Ridiculous death due, in my opinion, to flawed design.

[Timo Pietilä]

Having a "game tips" service for free in the General Store mightn't be a bad idea. (Unlike "rumours", game tips should always be true!)

When you're learning a game, there's a certain appeal to having the knowledge come from within the game itself, rather than having to plow through manuals before even getting started.

What do you think players are missing? Playing the game in first place just plain requires person to read the help through, otherwise he wouldn't know anything about what different commands do, or even what they are. At minimum you need to read command descriptions.

"game tips" are very hard to do concept, when even veterans can't agree how this game should be played. All you could do is tell exploits (which might be removed in next version), or monsters, and for monsters we really need that one tip: read the monster description.

So IMO basically we only need to make sure that help is readable and easy to understand, and monster description actually gives hints of monster abilities.

If you think we need something else, like those "game tips" give an example what kind of tips there could be (that doesn't ruin the game experience).

I can give few:

1) patience is a virtue
2) when in doubt, run
3) don't get greedy
4) small chances cumulate
5) if it is faster than you and you don't know it, assume it can kill you.
6) Speed, HP and damage output mean more than any of the high resists

For that we need an explanation what is considered high resist somewhere, which brings the question how do we deal poison? It acts like basic4 (double resists, constant damage reduction) but is treated like high resist (random resists), and it has damage cap between the two. It is an anomaly in resists.

Maybe we should make it pure high resist with variable resist, no double resists and 500 point damage cap. Add poison counter like stunning and cuts and make being poisoned a lot worse %-based damage, or if not damage, then hindrance to abilities, like confusion but much worse to to_hit and to_dam, maybe also speed. Hit hard enough without cure and you are dead.

[ewert]

Don't staves of probing already do LoS ... or was that in a variant.

Personally, since monster memory exists and is stored in savefile (which I start new one very often), I just use cheat_knowmonsterinfo. You use spoilers: you are "cheating". You play long time but don't save the savefile: you are missing on a feature of the game. So, just use the know all info option ...

[fph]

Wouldn't it be possible to make the use of a staff of probing available even if a monster is not in sight? when you just detected monsters so they're visible you could simply probe a monster as if it was in LOS... the probing could either be complete or maybe it would only give out some info

We could have a staff/rod of probing return the complete info of all monsters in a given radius (without giving out their location). This would make it a truly useful item ("poor man's detect monsters").

[Gockel]

Wouldn't it be possible to make the use of a staff of probing available even if a monster is not in sight? when you just detected monsters so they're visible you could simply probe a monster as if it was in LOS... the probing could either be complete or maybe it would only give out some info: either
- info if it can kill you within one player turn with the currently equipped gear or
- info about the complete attack arsenal
- or maybe only which elements it is using so you can take care of your resistances

would be easily justifiable with something like " the monsters "vibrations" (or what the hell) are dampened by the walls...
it wouldn't bother veterans at all, wouldn't take all the risk away as you still wouldn't know about hp / spells / etc. of the monster, and it would be pretty helpful for preparation while not being as boring as simply reading the monster description.

being quite new to angband i don't know how this would go together with esp etc. + what to do about spells ( from what i heard of it, the info if a monster uses mana storm or such stuff should also be of slight interest to a player) but to me it seems fair enough to waste one slot on a staff of probing in exchange for useful but incomplete monster info...

don't know either if it would be a problem to code, just throwing at you what came to my mind a few times already...


oh, and actually i somehow liked the way it was done in zangband 240r5 (?) too, where the beastmaster sells info on whatever monster for ~3000 gold... can be a bit tedious to recall all the time, but in a way i liked it.

[Djabanete]

Having a "game tips" service for free in the General Store mightn't be a bad idea. (Unlike "rumours", game tips should always be true!)

When you're learning a game, there's a certain appeal to having the knowledge come from within the game itself, rather than having to plow through manuals before even getting started.

[Timo Pietilä]

Why make it so hard? Add an option to the stores to provide hints (like ToME tavern rumors). There's no reason to withhold stuff like how to run, how to set up term windows, etc.

I'd rather see monster knowledge as an achievement-type award. Kill a unique native to DLX, get full knowledge of all non-unique monsters native to X+1

If the monsters are the problem for newbies then we need only one hint: Read the monster description.

