Hi!

[RCIX]

Hey all, fairly new Angbander here. Always liked roguelikes of various forms, but I think this is the first "classic" one that's appealed to me (thanks to DF for getting me used to an ascii style game). I thought I'd give a bit of feedback on some ideas/suggestions/questions I had as a new player. Feel free to point me in the direction of appropriate documentation or explain stuff if you want ^^

1. The stats: I understand STR/DEX deals with my attack (and STR boosts max load), and INT gets me more mana and spells to cast (if I have that), but I have zero clue what CHR/WIS do. IMVHO, CHR ought to be dropped entirely or more effects added (maybe high CHR gets you friendliness from the town enemies and low-level intelligent dungeon enemies?). Same with WIS, unless of course these have a major use I'm missing!

2. Stat numbers. I'm still not clear on what 18/XYZ numbers translate to, and it seems like it would make more sense if it just kinda... scaled up like normal :P

3. Shop services. I tried NPPangband, and though a variety of things conspired to make me dislike it (don't remember what ATM), something that I did like was that shops offered services like cure light wounds, identify, enchant, etc. Would be nice if you could get something similar (or maybe point me to other variants that do this as well) in some future vanilla/v4 version.

4. As a mage, it feels kind of tedious when I have to lazor everything I can in a room down, run like crazy, rest for more mana, and repeat since i have next to no health, resistances, or combat capability. I once had to burn 4+ Phase Door scrolls just to escape from bouncing between 2 halls with enemies in them >.> I can't think of a thematically appropriate way to fix this though. Perhaps increase the scale of mana, then offer cheaper resistance/melee combat spells [A book of Magic for Fighters: Resistance and Swordplay]? So i have more options as to how I go about fighting my enemies.

Edit: I mapped [Tab] to R&[Return], but when I rest I randomly get Cancelled messages for no visible reason, where just manually issuing R& works fine. Is this a bug and should I report it in that forum, or am I mapping something wrong? I noted that if I left off the [Return] it would leave an unintelligible character (just a big dot) in the rest duration query just after &.

[ekolis]

Well, I can answer ONE of your questions... Wisdom is used for priests in place of intelligence regarding spellcasting. Also it affects your saving throws (resistance to certain special attacks, though I can't think of which ones!)

[Derakon]

In current Vanilla:

STR: carrying capacity, number of blows per round in melee, bonus damage on melee strikes, minimum weapon weight
DEX: number of blows per round in melee, bonus to-hit chance, bonus to-AC
CON: number of hitpoints
INT: casting stat for arcane casters (mage, ranger, rogue, in descending order of casting ability), magical device skill
WIS: casting stat for holy casters (priest, paladin), saving throw skill
CHA: cost of items in stores

CHA is by far the least useful stat, as it has been historically pretty much through to the original version. We've occasionally debated what to do with it; letting it make monsters neutral was IIRC one such suggestion.

As for the 18/whatever, that's just Angband's quirky way of representing stats. I think it relates back Advanced Dungeons and Dragons? A.k.a. AD&D a.k.a. D&D version 1.5. So yeah, it's pretty old and nonintuitive. You can basically think of every 10 after the slash as one point, so your stats are actually on a scale from 3 to 40 (18/220, the maximum).

Shop services have also been discussed, but not yet implemented. There's a lot of contention about what to do with the town.

Mages are generally considered to have the hardest start of any class, pretty much for the reason you brought up: they have absolutely terrible combat endurance. Mages benefit strongly from your knowledge of the game, so you can know which monsters you can kill, which ones are worth fighting, and when you're in over your head. Otherwise you'll tend to die a lot. My general recommendation for a new player is to roll up a warrior or, if you want to play with casting spells, a rogue (arcane) or paladin (holy). The extra HP and ability to hit things on the head until they stop moving make the early game much more forgiving. Put points into your STR and DEX until they've both had 8 points allocated, then dump the rest into your casting stat, or CON if you're a warrior.

Finally, for resting, I can't say what's disturbing you. As long as nothing's actually going on you should be able to rest freely. Monsters moving, your light source running low, becoming hungry, etc. can all disturb you though so you can take action (wouldn't want to starve to death because you were napping, after all). But if nothing like that's happening, then you should be able to rest more or less indefinitely.

[RCIX]

A random note, I think it would be cool to have more specialized spells (like ones that go "Deals 2d6 damage plus your STR stat" or something like that), though I haven't seen any spellbooks past the second one so I'm probably naming a spell similar to one that exists :P

I'm a sucker for caster type characters, so having a pure caster that has some combat endurance might be fun. I think a priest is probably the closest I can get to that though. For now, back to losing another mage due to a stupid mistake early :x

Cancelled is me being disturbed? Hmm. None of those were happening because I would have gotten a message for them. I think it has to do with my keybind since as I said manually issuing the command works fine.

