Question about diving

[camlost]

My ultimate game would be cross-breed of Sangband, NPP and vanilla. 4GAI from NPP, o-combat and skills from sangband and general simplicity from vanilla. Add in darker feeling and difficulty from frog-knows and you have pretty perfect game.

I'm thinking about making this a Sangband mode. Can you elaborate? Sangband already has 4GAI (is NPP's any better?). What is unsimple in Sangband (forging, shapechanging, and unarmed skills come to mind)? Should melee skills and missile skills be unified separately?

I'm also curious how to quantitatively make the game more difficult? Fewer drops, more OOD monsters? Less reliable availability of supplies? I never played frog-knows. Are we sure that the game is easier now, or are we just better informed?

[Timo Pietilä]

I never played frog-knows. Are we sure that the game is easier now, or are we just better informed?

frog-knows didn't have hardcoded OoD limits, you couldn't look beyond what you really saw, there was no "preserve mode", items didn't stack on the floor (items that didn't fit into floor simply disappeared), almost all artifacts were generally less powerful, monster deadliness jump was much sharper at 2000' and in general information you got from screen was simply less than it is now (no extra term windows). Shops didn't guarantee anything. Not even food. Nearly all normal monsters drop only normal items, most uniques only good, and I think only Wormtongue, Tiamat, Sauron and Morgoth had guaranteed excellent drops. There were less GV:s with "8" blocks (but OTOH that made CGV more likely / game)

No acid or poison brands (elec was x5 brand). Only kill-slay was kill dragon. No weak speed items, BoS, Ringil, Cubragol, Feanor and RoS were only sources to speed. Many of the deep objects simply didn't exist, there were no aman or magi cloaks, no Lothlorien bows, Buckland slings, Dwarven armors or elvenkind boots. Chaos was capped at 600. Sources of poison resistance were really rare. No branding ammunition. No off-weapon brands/shots/blows. Only off-weapon combat bonuses were in slaying/power handwear, rings of damage, slaying or skill and Fingolfin and Cambeleg.

Some things that were easier were one seriously broken feature: invulnerability spell for mages, and demons were all fire-based so immunity to fire made you pretty much invulnerable to all of them. Chaos resistance did provide protection to confusion effect.

OTOH most mage attack spells pretty much suck, so mage needed that invulnerability, and immunities were rare those days (special ring artifacts like Narya and DSM artifacts IIRC were only ones with them. Deathwreaker might have had it, but it was really rare, can't remember did it have it or not).

[Derakon]

I'm pretty sure Thorin still gave ImAcid and Taratol ImElec, but it's been so long that I may just be remembering the 2.7/2.8 days instead.

By "can't look beyond what you really saw" what Timo means is that the 'l'ook command didn't work outside of LOS, so you couldn't remotely inspect monsters or objects. In fact, the detect-monster spell only showed monsters until you cleared the "You detect monsters! -more-" prompt, so you had to cast repeatedly to see if a monster was awake, flickering, etc. to try to guess at its type. Or have telepathy. Speaking of which, if you wanted to rest you had to take off your telepathy gear, since there wasn't any "disturb when any monster moves" option to disable.

Many of the nastier monsters and uniques were not in the game. The most powerful non-unique IIRC was a Great Wyrm of Balance (most dangerous, probably still gravity hounds). I'm pretty sure "intelligent" spellcasting wasn't in the game. Speed was much more quantized - +1, is double +2, is triple, etc. with no diminishing returns. I once rolled up a wizard mode character, went to modify stats, held down the '+' key when it prompted how much speed I wanted, took a step, and immediately died of starvation. Fun times. Once you did start finding rings of speed, an RoS +2 was rare but not unheard-of; certainly more common than a modern RoS +20.

Tracking your abilities was very hard. *Identify* only showed you properties of an item until you cleared a prompt. You needed to hoard every *Identify* and Potion of Self Knowledge you found to figure out what gear did. Combine that with the lack of spoilers or an online community and the game was much more mysterious in a way that I think is fundamentally unachievable now.

