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

[fizzix]

I like that suggestion of making ancient dragons stronger. In fact ancient dragons are pretty much pushovers where they appear, so they don't need to get deeper unless you make them quite a lot stronger.

Double the HP of Ancient dragons (same with wyrms and mature) then they do 400 damage per breath. Taking on an Ancient Green without poison resistance is very dangerous at this point. Maybe they don't need to be dropped deeper, I don't know.

We really need a common monster that does a moderate amount of poison damage, 3-400, right now the only monster that fits that role is the greater basilisk. Ancient greens are the obvious candidate.

I know that we disagree on where monsters should be placed. You like monsters at a certain level to have widely varying difficulty, to bring difficult, or non-boring monsters, to the level. I think that the monster level should reflect difficulty as accurately as possible, with a greater chance of finding OoD monsters. In fact, part of my reason for making medium vaults is to give the game an easy way of producing 40 lvl OoD monsters. A careful player should be able to look at the monster file, see it's OoD, and avoid it based on that information alone.

[chris]

(old versions where pack "ambush" AI didn't exist early char was easily overwhelmed by attacking pack of cave spiders or jackals).

I definitely think the ambush AI made the game easier, at least early on. Often, I can turn off my disturbance options and rest up to full in a hallway, while stupid (erm... smart) monsters setup to ambush me in the room ahead. While if they would just come after me, I'd probably be dead.

Congratulations on the Silver Jelly death. I don't think I've succumbed to that foe yet

One of the most annoying early killers in the old days was the floating eye, back when it did 0 damage. If it caught you in its grasp, you had no recourse but to hold down the space key until you starved, which often took over 10 minutes!

[Timo Pietilä]

The solution to drolems is to drop them deeper and/or make them evil. The solution to AMHDs is actually to strengthen Ancient dragons so that they're closer in HP to AMHDs.

Drolems don't need evil flag. If you die to one then you die to one, it's rare enough that it actually needs to be surprise to make them any kind of threat. I don't remember when I have lost a char to Drolem. I have lost quite a bit more to time and gravity hounds and even Dreads.

Actually in my current savefile which is pretty close to perfect it seems that I have been killed exactly once: by Grip. Too bad that monster memory breaks when savefile compatibility breaks.

Going thru older installations it looks like major killer has been surprisingly vibration hound (4) followed closely by gravity hounds (3)....ah, finally I found one savefile with huge number of deaths. Seems to be that top killers are Battle Scarred Vet, Jackals and Cave Spiders by huge margin, and then again biggest killer was Vibration Hound. One oddity in that savefile. Killed by silver jelly!?!??? How an earth can person die to silver jelly. How an earth don't I remember that one? Too embarrassing? (old versions where pack "ambush" AI didn't exist early char was easily overwhelmed by attacking pack of cave spiders or jackals).

I like that suggestion of making ancient dragons stronger. In fact ancient dragons are pretty much pushovers where they appear, so they don't need to get deeper unless you make them quite a lot stronger.

[Timo Pietilä]

I personally feel that the whole monster memory should be available from the start. But that's not how the game is, and most old-time players don't care too much, because they already know what can kill them.

Actually that is not quite true. Obviously you need to know what monsters can do, but that is not necessary for survival if you know how you can get killed. When JLE-patch monsters were introduced I build up my monster memory for those missing parts without any problem of being risk of getting killed. I did this with variants too, it's quite easy barring some new ways to die, which case you learn from dying. If you don't then you die again.

[Adley]

Finally, since Vogrim's behavior strikes me as pretty immature (IMO, judging from the fact that I was like that when I was 15)... I'm going to make a suggestion to the administrators here. Maybe it would be a good idea to have an age limit on joining this board? The age of majority where it's hosted perhaps?

NO! Age of maturity is, in my opinion, irrelevant as to werether someone is mature or not. Besides, if someone IS immature AND rude, he can be individually banned. no need to harm the (small) quantity of Angband teenager players.

[fizzix]

@Sasa

Drolems are particularly deadly because they also can't be detected with devil or telepathy. Even if you know about their deadliness, often you will be instakilled by them with a priest or warrior character who doesn't know they're around until too late.

Drolems are rare monsters, yet they've accounted for more character deaths for me than any other monster. Honestly, I think they should be moved much deeper.

AMHDs are also another problem. Their problem is that they have so many more hitpoints than ancient dragons. A player might be running through ancient dragons with ease, and think AMHD, piece of cake! and then get destroyed. This is problematic for a different reason than drolems. Here the game is making a natural extrapolation be false. Why do AMHDs have 3 times the HP of ancient dragons? This should really be something more like 1.5

The solution to drolems is to drop them deeper and/or make them evil. The solution to AMHDs is actually to strengthen Ancient dragons so that they're closer in HP to AMHDs. And then drop everything a bit deeper. The reason that these won't be changed is there's a lot of history of 'it breathes gas, you die' in Angband, and people are loath to remove it.

