Making the game harder, take two

[Derakon]

Yeah, the important thing about the potential for instant death is that it is potential, only rarely actualized. The goal is for the player to be aware that at any moment things could suddenly get dangerous. Keep them on their toes. Keep them wondering what's right around the corner. Keep them nervous. That's all part of making the game fun.

As for restores, TJS's point is valid. Stock, oh, no more than 5 at the very most restore potions of each type and you should be fine.

As for Word of Recall, this is one resource that should be unlimited. Reason being, if you run out of it in town then you have to walk back down to wherever you left off, and that's so far in the "not fun" direction that it'd be a blatant design flaw. Not only that, but different players will use wildly differing amounts of the scrolls, not just down to playstyle, but also how soon they find a replacement for those scrolls. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are players who read hundreds of them in one character life, and that doesn't even get into all the scrolls that get burned.

Actually, how about just making Word of Recall an innate ability that all characters have? Chop off an inventory slot and let the player, at any time, start the WoR countdown. Maybe charge them 20% of their current HP and SP to do it or something. Or 2HP/dlvl ascended/descended.

[TJS]

As for Word of Recall, this is one resource that should be unlimited. Reason being, if you run out of it in town then you have to walk back down to wherever you left off, and that's so far in the "not fun" direction that it'd be a blatant design flaw.

You could make the down stairs in town take you straight to the deepest level you've visited. Or if that seems a bit odd then have a service in town takes you down, but you need a scroll to get back (which are in limited supply).

[Derakon]

Hm. A portal to take you down to your recall depth, in addition to the staircases that take you to 50'. Then you can always get into the dungeon, but you may not necessarily be able to get out easily. That works. Impromptu ironman sessions can be quite fun sometimes.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

The trouble with stat restoring is that if it is guaranteed in town then it all becomes a bit pointless. You just need to go through the hassle of recalling back to town. I think having a few in town, but once they've gone then that's it would help solve the Lost Soul problem, without making stat drain trivial for the whole game.

2 words:

Time Hounds.

And to a lesser degree, time vortexes...which can be harder to detect.

The only effect of stat draining right now, is to force a recall, and sometimes force some scumming if needed. The only time this costs, is when you know you've got a sweet vault to crack, or there's some item elsewhere you want to get.

If there's a tightly limited supply, what happens when you get nailed for *2 or 3* key stats...damned time hounds could nail a caster for casting stat AND Con, for example. It gets back to the non-fun of hunting for the restorers.

Of course: some of this might be fixed in the later nightlies, with improvements in consumables drops. If !Augment (or even !RestoreAll, which would be another nice, moderate-depth potion) was common enough, then the town can run out, and it'll be an appropriate penalty.

I also like the portal to take you to your recall depth. One could extend that to any level, no deeper than your recall depth...but I dunno if there's enough added value to this to make it worthwhile.

An extension of this, which may be too radical: we've got stairs on each level. Why not define special, relatively small rooms, in which portals back to town exist? The reason why I suggest a small room is to give it a fixed, well-known appearance; it makes it less accident-prone than if it's just a random terrain feature. We *eliminate* WoR altogether. Want to go back to town? You gotta find one of the portals on the level.

[dos350]

eek

eek

i have never won game but please believe me~ its is hard enough!

my best char was 1 hit by a jaberwokky at dlvl 51~~

and infact im in favor of shops holding pots of restore stat and all the good stuff constantly, is only waste time to go to lvl 1 and rest..

but no auto id or removing thing from game is too good to hurt now~~!

[Timo Pietilä]

and infact im in favor of shops holding pots of restore stat and all the good stuff constantly, is only waste time to go to lvl 1 and rest..

...and there's the problem. If you have items in shops that can't be guaranteed to be there then someone will town-scum to get them. Either they need to be guaranteed or so rare that town-scumming becomes moot point. Or have some other solution to that problem.

Maybe have time limit for stat-drains, like regeneration, but slower, and remove entire stat-recovery potion-mess from the game. That way stat-drains still hurt and can't be trivially cured, and annoyance for getting that cure is removed.

[d_m]

That's a massive change. I'm not saying I'm against it, but we shouldn't underestimate how much it will "make the game easier" by effectively removing the ID minigame.

