item generation

[Whelk]

A perfectly good reason for a demon to keep a slay demon weapon with him would be to keep other demons in line.

I bet the orc captain in Mordor (when Frodo and Sam were masquerading as orcs and got 'drafted') had a whip of slay orc.

For those exposed to the Rankin & Bass rendition: "Where there's a whip, there's a way."

[Obsilium]

A perfectly good reason for a demon to keep a slay demon weapon with him would be to keep other demons in line.

[takkaria]

I really don't like the way it uses max(monster level, dungeon level) either.

Me too; it was a suggestion on r.g.r.a years back implemented as an experiment. It hasn't worked brilliantly and 3.1.2 will change it in some way.

[buzzkill]

Why on earth would a novice mage be carrying pb1, or a novice priest mb2.

We all know that spell book burn easily. Why can't we use them to re-fuel our torch. Yeah, I know it wouldn't come into play very often, but I can think of at least one occasion when it would have saved my life.

[will_asher]

I really don't like the way it uses max(monster level, dungeon level) either. It means there is no reward for killing more difficult monsters at higher levels which seems to reverse the risk/reward mechanic which I find fun. If I manage to kill something nasty then I'd like to be rewarded for it.

I much prefer the idea where it uses a random level between monster level and dungeon level (inclusive) so you might still get lucky and get a good drop from an easy monster, but you're much less likely to do so.

This would reintroduce the problem of too much junk, but then you can simply put a maximum level on which an object is created. So for example if the RNG decided a slay ego is the drop of a novice mage on level 80 then they simply wouldn't drop it at all.

I agree.
(strongly enough to post and say so, but I don't have much to add except that I'll probably do something like this in DaJAngband.)

I also agree that monsters should be limited on what they drop (demons not dropping slay demons, and novice mages not dropping PB1, etc.), but I don't like the idea of monsters using what they carry because I always hated that when I used to play Nethack. I don't know how many times I was killed by something like a kobold with a wand of death. The idea of drain life doing less damage when zapped by a monster seems bogus to me (to use Powerdiver's term).

[Magnate]

I would expect things like the Wand of Drain Life to be removed from the game, or made sufficiently deeper that the chance of the player being instant-killed by a typically wimpy monster to be nil.

It has long been understood that monsters and @ are not built the same. Monsters have lots of hp but do (relatively) low damage. @ has far fewer hp but does a ton of damage. So a wand of drain life used by a monster would do only a fraction of the damage it does when used by @.

There's been a proposal for a long while to generate items at the same time as monsters, rather than on monster death. Not sure where it ended up - there isn't a ticket for it, unless I missed it.

[zaimoni]

This brings up another point that I've been thinking about. There is a problem with the drops being created after the monster is destroyed as opposed to when they spawn. The problem is that they don't use the items they have. If a novice ranger is carrying a wand of acid bolts, don't you think he would use it when he was in mortal danger? I understand that some monsters, like dragons, probably can't wield the weapons they are carrying.

I would expect things like the Wand of Drain Life to be removed from the game, or made sufficiently deeper that the chance of the player being instant-killed by a typically wimpy monster to be nil.

[zaimoni]

This brings up another point that I've been thinking about. There is a problem with the drops being created after the monster is destroyed as opposed to when they spawn. The problem is that they don't use the items they have. If a novice ranger is carrying a wand of acid bolts, don't you think he would use it when he was in mortal danger? I understand that some monsters, like dragons, probably can't wield the weapons they are carrying.

There is always NetHack and Crawl.

Ok, so this is more realistic for the game, but seems to be a pretty difficult problem, and probably nowhere near implementable. At the very least, we can try to remove some of the incoherent drops.

Why would a demon carry a weapon of slay demon? It'd probably destroy it on sight, or at least drop it and bury it under rubble.

I wouldn't mind banning the drop of any item a monster cannot pick up. That covers this (there already is a check preventing demons from picking up slay demon weapons, etc.).

Why on earth would a novice mage be carrying pb1, or a novice priest mb2. Why would a priest be carrying an edged weapon? If you were limited to carrying 1 item, would it be one that you have absolutely no way of possibly using? More to the point, shouldn't *every* novice mage have a copy of mb1? If not, how is he casting magic missiles? Ok, so the process of meleeing destroys many of the books and makes them unusable. But still, mb1 should be a more likely drop than anything else from a novice mage.

Ignoring that the monster mage, paladin, etc. are not Borgs (the spell list for the paladin line suggests that they are not even the same class as a @ paladin): this causes a fairly radical rebalancing problem by creating Too Much Junk. (In RAngband, it is literally impossible to "hoover" DL6 and lower as a fighter because your pack will fill up with {excellent} weapons and armor first.)

[fizzix]

This would reintroduce the problem of too much junk, but then you can simply put a maximum level on which an object is created. So for example if the RNG decided a slay ego is the drop of a novice mage on level 80 then they simply wouldn't drop it at all.

