Making the game harder

[fyonn]

I like the idea of re-working how stealth and alertness work. as has been said multiple times, Charisma is a virtually valueless stat. the only thing it affects (afaik) is item cost in the shops and by the time you get to start seriously improving it, money is semi-irrelevant. I'd also like to see the effects of light and lack of light have an impact. walking past a pack of orcs with the phial hoisted high surely would be likely to wake them up rather than leave them sleeping. and people should be able to use light and lack thereof to their advantage. I think this might make the game both easier and more difficult depending on how you play.

I'd like to see a system where the right characters can sneak past even fairly alert monsters. I'd like dwarves to be able to wander around in near pitch darkness with long infravision and the walls mapping around them. in the other direction, a human warrior in clinking plate armour and a crackling torch would be waking up all sorts of monsters around him. almost like being aggravating. aggravation could just be a severe penalty to stealth.

a pitched battle with an ancient dragon should wake everything in the room rather than leaving a pack of ogres fast asleep in the corner. perhaps being a percentage chance of waking creatures per round so a steathly hobbit rogue may sneak in, stab and leave whilst making nery a noise but a fully armed paladon slashing away at a balrog would be pretty lound. and if one of a pack wakes he's likely to wake his friends.

dave

[nppangband]

One fix that hasn't been discussed is to make the game remember the level you just left, and if you use the same stairs you just went down you return to the old level. That could eliminate most of the usefulness of stairscumming, which I think is an essential part of surviving a powerdive.

[fizzix]

I'd like to see a system where the right characters can sneak past even fairly alert monsters. I'd like dwarves to be able to wander around in near pitch darkness with long infravision and the walls mapping around them. in the other direction, a human warrior in clinking plate armour and a crackling torch would be waking up all sorts of monsters around him. almost like being aggravating. aggravation could just be a severe penalty to stealth.

I proposed something like this a while back and someone brought up the valid point that heavy armor already has a lot of penalties for very limited gains (AC is not all that important) There's no reason to penalize it more. It's one of those situations where reality takes a back seat to gameplay. Paladins, priests and warriors already wake up pretty much everything, they don't need additional penalties.

Personally, I'd like to see heavy armor weights dropped significantly. Weight reduction should be standard for any ego armor.

[fyonn]

I proposed something like this a while back and someone brought up the valid point that heavy armor already has a lot of penalties for very limited gains (AC is not all that important) There's no reason to penalize it more. It's one of those situations where reality takes a back seat to gameplay. Paladins, priests and warriors already wake up pretty much everything, they don't need additional penalties.

Personally, I'd like to see heavy armor weights dropped significantly. Weight reduction should be standard for any ego armor.

I guess I was more thinking of providing different options for gameplay, but as we consider aggravation to be a fairly serious penalty on equipment, but this could be regularised into the action of a stat. make it more easy to wake creatures via your actions (lighting a room, fighting nearby etc) and perhaps more options to allow really sneaky characters to avoid even alert creatures as they can be near invisible.

I also might think that there might be some variation. one would imagine that elves would know how to quieten down metallic armour with cloth, but half-orcs would just let it clang away etc.

dave

PS. don't hounds ever sleep? shouldn't we ever come across a pack fast asleep into a corner?

[Tiburon Silverflame]

There is a problem with no shallow level critters at deep dungeon levels, as I brought up in the item generation thread:
Everything native to L50 or below has drop_good. No consumable types are considered good.

Then fix the "good items" list, because !Healing (for one) *should* be considered Good, and !*Healing and !Life should be considered Great.

It's also quite possible that this might go a surprisingly long ways to fixing the consumables availability issue.

[Derakon]

One fix that hasn't been discussed is to make the game remember the level you just left, and if you use the same stairs you just went down you return to the old level. That could eliminate most of the usefulness of stairscumming, which I think is an essential part of surviving a powerdive.

Really? I don't generally stairscum in my dives. They consist of one of:

* Buy a stack of scrolls of Deep Descent from the Black Market, then read them en masse
* Take down staircase, explore dungeon for next down staircase, repeat
* Take down staircase, explore dungeon for items of interest, take next down staircase as soon as anything interesting is dealt with

The only thing I see semi-persistent levels doing in your suggestion is prevent players from using them to escape trouble, in the rare event that the level they enter is also troublesome. Pretty much the only time I countenance immediately taking a staircase on entering a level is when I'm surrounded by awake nasties* and don't dare teleport.

