Making Mages, More Magelike

[buzzkill]

That doesn't mean they're unbalanced; just that you need good knowledge of the game to be able to win with them. As such I have a bit of a kneejerk reaction against making them easier.

While I support many of the ideas mentioned in this thread, I too have no desire to make mages easier. If I were to implement any of these changes I'd strive to keep the mage power level where it is now, by first dialing it half a step backward. In this way the enhanced powers and abilities would only (roughly) achieve the old power levels, not surpass them. IMO, these changes are about flavor and mage-like-versatility (rather than multi-class-versatility), not about extra power.

BTW, nothing I've read here would prohibit mages from wielding a sword and charging into melee, it would just give them a more mage-like option should they choose it.

[Gorbad]

Actually the most fun idea I've seen in this thread, which has been ignored as far as I can see, is making more stuff wieldable as a weapon.

If a wand or Rod of Lightning Bolts gives ResElec when wielded as a weapon, or a Rod of Detection ESP, and either the activation is increased in power, or it enhances an existing spell (wield a wand of MM, and cast the spell for more damage, wield a staff of Confuse Monster, and have the spell actually affect anything that matters), then it inherently makes the game more flavourful for mages (I'd be disinclined to let half-casters benefit, or even priests).

I already have a mental image of a mage with loads of devices, swapping them around as needed.

[Tibarius]

Originally posted by Gorbad
If a wand or Rod of Lightning Bolts gives ResElec when wielded as a weapon, or a Rod of Detection ESP, and either the activation is increased in power, or it enhances an existing spell (wield a wand of MM, and cast the spell for more damage, wield a staff of Confuse Monster, and have the spell actually affect anything that matters), then it inherently makes the game more flavourful for mages (I'd be disinclined to let half-casters benefit, or even priests).

I like that a lot.

Just to clarify things - i don't want to make mages easier. I want that players have more fun playing them!

[Therem Harth]

Okay, this is a bit of rant, and not quite on topic. But here goes.

It seems to me there's a thing here about not wanting to deliberately make the game easier. And just IMO, that is... rather shortsighted.

Challenge is good. Challenge is what makes a game worth playing, and replaying. Likewise, it wouldn't be good if every class played the same, or if some classes weren't harder than others.

But this is Angband. It has permadeath.

Let me repeat that: Angband has PERMANENT CHARACTER DEATH. If your character dies, you start a new one. I realize this is thrilling for some people, but for others it gets really boring really fast. Also, the effect seems to be to encourage one of two playing styles:

1. Be slow and paranoid. Most people, myself included, consider this boring.

2. Roll up lots of characters, dive fast, and keep spamming them until you win (or come close). This also gets boring after a while.

The obvious solution to this is to make permadeath optional... But failing that - or in addition to that - making the game a little easier would not necessarily hurt. I don't mean "hold down the arrow key to defeat Morgoth" easy, but easy enough that a newbie (or a veteran, for that matter) can play it without adopting a boring or extremely time-consuming playing style.

And hey, I'm not even saying that mages being hard is a problem. It makes sense for magic users to start off weak, you know? What I'm saying is that easier isn't necessarily worse. It's not just about difficulty, it's about finding the balance between the game being difficult enough to entertain and easy enough to actually be possible to play.

[Jazerus]

If a new player wants a low level of challenge, they shouldn't play a mage or priest. Pure spellcasters require a level of knowledge that new players aren't going to have until they've gotten a couple of characters into the mid-game, and I think that's fine; fragility in exchange for increased options is inherently tough until you know how to use those options, and this is something every game with a weak but diverse spellcasting class has been dealing with since 1st Edition D&D.

We should make that more explicit during the birth process - I'd favor steering new players toward playing Paladin and Ranger. The hybrid classes are the easiest to learn with, since they're proficient in everything, letting you figure out what tactics you tend to prefer without having to die and reroll to try something out.

Edit: To more generally address your rant, I agree. A change shouldn't be discarded just because it would make things easier, and sometimes accessibility/thematic changes are derided as making things easier inappropriately. That being said, vanilla Angband is, I would estimate, firmly in the center of the difficulty spectrum of the modern major roguelikes (possibly the very model of a modern major roguelike). Nethack is very easy in comparison - for all its vaunted difficulty I can be reasonably certain that I've won by the mid-game, and I've really not been playing roguelikes for all that long. Crawl is probably harder in general than Angband, and in general the new roguelikes that are popping up everywhere these days are not easy games, though some are easier than Angband. I'm not sure that moving from that middle position in absolute difficulty is a good idea, but there is some room to experiment with difficulty in either direction that is worth exploring.

The main thing Angband has lacked is accessibility. It definitely has a reputation for being inscrutably difficult that was really caused more by obtuse interface and a lack of transparency than anything else. I say "was" because a lot of the recent development has fixed those issues - certainly Angband's UI is better than Nethack's these days, which wasn't always the case.

[Derakon]

Keep in mind that Angband has gotten a lot easier over the past few years, for one reason or another. That's largely why there's so much "No, we can't make the game easier for any reason" rhetoric being tossed around here; many contributors are trying to figure out ways to steer the game back towards a desired level of difficulty, while trying to be less arbitrarily fatal about it than the game was in the old days.