If problem is that person doesn't know how to play then: read the help-files.

Then we just need to make sure that those two places are up to date and perform the task they are meant to do. Running is mentioned in help-files (more than once), but I'm not sure they tell anything about term-windows. Monster description should give hints about what the monster is and what it can do.

Maybe we could do a "pseudo-ID" for unknown monsters in sight (including detection and ESP). Like how fast it moves is immediately obvious as soon as it moves, monster HP "estimates", something like that.

[Derakon]

Yeah, ToME's listings were pretty pointless; IIRC all they had was vague descriptions of a monster's depth, health, and "danger rating", which were all generated automatically from the edit files.

Depth or letter would seem to be the obvious themes for monsters; I'd lean towards the latter so we could have a "Tome of Orcs" and a "Tome of Zephyr Hounds".

[bio_hazard]

ToME sort of had what you mention- 10 (11?) tomes with lists of monsters and brief descriptions. As I recall they didn't add to monster memory though in that case though- they were pretty useless.

I suppose they could be organized by depth (as they were in ToME), by theme (e.g. all d and D, all o T and O, etc), or just a random assortment of monsters not currently in monster memory.

[Derakon]

Any system designed to provide knowledge to the player that experienced players already have should a) be optional, and b) be accessible if the player wants it to be. Most programs with random hints allow you to page through them freely; I see no reason to gate basic (but nonobvious) knowledge on killing uniques. I suggested changing dungeon levels because it's an action you have to do to play the game and it's something you do often enough that a fair amount of knowledge can be dispensed this way. Staircases also often come at natural breaks in the action.

bio_hazard: interesting idea, but the connection of uniques with monster memory seems tenuous. You could have scrolls of monster knowledge drop that fill in your monster memory when you read them, instead. They'd supplement rods of probing; on the one hand, you don't have to get into LOS of the monster beforehand to get the knowledge, but on the other hand you won't necessarily get info on the monster you want. They should only drop for monsters you haven't seen before (to prevent creation of junk), should have negligible resale value, and ideally cover multiple monsters in one shot.

[bio_hazard]

Why make it so hard? Add an option to the stores to provide hints (like ToME tavern rumors). There's no reason to withhold stuff like how to run, how to set up term windows, etc.

I'd rather see monster knowledge as an achievement-type award. Kill a unique native to DLX, get full knowledge of all non-unique monsters native to X+1

[Nomad]

One possibility would be to have a set of hints that get displayed e.g. when moving between levels, which would explain some of the more obscure parts of Angband. Many more complicated modern games do this -- e.g. Civilization IV (haven't played V) does this during worldgen. Of course, Angband doesn't really have any "down time" when such displays would be minimally obtrusive.

How about giving the player a hint every time they kill a unique? Make it a menu option so that experienced players can turn it off if they want, but hopefully for newbies it would be infrequent enough to not get too annoying, and function as a sort of unlocked achievement. You could even go totally wild and assign each unique its own specific hint - kill them all to collect the set! - but in practical terms, picking one semi-randomly based on level like with drops is probably the way to go. Early level uniques 'drop' hints like "Use the shift key to run", a bit further on you get tips on which abilities/resistances to prioritize, and so forth.

[Derakon]

One possibility would be to have a set of hints that get displayed e.g. when moving between levels, which would explain some of the more obscure parts of Angband. Many more complicated modern games do this -- e.g. Civilization IV (haven't played V) does this during worldgen. Of course, Angband doesn't really have any "down time" when such displays would be minimally obtrusive.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

The only excuse left is that Angband is a niche game for crazy people who want their games to generate rather than relieve stress. That's all well and good, but it doesn't excuse looking down on casual gamers. Especially when there's nothing well publicized in the RPG genre that combines casual gameplay with casual system requirements.

I think that's overstating things. Angband's appeal is, IMO, similar to forms of solitaire that require thinking and skill (and of course some luck) to win. Get a bad hand, or make a mistake? Oops. Move along, try again.

[fyonn]

Freudwin award for fyonn!

Yeah, I keep misspelling it like that and then wondering why I can't find it in the spoilers

[Whelk]

Haha. Breathe Knowledge would be awesome. It could inflict you with Confusion if you're too low level, or if your Intelligence or Wisdom stats are too low.