OOD objects too common?

[Timo Pietilä]

Well, in that case again it is reasonable that you were seeing a monster 40 levels OOD.

I wonder if vaults are being generated too frequently at shallow dungeon levels.

Maybe those new medium vaults with "8" blocks are a bit too frequent. 40 dlvl OoD monster before stat-gain is a killer to anyone trying to open that vault. No easy to escape open vaults should have those blocks or at least they should be rare at shallow depths.

I think there are now too many "8" block vaults in vault.txt, some of the "medium" vaults have actually better content than many greater vaults (which might actually mean that those greater vaults have too few of the "8" blocks).

[Pete Mack]

Anyway, the game's gonna get harder one way or another, DOS350. Protesting everything we discuss without offering any helpful alternatives is, well, not very helpful.

Dos350 has it right this time, for a variety of reasons.
1. Functional
Monster symbol can be overriden by prf file. So are you going to use the original symbol/color for modified monsters, or the prf-file specified symbol? If the former, the UX is terrible: players must remember the original symbol and the new symbol. (This is a complete disaster for players who use graphics.)
If you use the new symbol, prf file configuration will have an impact on game-play. This is even worse!
2. Logical
Assume there is a workaround for (1). Then you are biasing the game even more in favor of cautious play. Don't know what that dragon is? Better not crack the vault or go near the 2x2 moated room.
3. Gameplay
Assume you do run into that 40 level out-of-depth GWoLaw, and get killed. If you are a relative newbie, you have no way to know in advance that such a beast exists. So you stop playing in disgust. If you aren't a newbie, you are just pissed off because you forgot that there is another monster with the same symbol.

For making things harder, nerf player capabilities, don't nerf the UI.
Examples include:
* Reduce damage (e.g. for off-weapon bonii)
* Reduce hit chance for crippled characters (blind/confused/stunned/infravision/stuck in the dark.)
* Reduce healing capabilities for non-priest-casting characters

[d_m]

From what I remember, I am reasonably sure I was seeing the corner of the "Rooms" medium vault (based on monster and trap locations).

Well, in that case again it is reasonable that you were seeing a monster 40 levels OOD.

I wonder if vaults are being generated too frequently at shallow dungeon levels.

[Zyphyr]

Was that in a vault also? I guess you wouldn't be sure at character level 5...

From what I remember, I am reasonably sure I was seeing the corner of the "Rooms" medium vault (based on monster and trap locations).

[Derakon]

Maximize can actually make the game easier, depending on how your stats play out. A race/class combo with penalties to important stats like CON and STR can come out post-stat gain with higher stats than would be possible with maximize on, though IIRC they'll also start out with worse stats.

Anyway, the game's gonna get harder one way or another, DOS350. Protesting everything we discuss without offering any helpful alternatives is, well, not very helpful.

[dos350]

please no, detection is good, knowing exactly is nice, also in difficult game i see remove maximize or something like that, eeek!

[d_m]

Last night, CL 5 mage on DL 8. Cast Detect Monster, and what do I see down in the corner? Smaug (native to DL48). The monster description promised me some absurdly high amount of XP for killing him.

Was that in a vault also? I guess you wouldn't be sure at character level 5...

[Derakon]

Ahh, a sling, some iron shots, and Phase Door's all you need for that fight. Right?

What kind of odds would a clvl 5 mage have to even hit Smaug?

[Zyphyr]

I don't know about OoD objects, but OoD monsters are insane. I detected a great wyrm of balance in a vault in the 30's, maybe DL36. When the anti-strategy people implement "all D's detect alike" that will be a source of unavoidable instakill.

Last night, CL 5 mage on DL 8. Cast Detect Monster, and what do I see down in the corner? Smaug (native to DL48). The monster description promised me some absurdly high amount of XP for killing him.

[Timo Pietilä]

There's no point putting that kind of vault down if 95% of the time the right action is not to enter it because you don't know whether you will be risking instakill.

That would be more like 0% chance of being insta-killed if you play it right. You could clear vaults without insta-kill risk in frog-knows, so your argument doesn't hold water.

If it is 95% instakill for your playstyle, then don't go there.

If you provide enough info via detection to figure out what it the D is [color, danger warning, whatever] you might as well leave things as they are.