[chris]

Rumors were first added in ZAngband, if I recall correctly. Vanilla doesn't have a rumors system. That said, it's not too hard to give a rundown of major damage sources and how to avert them. It's just more documentation. The question is, will newbies read that documentation?

Read documentation for a game? Never! That's one of the benefits of the rumor system. It (could) potentially move some of the documentation into the game where users would have to see it. Unless they don't read the messages either

[Derakon]

Rumors were first added in ZAngband, if I recall correctly. Vanilla doesn't have a rumors system. That said, it's not too hard to give a rundown of major damage sources and how to avert them. It's just more documentation. The question is, will newbies read that documentation?

[SaSa]

Well, I crossed over to Angband recently after 15 years of NetHack and other roguelikes, and had much the same experience - first character to reach ca. 2000 feet ran into a drolem and then I was looking at a gravestone.

I do agree with a lot of what the original poster is saying. While the game should be challenging by design, the issue of poison resistance at 1900-2000 feet isn't really properly presented as a challenge. Nothing up to that point even begins to approach the lethality that drolems and AMHD:s represent, when you take that one more stairway down. And nothing suggests to the player that poison resistance (out of the plethora of resistances in Angband) is critical - indeed some resistances remain inconsequential through much of the game. So you basically need to a) read the spoilers, b) be warned by a more experienced player or c) learn it the hard way. In an ideally-designed game there'd be d) you extrapolate from the game experience thus far that you could really need some more resistances now. But there's little to extrapolate from, as it happens in such a drastic transition at ca. 1900 feet - and this is something to avoid in game design, IMO.

(Of course, Roguelikes in general have a rich tradition in instadeath opportunities. Combined with permadeath it makes the whole thing a somewhat perverse excercise - IMO longtime Roguelike players may have some masochist tendencies, and they learn to savor all those grossly unfair deaths.)

[chris]

Does Vanilla have a rumor system?

Actually, this one cracked me up:
This rumor is not true.

Reminds me of Russell's paradox ...

[chris]

Why not, at the very LEAST, have an NPC run up to you at some point before the instant death phase of the game and warn the player what can happen?

Does Vanilla have a rumor system? In some variants, there are scrolls of rumor, and you can even pay to hear new rumors in one of the town shops. Mostly they are funny tidbits like:

They say that you can't trust rumors.
You will encounter a dark, tall stranger...
You can get the Longsword 'Ringil' by doing the following:
You feel the Windows (2000) on your hard disk is broken...

But this might be a place to actually give constructive advice like:

You better find a source of Free Action ASAP!
Basic Resistances (Fire, Cold, Acid, Lightning, Poison) are essential to a long, healthy and vibrant life.
If you see the Tarrasque, Run!

[chris]

3. 20 hours is quite a lot of time to get to level 39. And depending on the amount of time those hours were spread out over, it might be rather a lot to spend on a game.

It took me almost 1000 hours to get my first win, back in the Frog Knows days Don't sweat losing your guy in only 20 ...

And while I disagree with where this thread is heading, there is a valid point that players can die very quickly, often in a turn or two. It makes the game challenging, and fun, in my opinion, but it also makes one susceptible to lapses in concentration. Sometimes, your are grunting about, becoming bored, sending key press commands from your brain to your fingers too fast, and whammo! But honestly, if you remove monster deadliness, the game becomes too easy. I think part of the reason monsters *need* to be so deadly is that players have too much healing, teleport, whatever. So if they can't kill you quickly, you can just escape and live to fight another day.

Just my 2 cents. And I love this game. After 16 years of play, it is *still* fun. Give it a chance ... it might grow on you

[Djabanete]

Vogrim, when you're new to the game, one or two unpredictable high-level deaths are to be expected. You'll die many, many times --- but soon you'll be familiar with all the ways to die and you won't be caught by surprise anymore.

I personally feel that the whole monster memory should be available from the start. But that's not how the game is, and most old-time players don't care too much, because they already know what can kill them. For that matter, I don't care too much either.

You can campaign to change the game, but in that case I'd try being more polite.

Or you can just learn the game, if you like it. In that case too I'd try being more polite, because you will probably need to ask questions here often.

Or if you don't like the game, you can stop playing it.

In any case, you can stop the name-calling and caps lock. It's not attracting any sympathy.

BTW: I died laughing when I read "Cluebat of Slay Troll"

[Therem Harth]

Oh no you're right, I won't be... oh wait a minute I'm above that too. Sorry.

[Vogrim]

Here's a little advice for you, Therem: Playing the "holier than thou" card never works because the very act of playing it is a form of trolling, in that the whole point of your post is to highlight how you're above my behavior. If this was the case, you'd simply not respond.

Now, make a predictable, sarcastic response about how I'm right and that you won't be posting anymore.