Object and Monster generation question

[Zikke]

Seems like adding even a 0.002% chance to be insta-killed is an arbitrary and unnecessary addition. Similar to letting players get the first turn when taking stairs: before there was a 1 in X chances when taking deep stairs to be instantly killed by time hounds.

It may make a few players on these forums giddy with excitement, but it probably would upset the majority of players.

[Sirridan]

I actually like this idea, with one condition: If an OOD monster is generated, the level feeling should change to show this. Pits and things are one thing, they get OOD's but they are "contained" and generally things don't escape pits before the player can get away.

But a message like "You feel this place is {sort of, (no word), very, exteremely} dangerous." depending on how OOD. Of course this ignores pits and vaults when done.

[Zikke]

Which brings us back to dynamic level feelings of danger, which I think is a good idea. It changes as you clear things or as things respawn.

[buzzkill]

No one bitches about finding boots of speed on DL3, put put a Uruk or a Troll Priest there instead and suddenly the sky is falling. Monsters generated 10 or 20 levels OoD, save for the first few DL's, are not going to be much harder, if at all harder, than typical uniques. You could always cap OoD at DL*3 or something similar. Encountering an Earth Hound on DL6 would suck, but it's not necessarily a death sentence, nor is a mature dragon. I'm guessing that if it's done correctly it would add variety and unexpected 'fun' moments, not massive player deaths (not that there's anything wrong with that).

[Zikke]

I don't think there would be any problem with adding crazy OOD monsters if you alert the player in some fashion, or don't do it until players are high enough to have some escapes.

[Derakon]

I'd go with the latter option rather than the former. Waving a sign that says "Danger! There's a big badass monster on this level!" would reduce the surprise, and thus the fun. Don't inform the player that they're in danger. Show them that they're in danger. That's much more immersive.

[zaimoni]

Maybe. It's actually a lot more likely to generate tougher monsters than the old code which it replaced (which was a lot more complicated and a lot less likely to generate a monster 10 levels out-of-depth). There was a discussion about the change on the mailing list and on IRC if you're interested.

There has been talk about moving to a function that could produce *any* depth of monster or item (obviously with a correspondingly small probability) but tuning the function so it "felt" right would be tricky and no one's done it yet.

Patches welcome

Revert to Moria?

[Hariolor]

What feels wrong now? Do you really want people dying to ethereal dragons at DL 30?

Just because it's topical -

I had a pretty good run going with a Dwarf Paladin that was ended abruptly ("It breathes darkness - more -") by an Ethereal Dragon on DL33

Frustrating, sure

But IMO the game would be worse without that sort of thing being possible.

[Nemesis]

Just because it's topical -

I had a pretty good run going with a Dwarf Paladin that was ended abruptly ("It breathes darkness - more -") by an Ethereal Dragon on DL33

Frustrating, sure

But IMO the game would be worse without that sort of thing being possible.

Then why not roll for a slight chance of "rocks fall, everyone dies" every turn?

[miyazaki]

Then why not roll for a slight chance of "rocks fall, everyone dies" every turn?

Because sometimes you come face to face with that ethereal dragon, feel the panic start to rise up, dust down your sweaty palms and use your staff of teleportation (8% fail) and manage to scramble down a staircase without having your ass blown off. The danger that forces players to carry multiple escapes and (very occasionally) rely on luck makes the game great. For every time you are killed by a OOD monster, there are way more narrow escapes to be experienced. The fun of those escapes is worth the small risk of an insta-kill (to me anyway).

[Nemesis]

Because sometimes you come face to face with that ethereal dragon, feel the panic start to rise up, dust down your sweaty palms and use your staff of teleportation (8% fail) and manage to scramble down a staircase without having your ass blown off. The danger that forces players to carry multiple escapes and (very occasionally) rely on luck makes the game great. For every time you are killed by a OOD monster, there are way more narrow escapes to be experienced. The fun of those escapes is worth the small risk of an insta-kill (to me anyway).

I partly agree with you.