Plain color tells you general type of the monster, not exact type, which is enough. Balance dragons are violet, so they are easy to recognize. More difficult cases are impact/earth hounds, gravity/inertia hounds and stuff like that. Now that we have more colors used distinguishing monsters from each others is rather easy.

[Derakon]

There's no point putting that kind of vault down if 95% of the time the right action is not to enter it because you don't know whether you will be risking instakill.

Everything you do in the game is risking instakill. There's always the possibility, however slim, that you've screwed something up or forgotten to take something into account or just plain been screwed over by the RNG.

For you, you won't want to risk those vaults because the monster in one might be more dangerous than you're willing to tackle (this is the "risk of a risk of an instadeath"); others might be willing to take that risk, knowing that they could be facing an "It breathes, you die" death. You apparently hate taking risks that are due to lack of knowledge, but that doesn't mean that those risks are bad, or that having them reduces fun for all or even most players.

[Magnate]

To be clear: I don't think there is a concrete plan to replace *all* detection with frog-knows detection, or something else.

I've heard of ideas to have various kinds of limited ESP (e.g. pval-radius, ESP for orcs only, or ESP for presence only, or kind only, etc) as well as a pseudo-ESP for monster presence (listening or something like that). I know that Timo really wanted detection reverted to frog-knows, and I think Magnate was interested in trying it out, but I don't think there's a plan to definitely do it.

To be clear, we are really only talking about ESP, aren't we?

- nobody is proposing to nerf the automatic recognition of any visible monster in LOS

- nobody is proposing to nerf the Detect or Reveal Monsters spells, or their derivatives (Detect Evil etc.), as these take a whole turn.

So that brings us back to ESP, which is simply way too powerful as currently implemented. So yes, I do think that some sort of nerf is in order. I like Sangband's racial ESP (it has separate ESP for undead, animals and demons, governed by realm skill), but I also like Timo's idea of reverting to f-k for monsters not in LOS. I also like the idea of making ESP pval-dependent, so you'd have a radius of 2 squares per point, meaning you'd want to collect two or three items to reach the max radius of 20. Or the pval could govern frequency rather than radius (this is how Sang works - the creatures appear infrequently at low skill, as if they have WEIRD_MIND, and are white asterisks, and then they appear more consistently as their proper letter and colour as skill increases). Or both.

These could be combined - we could have separate types of ESP, each with different radii and/or frequency. Thoughts welcome.

[d_m]

There's no point putting that kind of vault down if 95% of the time the right action is not to enter it because you don't know whether you will be risking instakill. If you provide enough info via detection to figure out what it the D is [color, danger warning, whatever] you might as well leave things as they are.

To be clear: I don't think there is a concrete plan to replace *all* detection with frog-knows detection, or something else.

I've heard of ideas to have various kinds of limited ESP (e.g. pval-radius, ESP for orcs only, or ESP for presence only, or kind only, etc) as well as a pseudo-ESP for monster presence (listening or something like that). I know that Timo really wanted detection reverted to frog-knows, and I think Magnate was interested in trying it out, but I don't think there's a plan to definitely do it.

If you want a list of ideas devs have for 3.3 difficulty stuff you can check out: http://trac.rephial.org/wiki/DifficultGame

To be clear, nothing is really set in stone--those are ideas that devs are *generally* in agreement about, I think.

[PowerDiver]

Vault monsters can be generated up to 40 dlvls OOD. So of course you can just avoid the vault, or you can take your chances, knowing that that D could be something very nasty indeed.

There's no point putting that kind of vault down if 95% of the time the right action is not to enter it because you don't know whether you will be risking instakill. If you provide enough info via detection to figure out what it the D is [color, danger warning, whatever] you might as well leave things as they are.

[Derakon]

Vault monsters can be generated up to 40 dlvls OOD. So of course you can just avoid the vault, or you can take your chances, knowing that that D could be something very nasty indeed. This is just another iteration of the calculated risk-taking that you yourself originally advocated in the form of powerdiving.

Though as far as weakening detection is concerned, the most I would believe someone has planned is to revert to the frog-knows style where you can see the letter, position, and color, but can't 'l'ook at the monster. Thus you should be able to guess based on the color of the monster (and any relevant flickering) what type it is.

I guess that just gives more strength to players who have memorized monster.txt though.