This brings up another point that I've been thinking about. There is a problem with the drops being created after the monster is destroyed as opposed to when they spawn. The problem is that they don't use the items they have. If a novice ranger is carrying a wand of acid bolts, don't you think he would use it when he was in mortal danger? I understand that some monsters, like dragons, probably can't wield the weapons they are carrying.

Ok, so this is more realistic for the game, but seems to be a pretty difficult problem, and probably nowhere near implementable. At the very least, we can try to remove some of the incoherent drops.

Why would a demon carry a weapon of slay demon? It'd probably destroy it on sight, or at least drop it and bury it under rubble. Why on earth would a novice mage be carrying pb1, or a novice priest mb2. Why would a priest be carrying an edged weapon? If you were limited to carrying 1 item, would it be one that you have absolutely no way of possibly using? More to the point, shouldn't *every* novice mage have a copy of mb1? If not, how is he casting magic missiles? Ok, so the process of meleeing destroys many of the books and makes them unusable. But still, mb1 should be a more likely drop than anything else from a novice mage.

Ok, I think I'm sufficiently off-topic and rambling now. I'll stop.

[TJS]

I really don't like the way it uses max(monster level, dungeon level) either. It means there is no reward for killing more difficult monsters at higher levels which seems to reverse the risk/reward mechanic which I find fun. If I manage to kill something nasty then I'd like to be rewarded for it.

I much prefer the idea where it uses a random level between monster level and dungeon level (inclusive) so you might still get lucky and get a good drop from an easy monster, but you're much less likely to do so.

This would reintroduce the problem of too much junk, but then you can simply put a maximum level on which an object is created. So for example if the RNG decided a slay ego is the drop of a novice mage on level 80 then they simply wouldn't drop it at all.

[Nick]

http://angband.erley.org/patchs/mons...e-r835-v2.diff

That's the approach I took to adjusting the ranges monsters could show up in... never got around to documenting it, and can't remember why it didn't work properly (think it was a raw file problem) :-/

In O it's done by directly modifying the probabilities for the monster selection table:

	/* Low-level monsters avoid the deep dungeon. */
	int depth_rare = 2 * level / 3;
	int depth_very_rare = level / 3;

and

			/* Keep low-level monsters rare */
			if (table[i].level < depth_rare) table[i].prob3 /= 4;
			if (table[i].level < depth_very_rare) table[i].prob3 /= 4;

[s0be]

The Oangband system is a softened version of this; it divides the dungeon above the current level into thirds, and adjusts generation chances based on that. So if you're on level 30, level 20-30 monsters have their normal chance of appearing, level 10-20 monsters have 1/4 their normal chance, and level 1-10 have 1/16 their normal chance.

http://angband.erley.org/patchs/monster_depth_rework_code-r835-v2.diff

That's the approach I took to adjusting the ranges monsters could show up in... never got around to documenting it, and can't remember why it didn't work properly (think it was a raw file problem) :-/

[s0be]

I have preliminary patches to limit monsters to certain depths also. I began coding up patches to scale monsters as well, but after talking in IRC, these patches lead to some problems:

It'd require more monsters! If we limit orcs to only be so deep, either the deep dungeons need to be nearly barren of monsters, or everything is going to be a nearly lethal fight, and it would make any sort of diving REALLY risky. Hundreds of new monsters would be needed to fill in the gaps to keep diving interesting. If monsters were made such that they got stronger as the got deeper, the deeper monsters would need to be toned down a bit. About all you could do is to do something like adding .5 * rand_int( p_ptr->depth - r_ptr->level ) HP to monsters HP and/or AC, but that ruins your monster memory where a level 50 monster on level 98 could potentially be a lethal foe... Suddenly you're taking one of the few aspects of skill out of the game. All the discussion I had with Tak, and maybe d_m and others (don't remember, it was Feb of 08) lead to the point that the only real thing you could tweak there (easily) was the monster's drop level, which lead to that patch I shared above that made it a pot-luck, rather than a HUGE bonus for diving. Any attempt to make monsters scale with depth leads to levels that are too dangerous without scaling back how many show up or removing some deep monsters. Same goes for limiting how deep monsters go. I still stand by my previous patch being better than what's in there now, bringing some fun to what could be dropped, while not entirerly nerfing things.

If anyone has any ideas on a better way to scale the depth (maybe max it at min(2 x r_ptr->level, r_ptr->level + 20 or something like that?) I'd be glad to make a patch for testing.

[Nick]

An alternative approach that I've thought about (and that would make the game significantly more difficult) would be to limit monsters to a certain range of depths.

The Oangband system is a softened version of this; it divides the dungeon above the current level into thirds, and adjusts generation chances based on that. So if you're on level 30, level 20-30 monsters have their normal chance of appearing, level 10-20 monsters have 1/4 their normal chance, and level 1-10 have 1/16 their normal chance.

[buzzkill]

In a pack of orcs on level 80, you'd expect some to have found good deep items, while others have not been so lucky (or had their stuff stolen by stronger orcs). On the flipside, you'd expect most ood monsters to be weaker... why else would they be in the shallower levels?

You would also expect these DL80 orcs to be stronger than the ones encountered on DL10 (esp. when you pair it with the OOD flipside).