PC Angband 1.4

[Nomad]

In fact also trapdoor should act like that. It is a trap, so you should not have first move. In fact with that you should always start with zero energy in new level.

It always seemed to me that falling through a trapdoor should leave you stunned when you hit the bottom if you don't have feather falling. What, trying unsuccessfully to bash a door can knock you silly, but falling 50' isn't a problem?

[UglySquirrell]

Hengband nature magic had a spell create walls, it created a stone wall on four sides around you. Maybe add this and give the spell the ability to knock back monsters next to you. and remove destruction or make it incredibly rare. This was also a fun spell to block of corridors, and alter the dungeon so you wouldn't have to teleport the level but still had to use it carefully.

[Derakon]

Plenty of variants have create-walls spells, and I always find them to be unbalancingly powerful. Restricting enemy LOS is bad enough, but restricting their movement is too easy to abuse.

Let me put it this way: I'd accept a create-walls spell, if it were mage-only and mages lost banish / mass-banish.

[nppangband]

Plenty of variants have create-walls spells, and I always find them to be unbalancingly powerful. Restricting enemy LOS is bad enough, but restricting their movement is too easy to abuse.

Let me put it this way: I'd accept a create-walls spell, if it were mage-only and mages lost banish / mass-banish.

That's like the old wand of wall building from Moria. It was taken out because it was just way too unbalancing.

[bio_hazard]

It's always seemed weird that @ is almost the only thing that can dig. Create Wall would not be as unbalanced if more monsters could go through walls.

[Jungle_Boy]

I really like Timo's suggestion about Banishment and Mass Banish eating up all your mana but I do not like that it means warriors cannot banish, perhaps allow them the option of letting it eat their hitpoints to a certain threshold.

In response to some previous posts about foolproof escapes and Timo wanting to add variability here are some suggestions as to how we could change foolproof escapes.

Teleport-level - give it a chance to have a delayed action a la Recall, not as long though. Same for deep-descent

Destruction - allow the destruction radius to be variable, from 1 square to current radius, both 1 square and current radius should probably be pretty rare.

Teleportation - allow variable teleportation distances, sometimes it only moves you around the corner and sometimes across the dungeon, usually somewhere in the middle. Could also be used with phase door.

Teleport other - this was already nerfed significantly with the change to bolt but we could give monsters a resistance check against it the higher their resistance the less far it teleports them.

I think tha covers most of the escapes, now a suggestion about potions. Give healing potions an effectiveness timer. The way this would work is that when you chug a potion to increase your health it reduces the effect of the rest of your potions by a certain amount, could be very high, and could also be different for different level of potions. Then every turn you do not drink a potion their effectiveness increases. Basically say you drink a CLW potion, this would make a potion drunk on your next turn only heal 80% of normal, but if you waited a turn or two for your next one it would be 85%-90% effective. The effiectiveness reduction could be much higher for potions such as *healing* or life, perhaps reducing potion effectiveness to 0% and slowly building back to normal. This would prevent people from chain-chugging CCW in some late dungeon fights and would also provide some interesting tactical situations, should you drink the potion now when it is only 70% effective or try to hold out for a couple more turns and get more healing from it? This could also be applied to priests and paladins spells.

Finally a suggestion for magic devices, i really like the suggestion to make using a rod or activation simply increase the failure rate or set it to 100%, the gradually lowers back to normal. The increase or reset should happen regardless of whether or not the activation was successful. Multiple rods in a stack could make the failure rate restore more quickly or the decrease from a use not be as much.

Magical wands should continue to stack but the max charges should be 25, any more wands added after that simply make recharging easier without adding charges

Staffs should not stack they are big and bulky anyway.

I think these changes would go a long way to increasing interesting decisions for the player and also would make the game harder without increasing tedium or frustration.

[fizzix]

It's always seemed weird that @ is almost the only thing that can dig. Create Wall would not be as unbalanced if more monsters could go through walls.

This is one of those things that would be an improvement but is difficult to implement. Specifically the question of, "when should I dig, and when should I move instead" is sort of tough to answer.

[buzzkill]

In fact also trapdoor should act like that. It is a trap, so you should not have first move. In fact with that you should always start with zero energy in new level.

I've always felt that taking the up staircase shouldn't give first move either. No one walks back to town. Taking up staircase = fleeing or scumming. Neither should be protected.

I've also felt that everything, including the player, should start each new level with a random amount of energy.

[Nick]

This is going sound harsh, but it's the way feel so bear with. My apologies to the dev team in advance. If you know my PoV, then you don't really need to read this because it's more of the same. I just don't think that the current dev's have the stomach to take the game back to anywhere near the difficulty it held it the old days.

The first thing that needs to be done is to eliminate scumming, stair scumming and town scumming. Make scumming so cumbersome and boring that people will refrain from doing it in all but the most severe cases. Essentially, scumming and suicide should be equally attractive options. My guess is the dev team has no stomach for this.

I can sympathise with your PoV here, but I think you're coming at it from the wrong angle.

Scumming in all it's forms is boring. It follows that the main reason for doing it is because it gives a significant advantage over non-scumming play. So two things here:

1. Making the game harder is likely to increase the motivation for scumming and
2. Making the game more interesting is likely to decrease that motivation.

So the thing to focus on is taking the boring bits out of the game. Danger, challenge, choices and chance of reward all make the game interesting; IMHO the big boredom-maker is enforced repetitiveness (Eddie's "press this button to not die" mechanic).

As for the difficulty question, I think it depends on the kind of difficulty. If I had the choice between

1. Driving for 12 hours a day for two weeks on a perfectly straight road and
2. winning Wimbledon

- both of which (a) are difficult and (b) require endurance and concentration - I know which I'd rather do.

