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"Been away so long I hardly knew the place, gee it's good to be back home" - The Beatles -
FA has (almost accidentally) come up with a partial solution to the consumable issue (especially for the Morgoth consumables like !*Healing*) with the ability to order potions and scrolls from the Merchant once one has been found.
On reflection, I actually think that autosquelch is a fundamentally good thing. I think the game rightly changes character throughout, and some things just become uninteresting (money and the ID mechanic are examples). Autosquelch gives the player control over what items they want to simply ignore, and IMHO it is probably the correct solution to junk.
As far as future Oangband development goes, how about whichever of us first feels like doing something contacts the other. That should ensure that nothing happens
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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I do love stirring up the hornets.
No, I'm just communicating poorly. What I mean is not "there should be no magic numbers". Obviously, every attack has a maximum possible value, and that is always a magic number.
What I mean is there should be no "magic numbers that are so damn important to memorize, and which can't be estimated by non-suicidal in game experimentation".
These magic numbers are not just peak damages, but also depths at which key abilities/resists are needed.
In other words:
- Baseline damage/round for both unique and non-unique creatures should increase smoothly. We are OK on this.
- Things which depart from baseline damage should be predictable in frequency from a few simple principles (e.g. spell casters rarely shoot big spells; breathers can do high damage when at full strength). We are also OK on this.
- Things which depart from baseline damage should be predictable in magnitude. We are pretty bad on this; there are many times in the game that a new breath weapon or spell shows up with the capacity to flatten an unprepared player. If you know monsters.txt, you can cope. If not you have a good chance to die to each of these.
- Corollary to the above: dangerous new attack types should be introduced in increasingly dangerous ways; they should never jump from "ignorable" to "one-shot killer" with one new monster. We are pretty bad on this as well.
Coming into line with the above principles this does not have to make the game easier - it can even do the opposite. You could add a "junior drolem" between the AMHD and the drolem, and you could make the AMHD smart enough to breath gas more often. This would give a new players fair warning, without making the drolem any weaker for an experienced player. Similarly, you could add a ton of "slow" effects at around 800' to warn players that free action is rapidly becoming mandatory.
To take the extreme example, there is no reasonable way for a non-spoilered player to know that Morgoth's peak unresistable damage is 600hp. The difference between this and his baseline melee damage is pretty big compared to other end game uniques. Increasing his melee damage to ~150 against endgame gear, would help this issue while actually making him more dangerous. You could also teach him to consistently shoot an early mana storm (while the new player is getting a sense of his attacks and likely to be staying near full health). Again this makes him tougher, but more fair to people who have memorized the magic numbers.Comment
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Incidentally, these depths are all lies. Yeah, yeah, we used to all never go below 2000' without poison resistance because of the incredibly minute chance that we'd encounter an awake drolem whose first action would be to breathe poison...turns out you can just dive and if a drolem shows up, avoid it! Frankly the only abilities that I read as absolutely required in the game now are:
* Basic 4 resists. Too common to ignore.
* Speed. You want to be able to hit +20. +25 is better, +30 is plenty.
* Hitpoints, the more the merrier. I'd want at least 800 before considering fighting Morgy.
* Damage. At least 400/round in melee, less in ranged.
And even with that, Eddie (PowerDiver) has won an artifactless egoless game, which basically mean that he had pathetic speed and hitpoints (wearing one ring of speed, one ring of CON +6) and relied on spellcasting for his resistances.
In short, there are far fewer hard requirements in the game than we used to think.
Granted, we do a very bad job of informing the player of what monsters can do. Every once in awhile we talk about making all monster information public from the start of the game, or other similar ideas. Certainly there's a plan to make monster memory not tied to savefiles.Comment
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Potion belt
Bahman, the system you describe with infinite potions on cooldowns equipped in a belt is very similar to the inscription system ToME 4 moved to some months ago. Consumables have almost completely disappeared; only an incomplete implementation of wands remains, and it's going to be scrapped soon. For the most part, reactions to the change have been extremely positive, despite the predictable apprehension when the change was first announced.Comment
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Totally true, but only for two reasons. First, the game is currently on the easy side - this will change over time. Second, and much more importantly, because you already know all the "magic" gotchas. A brilliant but new and unspoiled player will have no chance without following the conventional wisdom around resists and abilities, nor will they get enough in game information to infer it. At least not without countless deaths.