You might be right, but I find the ID mini-game to be easy to the point of being useless, and I think new players who don't know the ropes find it really hard and/or annoying. I know Takkaria wants to eliminate ?ID entirely, which is why that I think ID-by-use, pseudo at 20 and auto at 40 won't make the game easier in the long run.

It is possible to reach cl20 in minutes of play (I play slowly and even I can do it in under an hour), and instant pseudo will automatically reveal any cursed items (unless we introduce Sangband-style "hidden curses", which people will hate). Given the sophistication and speed of ID-by-use now there's not much difference in impact between the pseudo at cl20 and the full ID at cl40.

I agree with you, but I think the current curses are so boring that I'm not worried about it. In fact, I would be fine with curses being undetectible by ID, as long as they aren't either boring (like the current curse which is easily undoable) or sticky curse (which most people just use to reset). I think cursed items that are tempting to use are fun, whereas "suprise you're screwed" curses are boring, because it's easy to adapt a play style where you literally never hit them (as I have and as I feel most people here have).

When was the last time you inadvertently got stuck with a cursed weapon that wasn't in an ironman game? For me it may have been two years ago.

Especially after level 40, ID is tedious and probably shouldn't be referred to as a game. I feel more strongly about the auto ID at 40 than the instant pseudo at 20. I'm at work so I can't really get all my thoughts out, but I will try to follow this post up later. Given that ID doesn't make the game more dangerous (only more annoying) I think we can substitute better challenges for it.

[PowerDiver]

IMO the way to make things harder is to choose to differentiate by removal rather than by addition. E.g., when someone complains that mages and priests are too similar, you could either add different powers to each, or you could remove similar powers from one or the other. If you choose removal every time such a situation arises, then over time the game will naturally evolve into something harder. Same thing for egos and artifacts. Differentiate things by weakening or removing them instead of by improving them.

[Dean Anderson]

I also like the portal to take you to your recall depth. One could extend that to any level, no deeper than your recall depth...but I dunno if there's enough added value to this to make it worthwhile.

An extension of this, which may be too radical: we've got stairs on each level. Why not define special, relatively small rooms, in which portals back to town exist? The reason why I suggest a small room is to give it a fixed, well-known appearance; it makes it less accident-prone than if it's just a random terrain feature. We *eliminate* WoR altogether. Want to go back to town? You gotta find one of the portals on the level.

I think the portal down is a great idea.

I'm less sure about removing WoR completely - some of the most exciting times in Angband are when you've got in out of your depth and you cast WoR then desperately try to survive until it kicks in and whisks you to safety.

Then again, desperately trying to find a portal room without dying might turn out to be just as exciting.

That's the sort of thing that someone should try in a variant first, rather than sticking it straight in Vanilla.

[Timo Pietilä]

IMO the way to make things harder is to choose to differentiate by removal rather than by addition. E.g., when someone complains that mages and priests are too similar, you could either add different powers to each, or you could remove similar powers from one or the other. If you choose removal every time such a situation arises, then over time the game will naturally evolve into something harder. Same thing for egos and artifacts. Differentiate things by weakening or removing them instead of by improving them.

Well said. That's something I have been saying for a long time now, but not so elegantly.

[Dean Anderson]

You might be right, but I find the ID mini-game to be easy to the point of being useless, and I think new players who don't know the ropes find it really hard and/or annoying.

The ID mini-game should be like the food mini-game or the light mini-game.

It should be a resource management issue at low level, then once you get to higher level you shouldn't need to worry about it any longer.

[d_m]

It should be a resource management issue at low level, then once you get to higher level you shouldn't need to worry about it any longer.

I pretty much agree with this, as long as it's at least somewhat interesting at low levels (for instance, I would like to remove the Satisfy Hunger spell or make it harder/more expensive to cast).

[bio_hazard]

For context- I haven't gotten past the mid-game.

I don't see a need for a change to ID. The ID by use works very well in the early game, and ID is in enough supply in the stores to deal with all but the largest stacks of ego gear in my experience. Although I haven't reached CL40, I don't see a problem with auto-ID at that stage, since presumably so much more stuff will be worth checking out.