Vaults in general were more common, and especially given the low number of greater vaults, GCVs were much more common back then than they are now. They were also a major source of gear since they could be tackled comparatively safely and broke the normal item generation rules. Most greater vaults these days are not only rare, but seriously unfriendly to crack. Take a look at the old vault designs and you'll see they're mostly broken up into small chambers that can be tackled one at a time.

[buzzkill]

I'm also curious how to quantitatively make the game more difficult? Fewer drops, more OOD monsters? Less reliable availability of supplies? I never played frog-knows. Are we sure that the game is easier now, or are we just better informed?

I was actually thinking along these line today. I may be wrong, but without changing much else, if you just prohibited players from using 'questionable tactics' and nerf the obviously over powered and/or misused items, the game would be damn near impossible.

That is, changes to prohibit town scumming, stair scumming, hack n' back/ pillar dancing, enchanting ammo, destruction, tele other, tele level, rune of prot, and bring back real PITA curses and OMG/WTF deadly traps. I'm sure I've missed a ton of stuff that could also be added to the list... and having never played Sang, just kinda throwing out stuff that would work for most variants.

I know it's a pipe dream, but better AI would make a huge difference. Every monster should have it's own unique AI routine.

Basically I'd just keep the player from 'chee-tang' as much as possible. I don't know how you can seriously consider making the game harder without first patching the obvious exploits.

[myshkin]

OTOH most mage attack spells pretty much suck, so mage needed that invulnerability, and immunities were rare those days (special ring artifacts like Narya and DSM artifacts IIRC were only ones with them. Deathwreaker might have had it, but it was really rare, can't remember did it have it or not).

I've never played frog-knows, but I do have the source. Deathwreaker did have an immunity, as did Ulmo, Eonwe, Razorback, Thorin, Tuor, and the Rings of Power. (It was surprisingly difficult to find the properties for the rings, which are very much special cases.)

[Derakon]

Keep in mind, Buzzkill, that the player has to be able to make some tactical decisions. If you outlaw everything that gives the player an edge, then the game devolves into "stick strictly to safe fights until I get a lucky drop which expands the definition of "safe" so I can go down a few stairs". In other words, there's a difference between "effective tactics" and "abusive tactics". We want to encourage the use of tactics by rewarding the ones that work; the rewards just can't be so big that the use of those tactics becomes dominating.

[Estie]

I was actually thinking along these line today. I may be wrong, but without changing much else, if you just prohibited players from using 'questionable tactics' and nerf the obviously over powered and/or misused items, the game would be damn near impossible.

That is, changes to prohibit town scumming, stair scumming, hack n' back/ pillar dancing, enchanting ammo, destruction, tele other, tele level, rune of prot, and bring back real PITA curses and OMG/WTF deadly traps. I'm sure I've missed a ton of stuff that could also be added to the list... and having never played Sang, just kinda throwing out stuff that would work for most variants.

I know it's a pipe dream, but better AI would make a huge difference. Every monster should have it's own unique AI routine.

Basically I'd just keep the player from 'chee-tang' as much as possible. I don't know how you can seriously consider making the game harder without first patching the obvious exploits.

Minus the tele other, that sounds about how Ironman plays.

[buzzkill]

Keep in mind, Buzzkill, that the player has to be able to make some tactical decisions. If you outlaw everything that gives the player an edge, then the game devolves into "stick strictly to safe fights until I get a lucky drop which expands the definition of "safe" so I can go down a few stairs". In other words, there's a difference between "effective tactics" and "abusive tactics". We want to encourage the use of tactics by rewarding the ones that work; the rewards just can't be so big that the use of those tactics becomes dominating.

I don't entirely disagree with you but I think that you're overstating if you say that there will be 'no tactical decisions left' for the player. Everything is still on the table, except a few things, and maybe a few more as new abusive tactics arise. If the preferred substitute tactic becomes "stick strictly to safe fights" then something probably went horribly wrong along the way, but if not, that too could be 'tweaked'. There's a fine line between effective and abusive, and that's is left to the player to decide (which isn't a great mechanic). If we limit the player to (what the RNG judges to be) "fair and effective" and eliminate the abusive, then the game gets much harder, harder in way that can't be simply overcome.

I don't really expect this to happen short of my own variant, but I feel that making the game harder in other ways is irrelevant if the same tried and true exploits can be employed, just to a higher degree, to overcome said difficulty... and they can.