More generous monster memory is a crude ugly fix, at least to my taste. If you want to let players know that poison is getting to be serious business, don't tell them - show them!Comment
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I agree with this--there are all kinds of situations where a new player is carefully watching how much damage an attack does when all of a sudden it can do immensely more damage than previously seen. The variable damage reduction from high-resists is like this, as are some of the more lopsided attacks if you get unlucky (e.g. 4d14, averages 30 but has a range of 4-64). I'd prefer to lower variance but increase the mean to achieve the same effect, while signaling to players how dangerous something is.
I could imagine a transformation where all MdN attacks where M > N become (N + 1)dM to reduce the variance but increase the mean to compensate. I may try that locally and see how it feels.
One thing that's happened to V (which I think is good) is that the early game has gotten a bit easier. The trick now is to make the mid-to-late game as hard or harder as it was!Comment
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The Roflwtfzomgbbq Quylthulg summons L33t Paladins -more-
In UnAngband, the level dives you.
ASCII Dreams: http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com
Unangband: http://unangband.blogspot.com
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Total money is an entirely separate issue. Increase or decrease money drops as you want to get the money distribution you want the char to accumulate. Back at 3.0, when I first tried out the idea, I found that multiplying gold drops by 4 was the minimum amount I found fun for normal games. That's less money than in games with selling, but IMO selling games had too much money.
The point is that you don't want people to think that an item is better to sell than to use. At an absolute minimum, empty wands need to sell for as much as full wands. Extrapolate from that. Setting all selling prices to 0 is the logical extreme. [Value based pricing, to the extent it is even possible, is the enemy of good gameplay.] No selling encourages people to actually use items instead of viewing them primarily as IOUs to cash in. Also, it as bad for gameplay when a slot is more useful to devote to selling a pricey item instead of carrying a different item of questionable utility. You won't believe this until you try it.
No selling is about encouraging people to use items. You will use items you never did before.
You cannot imagine how much the game is improved until you try it, but you may need to play several games before you can let go of your preconceptions and fully appreciate it.
You're completely wrong about squelch and attempts to reduce item drops. IMO the changes to item drops were the second worst change since 3.0 [after melee boosts on off slots]. If you really want the classes to play differently, they will want to use different items, and what is valuable to one class will be junk to many others. Junk is unavoidable. My last two warriors found their first rods of trap detection at CL45 and CL50 respectively. That is completely wrong, but is the result of trying to address junk by reducing drops. Is it really so horrible for spellcasters to squelch rods of trap detection? Only to the anti-squelch fanatics. Unfortunately, real life is too busy and I've probably reached my oook limit for another while. Maybe I can rant at you in a week or two.Comment
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Good creature detection is required to follow avoidance rule. This can be problem to warriors, priests and paladins. Detect evil works for most, but not all monsters, so only warrior is the real problem. Which incidentally is the reason I play exclusively warriors now. In order to find out what we have missed warrior is perfect test platform.
Which BTW tells me that ESP is now a bit too rare. We need something to compensate, staves of detect evil as shop item and common in dungeon or other stuff like that.
Also FA is good to have until you have very high AC and/or very good saving throw.Comment
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Money is actually significantly less tight in the early game with no sell on, as (now upscaled to around 5x with nosell) money drops are significantly more common than ego items and other high-value objects early on. It's also subject to significantly less RNG-swing, averaging out to about 4000-5000 AU by 500', which is the point when most of my characters need to return to town for the first time with no sell. After the first recall it's roughly equivalent to normal settings, with less frequent recall needed and more inventory space for interesting utility items.
I'd have to agree with Timo in calling it one of the best changes in a very long time.Comment
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Thanks, Timo. I knew I'd forget something. FA is definitely a requirement, as is SI. I just played a warrior who didn't find ESP until very late, so it's possible, though I wouldn't want to fight Morgoth without it. Staves of Detect Evil are, IIRC, available in the magic store.Comment
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