I also haven't gotten to the point where I consider the game too easy. But if it had to be made more difficult, here are a few thoughts.

-The game is entirely about detection, so if you want to make it harder or more exciting, limit detection and telepathy. Make sleeping monsters not detected. Make monsters within vaults undetectable.

-Make monster groups act as groups. If you start wailing on one troll, and he shouts, the other 15 should wake up immediately.

-remove TLevel, and allow monsters to follow you up stairs if they are within a certain radius. Maybe allow digging to the next level- this would be a slow means to change level if the ways to the stairs are too dangerous.

-Make digging aggrevate

-Make player take damage from its own area effect spells

-make *Destruction* drop you to the next level (stunned, blinded) Obviously won't on D99/100

-As was stated earlier, make good items more tied to defeating enemies. OOD items should come from OOD monsters or uniques. Consumables could come from chests sitting underneath the cluster of humanoids, or at least in the same room.

-Occasionally make humanoids have ego/branded attacks.

-For curses, break curses when player gains level.

[fizzix]

IMO the way to make things harder is to choose to differentiate by removal rather than by addition. E.g., when someone complains that mages and priests are too similar, you could either add different powers to each, or you could remove similar powers from one or the other. If you choose removal every time such a situation arises, then over time the game will naturally evolve into something harder. Same thing for egos and artifacts. Differentiate things by weakening or removing them instead of by improving them.

Does that mean that I can use this principle to remove gravity hounds?

Seriously, I think this has already started with CLW being removed for rogues and mages.

Here are some other ideas of things to remove.
Reduce +to_dam and +AC on most weapons and armor, including artifacts.
Remove extra shots from rangers (or reduce it to only +1 shot)
Remove object detection from clairvoyance/enlight (i playtested this with ewert)
Remove WoD from ranger and priest
Remove _magi and _banish
Remove rods of TO
Remove TO spell from rogues, paladins and rangers
Remove =escaping
Remove arrow branding and enchanting spells
Remove ?enchant from stores
Remove !CCW from stores

[d_m]

So, a couple of observations.

First, I think a lot of the people who have argued about the game getting easier are right, and I think Eddie's statement about the problem makes sense.

Second, almost everyone who has posted on this forum has advocated more or less strongly for various changes to the game to be introduced (whether arguing that changes should be reverted, supplying small patches, or making major changes). This is the overwhelming reason the game lacks direction: because people with commit access have been listening to ideas from people who don't. As the (implied) target of a lot of criticism about how V is too easy, or off-target, or whatever, it's worth noting that many (if not most) of the current new features don't originate with me or Magnate, but with other people who supplied patches or whatnot, and I would say that most of the changes were directly made to address concerns on oook (e.g. consumable rarity) which I think most of us shared.

Third, Takkaria has said on IRC that he specifically wanted V development to move to a more collective model. In my interpretation that includes the wider Angband community, not just those of us with commit access, or those of us in #angband-dev, or whatever. While many people on here don't write code, many do, and most people can change the edit files. So rather than griping about how the game is too easy, or about how the direction is wrong, I would encourage people to open tickets, submit patches and modify edit files to achieve the game you want to play. The days where an iron-fisted dev runs V single-handedly are gone (and I encourage people who prefer that model to play many of the excellent variants run in exactly this mannger).

Most of the work Magnate and I have been doing lately on Angband hasn't been our own vision (or even fun) but rather corralling, testing, and integrating work and patches from many other people (fizzix, ewert, noz, Nick, elly, ...). Since having been given commit access (and dev responsibility) I have felt like I have had less ability to work on my own ideas, since I spend more time trying to fix bugs the community reports, integrate other people's ideas and work (what a hobby!). Even this work represents only a fraction of ideas that are constantly proposed and discussed here on oook, which easily overflow our ability to keep up with.

I have actually been really excited that a wider group of devs is doing work on Angband, even if in the short term this has caused some instability and shifts in difficulty. What I am hoping is that people like Pete Mack, Eddie, Timo and others who advocate for a harder, stricter game will also continue sending patches and concrete suggestions for how to improve V.

tl;dr -- Angband wants YOU... to help make V more exciting, fun, challenging and interesting than it has ever been before!