* Hounds are never asleep. If you look at their stats in monster.txt, their "alertness" value (how easily they're disturbed) is always 0 (always awake) and their "vision" value (how far away they notice the player) is always 30 (compare uruks at 20, black reavers at 20, Greater Titans at 30). One of the key things that makes hounds so annoying is that they're always chasing after you. If they're on the level and remotely close to you, they're on the scent, trying to track you down so they can irritate you by breathing down corridors and hiding in rooms.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Tiburon: removing Deep Descent, existence of staircases, etc. has one major problem: if the current dungeon level the player is at is boring (in a "nothing can seriously challenge me and there's no good loot here" sense), then he has no good methods for rapidly getting deeper to reach dungeon levels that are interesting. There's several race/class combinations that want to skip basically 500-1500' in the current design -- even though other race/class combinations need to traverse those same levels carefully! But then there are characters that, once they get to 1800', need to stop and power up for a while, and others that are then clear to dive straight to 3500'. Difficulty as a function of dungeon depth does not monotonically increase, in other words.

So basically, is it worth forcing some characters to slog through uninteresting levels just so we can keep them from skipping ones that would be interesting if they just bothered to play them?

Probably so, yes. Because it's not about that.

No TLevel, no deep descent, 1 stair down...that's one extreme. The other extreme is what we have now. The problem is the strategy you mentioned...get the basic resists covered, get 400 hp or so, FA, and see invis...then dive as fast as you can to 4900', with its corollary: don't fight, RUN; and run down because the loot's so much better. IMO this says, we have some fundamental problems.

And that's the motivation behind the suggestion of 1 down stairway per level. Yeah, so you gotta search...so you can't just go crashing down willy-nilly.

[Derakon]

The problem is the strategy you mentioned...get the basic resists covered, get 400 hp or so, FA, and see invis...then dive as fast as you can to 4900', with its corollary: don't fight, RUN; and run down because the loot's so much better. IMO this says, we have some fundamental problems.

Why is this problematic? I agree that it's too easy to do right now, and that it's a problem that the default recommended behavior is to skip half the levels, but why shouldn't a highly-skilled player be allowed to do this? Similarly, why shouldn't a character whose power curve means that certain levels are much less interesting (not just in terms of reward but also in terms of risk) be allowed to powerdive through those levels to reach the ones that are fun to play?

And that's the motivation behind the suggestion of 1 down stairway per level. Yeah, so you gotta search...so you can't just go crashing down willy-nilly.

Searching boring levels is boring. Either make the levels interesting, or allow the player to skip them. Arbitrarily forcing players to explore levels so they can't dive quickly is just introducing tedium into the game.

[nullfame]

One fix that hasn't been discussed is to make the game remember the level you just left, and if you use the same stairs you just went down you return to the old level. That could eliminate most of the usefulness of stairscumming, which I think is an essential part of surviving a powerdive.

I admit to an amount of stair scumming. If I arrive on a level with great dangers I leave (time/aether hounds in the distance, landing adjacent to Tselakus). Disconnected stairs effectively solves this problem for those who want it.

Why is [diving] problematic? I agree that it's too easy to do right now, and that it's a problem that the default recommended behavior is to skip half the levels, but why shouldn't a highly-skilled player be allowed to do this?

Agree. If you don't like it don't do it. I am having plenty of fun right now thank you very much. I used to enjoy clearing levels. Now I don't. If you still like it go clear levels then.

I postulate that you cannot make the game too hard for diving to be effective. More dangerous monsters just means I will go through consumables faster (escapes, teleport other). Diving will still be the dominant strategy. Therefore it is silly to try discouraging it. IMO.

[fizzix]

Searching boring levels is boring. Either make the levels interesting, or allow the player to skip them. Arbitrarily forcing players to explore levels so they can't dive quickly is just introducing tedium into the game.

Searching boring levels is boring mainly because there's no incentive to search. The level becomes much more interesting if it becomes a problem of, 'how do I get to the stairs?'

Two of my most interesting experiences in Angband involve:

1. Luring wormtongue down a corridor away from stairs and then phasing across a gap and getting to the stairs. (It look several tries)
2. Luring a vampire lord away from a vault so I could teleport to the other side of a level and loot it. Hard because it moved faster than me.

Figuring out how to get to the stairs on a dangerous level is fun, at least for me it is. IMO this doesn't happen often enough in Angband.

[PowerDiver]

Figuring out how to get to the stairs on a dangerous level is fun, at least for me it is. IMO this doesn't happen often enough in Angband.

The harder you dive, the more often this happens. I currently see it several times a game, maybe even a dozen times with a weaker character.

[Derakon]

Searching boring levels is boring mainly because there's no incentive to search. The level becomes much more interesting if it becomes a problem of, 'how do I get to the stairs?'

