it work on visible or on detected monsters. Visible sounds more satisfying. Make it give full knowledge. You'll still be using a turn that could be used to attack/evade/etc, so it should satisfy the conservatives, but you will accumulate full knowledge much faster (at a rate more commensurate with the human player's own learning process), which should satisfy the progressives.

And scrap the rods for heaven's sake.

[Rizwan]

Perhaps a good compromise would be to make probing an additional activation on a common artifact, such as the Phial. That way you don't kill an inventory slot on a useless meta-game item when you could just consult a spoiler.

Either make it work on visible or on detected monsters. Visible sounds more satisfying. Make it give full knowledge. You'll still be using a turn that could be used to attack/evade/etc, so it should satisfy the conservatives, but you will accumulate full knowledge much faster (at a rate more commensurate with the human player's own learning process), which should satisfy the progressives.

And scrap the rods for heaven's sake.

I was thinking of going in the other direction. IMHO have rods, wands, staves, mushrooms (maybe some with and some without negative effects like make you forget about another monster), scrolls (scrolls could activate for visible monster selection or like confuse monster scrolls tell you about the very next monster you melee), rings, potions (kinda like the self knowledge potion). We could have monster knowledge potions (sorry if it increases TMJ but you can always squelch) for different types of monsters and maybe even artifact activations (is there one already?)
Have the %age of monster knowledge gained go up according to exp,wis.int, monster level or a combination of all so that lower level characters get the basic info on the first try (or some chance) and then successively get more info until complete and then later on get basic plus an attack or two etc.
It should work on visible (with or without ESP/Telepathy/Infra) monsters but not detect and then probe and all this would automatically be recorded in your monster memory (of course).

[Edit] You could maybe also throw potions at monster to gain knowledge about them.

[zaimoni]

One idea I've been considering, is making reasonably complete monster knowledge a side effect of telepathy. (Among other things, this eliminates a whole bunch of cheat-AI as all monsters are telepathic anyway.) This doesn't really help the early game at all, but makes things half-way reasonable after the first telepathy-conferring item.

This does have a few difficulties conceptually (e.g., Fire hounds are rather unlikely to know that they're fire-resistant).

[buzzkill]

... this eliminates a whole bunch of cheat-AI as all monsters are telepathic anyway...

I've never thought of it that way, as area of detection roughly equates to telepathy. All the more reason to revise the way monsters hunt you down.

[Magnate]

I've never thought of it that way, as area of detection roughly equates to telepathy. All the more reason to revise the way monsters hunt you down.

The problem is that it would make telepathy even more overpowered than it already is. There are already potions of ESP, but we'd need spells for all casters and scrolls, wands and rods for warriors. (Personally I think we need those anyway, but hey...)

[buzzkill]

The problem is that it would make telepathy even more overpowered than it already is. There are already potions of ESP, but we'd need spells for all casters and scrolls, wands and rods for warriors. (Personally I think we need those anyway, but hey...)

I'm thinking bigger, though I have no delusions that this is actually going to be implemented... Humanoids could be alerted to your presence by the sounds of nearby battle. tunneling, walking around in plate mail/steel boots, maybe even boisterous spellcasting. These sounds should travel very well through a dungeon environment. It's kind of ridiculous that a Warrior "screaming in agony" doesn't wake his buddy in the next space, or that a fireball doesn't awaken the whole room.

[zaimoni]

Humanoids could be alerted to your presence by the sounds of nearby battle. tunneling, walking around in plate mail/steel boots, maybe even boisterous spellcasting. These sounds should travel very well through a dungeon environment. It's kind of ridiculous that a Warrior "screaming in agony" doesn't wake his buddy in the next space, or that a fireball doesn't awaken the whole room.

Zaiband already has the near-trivial part of this, as part of reworking things so that being fast meant making more noise. (Unfortunately, noise still propagates like telepathy.)

The slower platforms probably would object to actually trying to model sound propagation, as they already are non-performant just from monster flow and sound propagation will be more complex. Besides, in that case I'd want to represent @'s hearing (to prevent introducing cheat-AI).

[bio_hazard]

^^^^^^
a bit OT, but this is eerily like what folks in my lab are trying to do in real life. Let me know when someone makes an Angband toolbox for ArcGIS...

[fizzix]

Zaiband already has the near-trivial part of this, as part of reworking things so that being fast meant making more noise. (Unfortunately, noise still propagates like telepathy.)

The slower platforms probably would object to actually trying to model sound propagation, as they already are non-performant just from monster flow and sound propagation will be more complex. Besides, in that case I'd want to represent @'s hearing (to prevent introducing cheat-AI).

I think this is off from the original topic.

Modeling sound doesn't have to be hard. An easy way would be to assign a value to each floor place and another value to each turn. And then have values for each sound. Let's say a monster screaming has a value of 100 and the sound is attenuated 5 points for every square and 20 for each turn, and 40 for each wall square. These numbers are completely made up, but you could then overlay a grid of sound from each action, which could be factored into the probability of the monster waking up.

Putting in realism here though really messes with the game dynamics, without some other major changes. If an injured troll immediately wakes up all the other trolls in the room (realistic), which then make a tremendous amount of noise, everything in the vicinity will wake up (also realistic). This makes stealth based characters much harder to play without a 'hide in shadows' ability or at the very least, having monsters fall back asleep after some amount of time.