[RCIX]

I have another question: Is the only functional difference between poison and grazes that cure * wounds pots will remove the latter but not the former?

[Magnate]

I have another question: Is the only functional difference between poison and grazes that cure * wounds pots will remove the latter but not the former?

Sort of. They are both damage-over-time effects, but poison is binary - you're either poisoned or you're not. Cuts have several levels, from graze through nasty cut and deep gash right up to mortal wound. You take much more damage from more severe cuts, so overall they're more dangerous than poison. (N.B. There have been many threads on how to make the poison mechanic more interesting/dangerous.)

Also, you can find resistance to poison which will prevent you ever being poisoned by anything. Although shards resistance protects you from cuts from shard attacks, I'm not sure if it protects you from all cuts (e.g. those caused by cause wounds spells).

[RCIX]

Offhand, perhaps it could soak up your nourishment value? So each turn you go by poisoned consumes 10 turns of nourishment? Or something like that.

Also, I can't seem to hurt Gollum. Wat do? :P I plan to try Stinking Cloud and Spear of Light on him as well as Frost Bolt (Lightning bolt nor Magic Missile did anything).

[Magnate]

Offhand, perhaps it could soak up your nourishment value? So each turn you go by poisoned consumes 10 turns of nourishment? Or something like that.

If you search for previous threads on the poison status you'll see a whole load of interesting ideas just waiting for somebody to code them up ...

Also, I can't seem to hurt Gollum. Wat do? :P I plan to try Stinking Cloud and Spear of Light on him as well as Frost Bolt (Lightning bolt nor Magic Missile did anything).

He's got waaay more hp than a low-level character can dish out in damage. He's kind of there as an early warning that you shouldn't expect to kill everything you meet. There's nothing otherwise special about him - once you do enough damage and have SEE_INVIS you'll roll over him easily enough.

[RCIX]

If you search for previous threads on the poison status you'll see a whole load of interesting ideas just waiting for somebody to code them up...

Waaauughhh, so much needing coding... Maybe I'll help with angband after my current project instead, that ofcourse requires actually working on it though

He's got waaay more hp than a low-level character can dish out in damage. He's kind of there as an early warning that you shouldn't expect to kill everything you meet. There's nothing otherwise special about him - once you do enough damage and have SEE_INVIS you'll roll over him easily enough.

Aww, too bad he doesn't drop the One Ring Maybe there should be one in [insert large number here] chance that he drops a powerful ring of some kind, just for theme's sake (he picked it up and discovered it wasn't TOR but forgot to drop it).

[Derakon]

Aww, too bad he doesn't drop the One Ring Maybe there should be one in [insert large number here] chance that he drops a powerful ring of some kind, just for theme's sake (he picked it up and discovered it wasn't TOR but forgot to drop it).

It's there. He has a chance of dropping a good item (usually he just drops nothing or some money), and that good item has an infinitesimally small chance of being absolutely amazing, including being the One Ring. But the odds against that happening are pretty huge.

[debo]

I thought the One only drops from 5000' onwards? Is minimum depth a hard limit or does it just drastically reduce the probability of the item dropping above the limit floor?

[Derakon]

The latter. Items can show up at any depth, but if the depth is less than their native depth, then the item has to pass an "out of depth" check first, which gets harder the more out of depth you are.

I think there's a limitation that prevents artifacts from showing up in town, so e.g. Farmer Maggot won't drop them, but he could theoretically drop a Ring of Speed and I've gotten dungeon spellbooks from him in the past.

[RCIX]

Is there any nonobvious benefit to having a Staff of teleportation over the spell? I'm pretty sure the only differences are you can use the staff while blinded and/or OOM, but does that really justify a >3k asking price?

Edit: any tips vs Bullroarer? I don't hurt him much with my spells and since he's so fast he just sprints to me and starts hammering away. Every time I've encountered him i end up casting Teleport Self or Phase Door fairly quickly =/

[buzzkill]

Is there any non-obvious benefit to having a Staff of teleportation over the spell? I'm pretty sure the only differences are you can use the staff while blinded and/or OOM, but does that really justify a >3k asking price?

That all depends on how much you value @'s life. Scrolls are more reliable. Staffs are more versatile. Ever wrestle with an umber hulk?

Edit: any tips vs Bullroarer? I don't hurt him much with my spells and since he's so fast he just sprints to me and starts hammering away. Every time I've encountered him i end up casting Teleport Self or Phase Door fairly quickly =/

Yeah, a lot of uniques are like that. It's fun to beat 'em early, but if you bravely run away, they'll be back agin... and you'll be stronger.

[Derakon]

Buzzkill has it. If you're in melee with a monster that has a melee confusion or blindness attack, then spells become a lot less useful -- you either kill them despite the ailment, resist it, or chug potions and hope they miss, and that last option is really not a very good one.