Is this just really bad luck?

[buzzkill]

It just means that you have to stockpile guaranteed escapes and use them when you first detect a fast and dangerous monster, since they are too fast to be able to outwit tactically.

Well you could always fight it, maybe kill it, or at least neturalize the threat, and if all else fails since there are no shortages of escapes, this isn't a problem at all.

This flip side is that the player is often faster (if only a little) than then monsters they encounter, and paired with the players superior INT, makes most of the game particularly boring.

You're never going to get perfect balance in a randomly generated dungeon so which would you rather have a) superior speed and lousy escapes, b) plentiful escapes and lousy speed, or c) great escapes and great speed.

I suppose you could choose a or b. But Angband has always been b.

I think that too much effort is put into the dungeon caring for the player. If I had a variant I'd put more effort into making it deadly. That ring of the mouse would come with aggravation. Congratulations, you're slightly faster than you were, hope you enjoy it.

[TJS]

You're never going to get perfect balance in a randomly generated dungeon so which would you rather have a) superior speed and lousy escapes, b) plentiful escapes and lousy speed, or c) great escapes and great speed.

I suppose you could choose a or b. But Angband has always been b.

I'd rather go for the difficulty arising from monsters being dangerous in ways other that being just faster. ie, monsters buffing each other or having to get out of difficult situations by cleverly using items without resoting to using the guaranteed escape button.

I think that too much effort is put into the dungeon caring for the player. If I had a variant I'd put more effort into making it deadly. That ring of the mouse would come with aggravation. Congratulations, you're slightly faster than you were, hope you enjoy it.

I agree with this.

[Derakon]

Uh, =Mouse increases stealth and DEX and nukes your damage. I think you meant =Escaping.

There certainly was a time when =Speed was fairly likely to be your first speed item, and its native depth was (and still is) 80. If I recall correctly, players did a lot of hanging about in the 2500'-3000' range, hoping like hell that a greater vault would be generated and then that one of its 40-levels-OOD items would be =Speed. Then they'd go in and abuse the heck out of Teleport Other (which was still the "affects everything on a line" TO) to try to get the items. Which of course made the rest of the dungeon horribly dangerous, so better hope you don't need to leave the vault in a hurry.

The attempts at retrieving items from a vault that you really weren't ready for were interesting, but the general lulls in the game while you waited for a source of permanent speed to drop weren't. While I do feel that modern Vanilla makes permanent speed too plentiful, the old game was not remotely perfect either.

Of course, in the really old days, +1 speed was modern +10, +2 was +20, no diminishing returns, and massively OOD drops were comparatively plentiful. So if you did find speed, it was guaranteed to be useful speed.