[Timo Pietilä]

I've always felt that taking the up staircase shouldn't give first move either. No one walks back to town. Taking up staircase = fleeing or scumming. Neither should be protected.

I used to, at least up to 250'. Now that I'm playing with no selling and recall scroll is standard equipment (that's one more thing that made game easier) I still don't use it unless I can buy another (which is easy).

[Timo Pietilä]

Scumming in all it's forms is boring. It follows that the main reason for doing it is because it gives a significant advantage over non-scumming play. So two things here:

1. Making the game harder is likely to increase the motivation for scumming and
2. Making the game more interesting is likely to decrease that motivation.

These two are not mutually exclusive. Making game harder can make it more interesting. One way to increase motivation for scumming is for example fixed store inventories which makes game easier. If you want more arrows, just wait at dlvl 1 for 1000 turns and you are guaranteed to get that stack of arrows.

IMO serious problem with scumming is only the case when player is so desperate to get something that he is willing to scum rather than just play the game. Something is missing from dungeon that should be there, or something is appearing in stores that should not be there. In that point game mechanism has a flaw.

Same thing applies to dungeon level scumming. There should never be a long enough period of time in dungeon that is boring enough that players resort to level scumming in order to get interesting level instead of just plain playing the game.

Diving can be seen as modified form of level-scumming. Instead of stopping and repeat same levels you dive to get interesting level. This has guaranteed success after enough dives, but you should not have to do that. Some of us enjoy exploring. If there is nothing to explore and you don't want to dive, then there is a temptation to level-scum.

Diving can also be boring. Constant avoidance instead of fighting happy fights is boring. Too hard to handle -monsters are boring unless they provide some challenge, like how to get something past that thing. You just avoid them. It's different kind of boredom, but it is boredom nevertheless.

Note that going up after you have explored a level it is not level scumming. Yes, I do that. I sometimes go up instead of down, not because I'm afraid to go deeper, but because I'm happy to be where I am. I explore the level, don't want to go to town and don't want to go down, I go up.

If those are fixed and someone still scums, then it's not really dev problem anymore (except to maybe find out why he is scumming).

[Nick]

These two are not mutually exclusive. Making game harder can make it more interesting.

I agree completely. I just think that focusing on more interesting rather than on harder will be more likely to get better results.

IMO serious problem with scumming is only the case when player is so desperate to get something that he is willing to scum rather than just play the game. Something is missing from dungeon that should be there, or something is appearing in stores that should not be there. In that point game mechanism has a flaw.

Same thing applies to dungeon level scumming. There should never be a long enough period of time in dungeon that is boring enough that players resort to level scumming in order to get interesting level instead of just plain playing the game.

Here I agree completely - but this is a difficult problem to fix. It is subtle, and needs a lot of experimenting and playtesting. And I think this is where the current devteam approach is correct - they are changing stuff to see if it fixes problems, and then changing it again if it hasn't worked.

[BlueFish]

These two are not mutually exclusive. Making game harder can make it more interesting. One way to increase motivation for scumming is for example fixed store inventories which makes game easier. If you want more arrows, just wait at dlvl 1 for 1000 turns and you are guaranteed to get that stack of arrows.

IMO serious problem with scumming is only the case when player is so desperate to get something that he is willing to scum rather than just play the game. Something is missing from dungeon that should be there, or something is appearing in stores that should not be there. In that point game mechanism has a flaw.

Same thing applies to dungeon level scumming. There should never be a long enough period of time in dungeon that is boring enough that players resort to level scumming in order to get interesting level instead of just plain playing the game.

Diving can be seen as modified form of level-scumming. Instead of stopping and repeat same levels you dive to get interesting level. This has guaranteed success after enough dives, but you should not have to do that. Some of us enjoy exploring. If there is nothing to explore and you don't want to dive, then there is a temptation to level-scum.

Diving can also be boring. Constant avoidance instead of fighting happy fights is boring. Too hard to handle -monsters are boring unless they provide some challenge, like how to get something past that thing. You just avoid them. It's different kind of boredom, but it is boredom nevertheless.

Note that going up after you have explored a level it is not level scumming. Yes, I do that. I sometimes go up instead of down, not because I'm afraid to go deeper, but because I'm happy to be where I am. I explore the level, don't want to go to town and don't want to go down, I go up.

If those are fixed and someone still scums, then it's not really dev problem anymore (except to maybe find out why he is scumming).

What is level scumming?

Is there a definition of it that is not "solved" by disconnected stairs and/or turning off level feelings? I'm still not clear that there is, based on what I've seen in this thread.

[Derakon]

What is level scumming?

Is there a definition of it that is not "solved" by disconnected stairs and/or turning off level feelings? I'm still not clear that there is, based on what I've seen in this thread.

Level scumming is going up/down stairs until you get a good level feeling. Because as we all know, level feelings correlate in a meaningful fashion with level quality. Both of the solutions you suggested would "fix" it; I personally favor turning off level feelings just because having stairs vanish behind you seems weird. Though for competitions having disconnected stairs is necessary since otherwise they really lend themselves to abuse.

[BlueFish]

Level scumming is going up/down stairs until you get a good level feeling. Because as we all know, level feelings correlate in a meaningful fashion with level quality. Both of the solutions you suggested would "fix" it; I personally favor turning off level feelings just because having stairs vanish behind you seems weird. Though for competitions having disconnected stairs is necessary since otherwise they really lend themselves to abuse.

I'm not sure why anybody is worried about scumming if there are already options that allow them to remove scumming from the game?

personally I've been playing hobbit rogues lately and have died 50 times in a row without winning. I like to dive irresponsibly deep and scum relentlessly with connected stairs. It's fun and it makes me feel like a sneaky rogue!