As for permadeath, that's really orthogonal to the point. Practically all roguelikes have permadeath; it's expected, so it doesn't really impact where the game lies along the roguelike difficulty spectrum. Sure, compared to your average modern game, Angband is hard -- but if Angband were anywhere near as easy (or even just as forgiving) as your average modern game then it'd also have very little replayability.

I definitely agree that newbies need to be steered away from mages and probably priests as well. The recommended starter classes IMO are warriors and paladins. I wouldn't recommend rangers because they're the most fragile hybrid class (and because arcane magic is less survival-oriented than holy magic), and rogues have such terrible spellcasting that it kinda sucks to be introduced to magic through them. Pick something big and burly and dive in; there'll be more than enough to keep you interested without adding magic to the mix. You can do that later, after you've killed a bunch of small-brained thugs.

As for playstyles, I'd say you (Therem) are oversimplifying. The key aspect of the "make a character, dive fast, see how far you get" playstyle is to dive past all the areas that you've successfully cleared in the past. Once you reach your competence zone, you can slow down or even stop, learn how this part of the dungeon works, and play more cautiously from there on out. Or not! Veterans of course know the game inside and out and thus are continually pushing their competence zones, but there's no reason why you have to do that. The main thing is to not play overcautiously when you're moving through levels that you've already played through dozens of times. That is the major source of boredom.

[Tibarius]

newbies

Originally posted by Jazerus
If a new player wants a low level of challenge, they shouldn't play a mage or priest.

I wouldn't back that up. New players should play a class they are interested in and which fits their playing style. That said, new players should experiment with different races and classes to get a feeling for what they are like.

For me personally i haven't found any information about the difficulty of races or classes, that's why i assumed they all should be (more or less) equal difficulty. It was quite surprising for me, that it is consens, that races for example are not on the same difficulty level. An explicit remark in the birth process could at least tell the new player about it (and why they are considered easier or harder).

Another option would be to let the player choose what difficulty he likes to play:
easy - standard - hard, or maybe 4 categories like
easy - standard - advanced - expert

How could the difficulty levels be distinguished? The easy way is to make global modifiers:
easy HP * 2 and/or monster damage *0.70
standard HP * 1, monster damage * 1.00
advanced HP *0.80, monster damage * 1.20
expert HP * 0.60, monster damage * 1.50

More subtile would be to reduce / increase drop rate for good stuff, to spawn more / deadlier monsters
or turn certain features on/off for different difficulty levels
like expert MUST play with disconnected stairs

My favorite would be to let player choose difficulty level (maybe not all races / classes are available then?).

If that is not wanted, then at least tell the player what the race / class he chooses is considered to be.

[Jazerus]

I guess I should rephrase. If a new player wants a relatively gentle introduction to the game, they shouldn't play a pure spellcaster. It's not that they shouldn't play pure spellcasters at all; just that they should expect to have a tougher time than if they'd rolled up a Dunadan Paladin. The last sentence of your post is more what I was getting at; we need information in the birth process to let new players know that they've chosen a character that's hard, because then if their gnome mage dies to Fang they know to try something a little less fragile for a while instead of abandoning Angband as frustratingly punishing. There's a certain kind of player in any RPG, roguelike or not, who always rolls up a magic user as their first character, often because magic is a lot more powerful in modern RPGs than it is for a low-level Angband mage. A game can really lose the interest of players like that if two conditions are fulfilled:

A. Playing a mage properly is hard without experience.

B. It's not clear that playing well isn't as dependent on experience with some other class.

I didn't "get" Nethack even after several attempts because I always tried to play a Wizard and (predictably) died horribly on dlvl 1 until I found out that really I should play a Valkyrie to get a handle on the game first before trying Wizard...and won a month later. Nowadays I always play melee or melee-focused hybrids in a roguelike before I play spellcasters, but it wasn't an intuitive or easy lesson; it could have been, if Nethack had told me that Wizards were hard.

That being said, I do think that the classes should be roughly equal in power, and I think they more or less are as it stands - though Warrior probably is at a disadvantage compared to Paladin. It's not like races, where some clearly are harder than others just through pure numerical differences. Mage is harder to play than Paladin because of playstyle complexity, not because they're at a disadvantage to the Paladin in raw power. That seems appropriate.

[buzzkill]

My 2 cents on game difficulty.

Angband isn't difficult to play, it's not difficult to have fun, it is difficult, at times seemingly impossible, to win. This is precisely Angband's charm. If the aspect of winning is more important to the player than the gameplay itself, then I submit to you that this is not the player that we should be striving to please.

Once you reach your competence zone, you can slow down or even stop, learn how this part of the dungeon works, and play more cautiously from there on out

This is a great point. Angband is basically a game of solitaire. A challenge of self discipline, strategy and random chance. Surpassing your previous accomplishments should be enough for one to declare themselves, in a sense, victorious. If one can't appreciate these small victories, then one probably won't much enjoy Angband.

[artes]

Ew. I've always liked that Angband mages are willing to get into the thick of things. I don't mind if they have good attack spells, nor if they're able to beat the game without getting into melee even once, but they should be willing and able to resort to melee when the time comes.

Yes, I like that mages have the option to use melee to some degree. Casting spells requires a lot of key presses, and sometimes after casting a lot of spells it's comfortable and relaxing for the fingers to be able to finish off the last little weak enemies with a weapon instead. In literature and mythology there are many mages that used melee weapons, e.g. Gandalf who used a sword, and Odin who used a spear.