An Ethereal Dragon is dangerous when OOD as it can move through walls and thus cause a never-knew-what-hit-you death. But as long as it won't appear until the depths where you're likely to find means of detection, I don't mind. Then you've got yourself to blame if you didn't detect, played at the edge of the screen without centering your @, etc. I still don't think OOD monsters should be that common out of vaults, if they appear often the game would just get tedious. They're probably more dangerous it they appear very rarely as they'd be more suprising that way.

I also think it's fair that you can get teleported into a room filled to the brim with evil, that just balances Teleport, Teleport Level and *Destruction*. Teleport is cheap and allows you to stay on the same level, but survival isn't guaranteed. Teleport Level would leave you without the loot lying on the Vault floor, but unless you're very poisoned or bleeding without means of curing yourself, you'll live. *Destruction* is both rather foolproof and lets you stay on the level, but is rare and should be saved for Morgoth if you don't find enough of them.

Situations when players can do nothing to save themselves, even though they took the right precautions, are in my opinion "rocks fall, everyone dies" randomly thrown into the game and shouldn't be there. However, I think the maintainer have done a quite good work letting players avoid them. Getting the first turn every time you enter a new level helps a lot, as most other inevitable deaths can be avoided with proper detection. Sure, you could start in a pitch black room, with a bunch of Gravity Hounds hiding in the darkness, but if you don't want to take that risk you can always scum for new levels where you start somewhere safe.

Another reason for not putting unavoidable deaths in the game is that players who like them can always play with connected stairs off, or an Iron Man game.

[free of me]

IMO what balances OOD monsters is OOD equipment. I mean how many times have you gotten something nice at a level much lower than it should appear? If you remove the OOD monsters you should remove the OOD items as well for balance. But what do we have then after that? A boring game that's what.

[Atarlost]

I partly agree with you.

An Ethereal Dragon is dangerous when OOD as it can move through walls and thus cause a never-knew-what-hit-you death.

I think this is a problem with the specific monster, not the OOD monster generation. Passwall on a heavy hitting monster is unfair. Well, actually everything about monsters is unfair to compensate for weak AI, but passwall actually feels unfair.

A simple general fix would be to change how projection treats walls. Currently I think it does not check for obstruction in the source grid. If it did, and a little code was added to the AI to make passwall monsters with ranged attacks prefer open grids when close to the player the Ethereal Dragon coming out of the wall problem would go away because they would only be able to make melee attacks unless they moved into an open grid.

The other fix would be to reconsider the monsters that are most deadly when they appear out of depth and make them either deep enough they no longer appear when they can cause instadeaths or put a flag preventing them from appearing out of depth.

The meta-problem here is that divers and conservative players want different things. Divers feel little pain from unavoidable deaths; conservative players a great deal. Now, if the community agrees that playing to minimize short term risk is wrong unavoidable deaths are fine, but if people who play in that style are to be accepted unavoidable deaths should be minimized or even eliminated.

tl;dr version: every death screen should say one of two things: "Sudden Catastrophic Bad Luck" or "Player Error". Non-divers want every death screen to say "Player Error." If non-divers are accepted as part of the community unavoidable deaths should be eliminated to the greatest extent possible without changing the fundamental nature of the game. This may mean keeping OOD monsters capped.

[bron]

A quick fix, if anybody notices this, would be to change

259	#define NASTY_MON    25        /* 1/chance of inflated monster level */
to this
259	#define NASTY_MON     [COLOR="Yellow"]5 [/COLOR]       /* 1/chance of inflated monster level */

Generically, I think this is a terrible idea. If you are dissatisfied with the depth of the monsters you are encountering, then the solution is for you to go deeper, not to invite the deep monsters to up more often. The problem of course is simply that the deep monsters will kill you. Particularly early on, before your character has a chance to develop detection skills to assist with evasion.

I think the current scheme is good the way it is. You occasionally encounter nasty monsters, but only very rarely something that can instantly kill you, so you have a decent chance of being able to run away.

[buzzkill]

I was just throwing it out there as an afterthought. It's not a death trap. 1 in 5 DL's a monster (I'm assuming a singular monster) will be generated at a maximum of 10 levels OoD (beyond DL 32). I think that unless you were told, you might not even notice the change. This already happens, my suggested 'quick fix' would just cause it to happen 5x more often.