First Post: Introduction and test

[Derakon]

Transparency is good, but useless information is not so good,
e.g. "fight (+90 +63)" is a piece of useless info in a dump, since you have exact dmg/round in weapon description. Experience is allmost the same, the only function of it is to show, how far it is to next level, so it can be merged in as level fraction without any information loss.

I think you're oversimplifying -- experience also shows you how useful it is to fight e.g. Time Hounds (and IMO we want those guys to be as tempting to fight as possible because they're right bastards), how much you have to regain before you get your level back (why bother returning to town for a potion when your next kill will get you fully-restored?), how much less valuable a kill is at level X+1 vs. at level X for the same monster, and so on.

Basically I think that the ailment here isn't that bad, and the cure introduces more complexities than it does simplifications.

As for the Fight stat, in v4 at least it will help players discern how much of their combat ability comes from level vs. stats vs. equipment. The character screen has these four fields on it:

Finesse: X
Prowess: Y
Fight: (+A, +B)
Melee: (+C, +D)

Where A = X + stat bonuses to finesse, and C = A + weapon bonuses to finesse. This kind of thing makes it easier for the player to figure out what's going on, which has nontrivial utility.

[debo]

I used to play a shareware PC dungeon-crawler called Moraff's World back when I was a tyke, and that game had some epic quantities for experience as you approached the endgame. I think at some point the display would actually roll over to using scientific notation when things became totally unmanageable

Example:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d1/MWDevil.JPG

[LostTemplar]

What do we gain from hiding how much experience the player gets?

Nothing but free space on main screen and dump. BTW it was your thought, that there is something wrong with millions exp points.

Transparency is good, but useless information is not so good,
e.g. "fight (+90 +63)" is a piece of useless info in a dump, since you have exact dmg/round in weapon description. Experience is allmost the same, the only function of it is to show, how far it is to next level, so it can be merged in as level fraction without any information loss.

[Derakon]

Something like this or maybe remove it form description. I propose to hide experience from player.

Generally speaking Vanilla aims for more transparency, not less. The experience information is in the edit files; why shouldn't it be in the UI as well? What do we gain from hiding how much experience the player gets?

[LostTemplar]

So how do you tell how much experience monsters give? Killing a Time Hound at your current level gets you .001 closer to the next level?

Something like this or maybe remove it form description. I propose to hide experience from player.

[ghengiz]

So how do you tell how much experience monsters give? Killing a Time Hound at your current level gets you .001 closer to the next level?

lost templar specifically proposed to use the fractional level in char dumps.
During a game, it makes sense to just leave the display of the amount of experience as it is now, so the player can see immediatly how much experience s/he gains...

edit: of course, if doing the difference of the experience points after and before the kill is too much hassle, there is always the 'l'ook command

[Derakon]

So how do you tell how much experience monsters give? Killing a Time Hound at your current level gets you .001 closer to the next level?

[ghengiz]

Good thing may be to remove "experience" number from char dump, just leave "level" with fractions e.g. level: 45.6178, and leave all calculations related to level draining the same.

good idea!

[LostTemplar]

It's purely aesthetics though, I grant.

Good thing may be to remove "experience" number from char dump, just leave "level" with fractions e.g. level: 45.6178, and leave all calculations related to level draining the same.

[fph]

I see, that's a fair point. Experience values with a number of digits comparable to Zimbabwean currency look a bit silly indeed.

[Derakon]

It seems clear that we'd want to have some kind of worse-than-exponential increase in the number of weak monsters you have to kill to gain each successive level. The current system does that, while also having the following desirable characteristics:

* You can get meaningfully massive experience rewards for killing monsters you aren't supposed to be able to handle yet.
* Experience numbers remain somewhere in the grounds of reason.

Worse-than-exponential requirements when experience rewards don't decrease with CL would probably mean that level 50 would require billions or trillions of experience, with high-level monsters giving out similarly heady rewards. Currently it's extremely rare for you to get more than 100k experience from a single kill. Honestly I'd like to compress this even more, since characters end up with millions of experience points in the end and that seems a bit silly. It's purely aesthetics though, I grant.

[fph]

A question, since the matter was brought up: why does the XP formula scale like that with the CL?
I can imagine tweaking the values thing so that either the XP needed to get from level n to level n+1 increases, or that the XP obtained by killing a monster decreases with the CL, but having both things change at the same time seems a useless complication. Clearly one of the two "multipliers" can be removed by rescaling the other.

[Nick]

I also enjoy FAAngband.

Awesome. Feel free to criticise it

Also, consider playing in the competition (see the tab at the top of the page).

[Monkay]

Ok I get it know, so basically its the base XP gained from killing a monster divided by clvl, thanks

[Derakon]

To clarify: it doesn't matter on what dungeon level you kill the monster; you'll get the same experience regardless. It matters what dungeon level the monster is native to. As I discovered once while playing the uber-broken versions of Sangband back in the day, if you change e.g. Black Ogres so their native depth (around 800', level 18) becomes 50' (level 1), they give 1/18th the normal experience.