[Derakon]

For what it's worth, my last character had a devil of a time in the mid-game, solely because no good equipment was dropping. I was down at 1900' or thereabouts, trying to get my stats up despite a near-total lack of stat potions, trying to get a decent weapon (still using a Dagger of Extra Attacks +2), and above all trying to get Free Action and See Invisible on non-ring slots! It was quite hard. Also quite frustrating because the game completely stalled for awhile, but hard.

In other words, simply pushing back the point at which good gear starts to drop does an excellent job of making the game harder all on its own. We just need to be careful not to create stallpoints -- in this situation all I needed was to get FA or SI on a non-ring slot.

[ulrichvonbek]

On the topic of diving, I thought I was going down stairs fairly quickly in my last successful game. It was at least quicker than I had ever managed to keep a character alive before. However, when I checked the file dumps between that character and my current character, I discovered that they both hit L34 at about the same turncount, ~600K, however the previous character was a human warrior and this one is a dunadan paladin. Also the previous character was at 2100' at L34, this one is at 3150' at the same level.

I guess the rewards of getting deep into the dungeon quickly are something the good divers have been saying and posting to the forum for a while, but it's one thing to read about it, and it's another to pull off successful diving.

[Timo Pietilä]

I'm pretty sure Thorin still gave ImAcid and Taratol ImElec, but it's been so long that I may just be remembering the 2.7/2.8 days instead.

Forgot to mention those. Thorin had immunity, not sure about Taratol (it had different dice then and x5 elec brand, I just don't remember did it have IMM_ELEC too). Same with Eonwe and IMM_COLD.

Many of the nastier monsters and uniques were not in the game. The most powerful non-unique IIRC was a Great Wyrm of Balance (most dangerous, probably still gravity hounds).

Problem with trying to balance easier game by increasing monster deadliness is that no single monster is difficult to avoid, especially non-uniques. GWoBalance was summoner which makes it a difficult opponent, but Jabberwocks were worse than they as single opponent (600 cap in chaos, triple-speed instead of double).

IMO we have currently too many uniques. It just makes uniques less unique and hunting the important ones less fun.

I'm pretty sure "intelligent" spellcasting wasn't in the game. Speed was much more quantized - +1, is double +2, is triple, etc. with no diminishing returns. I once rolled up a wizard mode character, went to modify stats, held down the '+' key when it prompted how much speed I wanted, took a step, and immediately died of starvation. Fun times. Once you did start finding rings of speed, an RoS +2 was rare but not unheard-of; certainly more common than a modern RoS +20.

You needed them. No weak speed items, less stat-boosts, almost no sustains (stat-rings didn't give sustains, robes of magi were good finds, crowns of might for warriors), less off-weapon combat bonuses which means you wanted to have at least one to_dam ring.

OTOH, you could get very deadly char with some luck. Deadlier than current chars. Just getting there was harder.

Vaults in general were more common,

Not based on my memory. Now you have one or multiple LV:s in nearly every deep level. Remember that there were no auto-scum were back then, so most levels turned out just plain boring.

and especially given the low number of greater vaults, GCVs were much more common back then than they are now. They were also a major source of gear since they could be tackled comparatively safely and broke the normal item generation rules. Most greater vaults these days are not only rare, but seriously unfriendly to crack. Take a look at the old vault designs and you'll see they're mostly broken up into small chambers that can be tackled one at a time.

Modern GV:s also have a lot more "8" blocks (and most of them are still very easy to crack safely open). Getting CGV with means to clear it was a Christmas every time in old times, but in general you found maybe one of those / (winning) game. In very rare game you found two.

Also getting GV without means or capability to handle it was serious disaster: no preserve mode. You just had to empty it, or potentially lose a lot of artifacts. During normal game you almost always lost some artifacts without ever seeing them. Losing Thorin or Arkenstone (or Phial in early levels) were major setbacks.

Forgot to mention that not all classes were available to all races (and kobolds didn't exist at all). Only warrior was available to all races, and only humans could play any class. Can't remember which classes were available to which race. IIRC paladin was available only to humans and Dunedain.