My point is that exploring levels that cannot challenge the player is boring. When your character is too powerful for their current depth, forcing them to explore levels just so they can get deeper is bad game design. Not only that, it's self-perpetuating bad design: in the process of searching for stairs, they will gain marginal amounts of power, which in turn push deeper the depth at which the player is entertained.

By the way, your two examples would have been more readily-solved with teleport-away. Though you can't be expected to have that to deal with Wormtongue, wands of TO show up before Vampire Lords do.

[fizzix]

My point is that exploring levels that cannot challenge the player is boring. When your character is too powerful for their current depth, forcing them to explore levels just so they can get deeper is bad game design. Not only that, it's self-perpetuating bad design: in the process of searching for stairs, they will gain marginal amounts of power, which in turn push deeper the depth at which the player is entertained.

By the way, your two examples would have been more readily-solved with teleport-away. Though you can't be expected to have that to deal with Wormtongue, wands of TO show up before Vampire Lords do.

Well, if I had -TO, yes, that would've been easy. I didn't have any at this point, so I had to improvise.

Finding the stairs on a level where there isn't much danger is pretty easy, and does not take that much time. Finding the stairs on a level where you have to avoid 30-50% of the monsters is more challenging. You seem to find a stair-search cumbrously boring, I don't. I think we're disagreeing on that point. However, there might be a compromise solution in between.

What I find cumbrously boring is bouncing between dlevels 98, 99 and 100 looking for endgame items and consumables. If some of this consumable farming was instead accomplished while trying to navigate my way from 60 to dlevel 98, I think this would be an improvement. Even if I still had to scum 98 and 99 for some amount of time and even if my total number of turns was significantly higher, I still think this would be more interesting gameplay.

I usually try to get down these levels by only taking down stairs and reading ?DD (mostly as escapes) now. And while it definitely increases my overall turncount, it's more fun. Still, stairs are just too plentiful in the dungeon and they're overall easy to get to.

[PowerDiver]

Though you can't be expected to have that to deal with Wormtongue, wands of TO show up before Vampire Lords do.

Everybody has TO vs Wormtongue. Just let him hit you, he steals your gold and teleports away. I often run up to him to meet him at a corner, instead of forcing him to come to me down a corridor casting the occasional frost bolt.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Why is this problematic? I agree that it's too easy to do right now, and that it's a problem that the default recommended behavior is to skip half the levels,

The problem isn't stating the behavior; the problem is that the gameplay MAKES this the best option. And that's something to fix. MAKE THE PLAYER WORK to get the good stuff.

My point is that exploring levels that cannot challenge the player is boring. When your character is too powerful for their current depth, forcing them to explore levels just so they can get deeper is bad game design.

Not necessarily. It may be the lesser of 2 evils. Being able to exploit a design where you can drop as fast as you want, and have that be the best tactic, is WORSE design, IMO.

You're thinking only in terms of "I'm bored on this level." Fine, if it's not a challenge, find the stairs down ASAP and go down. It doesn't STOP that. What it stops is looting the vault of the 3 good things on the whole damn level, then laughingly drop down more.

in the process of searching for stairs, they will gain marginal amounts of power, which in turn push deeper the depth at which the player is entertained.

Then there are too many levels. The dungeon doesn't get enough more difficult.

ALSO, we're saying that top-end gear is far, far too good, and levels mean way, way too little. The strategy you noted says, make about level 30, maximize stats, get your basic resists, FA, and see invis, then start dropping like a rock until 4900. You'll probably have made something around level 40 by that point, so NOW, because of your gear you're finding, you can fight anything...you don't need those last 10 levels, you just need the gear. Hey, you should be able to win without being 50th level, but things have to be done so we at least greatly reduce the Express Elevator to the Basement benefits.

And it has to be a package deal. First major things first:

--GREATLY reduce all magical monster removers, except possibly Banishment...Teleport Other and Mass Banishment will break ANY attempt to reduce this problem.

--No unguarded good loot outside a vault. (Which is why TO effects need extensive reconsideration.)

--Separate mapping functions from treasure detection. I'd much prefer !Enlightenment stops, for example, at mapping and lighting the whole level. NO treasure detection at all. (But man, I'd *love* it if it did TRAP detection.)

--Reduce the information gained outside immediate LOS.

IMO, nothing less than ALL of these, will do enough to address the whole "crash down to 4900' ASAP" issue. We might not need to eliminate Deep Descent, and we might be able to keep several stairs going down on a level...as long as we make it such that, if you drop your character 25 dungeon levels really fast with no real exploration time on any of them, that recovering almost ANY of those nice, powerful items, will be extremely risky.