All four rings of power found before 5000'

[nppangband]

Angband at its heart, if one doesn't set special restrictions, is not a battle between @ and Morgoth.

It's a battle between the human player and boredom.

I haven't played vanilla in a long time, but I hope that isn't 100% correct. That statement is indicitive of a game that isn't worth playing, and/or a game that is seriously broken.

I am not sure I can relate to the statements about the behaviour on the newsgroup and at .oook. With the exception of a couple trolls over the years, I have found the angband community to be one of the best behaved, cooperative, and helpful groups out there.

[BlueFish]

I haven't played vanilla in a long time, but I hope that isn't 100% correct. That statement is indicitive of a game that isn't worth playing, and/or a game that is seriously broken.

It's been that way forever. As long as there's easy recall and food available, the path to survival and inexorable, if slow, gains in @'s power is perfectly clear. Stay shallow, kill safe stuff, and hope for out of depth drops.

It's just that that's boring, so people don't do it.

So yes, I think it's absolutely coherent to say that people set their own difficulty level in vanilla Angband, and that it has always been that way. And that therefore "difficulty" is sort of a hard thing to talk about coherently.

I am not sure I can relate to the statements about the behaviour on the newsgroup and at .oook. With the exception of a couple trolls over the years, I have found the angband community to be one of the best behaved, cooperative, and helpful groups out there.

This board is great, I didn't mean to claim otherwise. I'm sorry if I inadvertently insulted anybody.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

The good thing about infinite dungeons is that the player can choose the level of risk that suits him best. That makes for a very enjoyable play!

The bad thing about infinite dungeons is that sometimes the game really does get reduced to player vs. boredom. That might happen if you have learned in other games to always play for the win, and for nothing else (not for a low turn count, for example). I guess most of these people quickly notice that Angband isn't for them. And most of the people here in the forums have developed a playstyle that very rarely hits this point.

I really think Angband documentation should say something about the playing philosophy of Angband to help newbies find an enjoyable playing style for themselves.

[LostTemplar]

Btw, going too slow in angband does not result in easy win. You can still loose your character to some mistake, and this will be worse for you if you spent too much time to build it. It is optimal to keep chance of fatal mistake equal to chance of unavoidable death. However later angband versions have very low chance of unavoidable death even for very weak characters deep in the dungeon. This generally results in diving being allways optimal way to win.

However I agree that game is actually broken due to recall ability.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Btw, going too slow in angband does not result in easy win. You can still loose your character to some mistake, and this will be worse for you if you spent too much time to build it.

I think this is exactly what the "player versus boredom" battle is all about. Trying to stay awake and avoid mistakes.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

For Angband's defence, though, I have to say that other roguelikes sometimes degenerate into "player vs. boredom", too.

For example, Brogue's early game is too easy. It takes a loooooong time to get to the point where there's enough risk for my tastes. In Angband I can just instantly dive to the depth where I feel happy.

[Derakon]

However I agree that game is actually broken due to recall ability.

So you think every game should be ironman?

[LostTemplar]

Ironman is a much bigger restriction, it limits amount of free stuff, you may get from the floor due to limited number of levels, it also restricts use of the best possible escape, teleport level. (At least in FA it do so, In Vanilla alter reality is possible in ironman, so this is true only for characters without it).

Townless mode however will be fine imho, not much harder then normal game, just more like an adventure.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Townless mode however will be fine imho, not much harder then normal game, just more like an adventure.

Nice idea! Playing like that never occurred to me. Maybe I should give the new NPP a whirl in townless mode...

[Derakon]

Vanilla currently has "Restrict the use of stores/home", which isn't quite like townless in that you can hang around killing townspeople all you like, but why would you bother? I suppose that it could be modified to start you out on dlvl 1 and prevent using up stairs on that level, though.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Vanilla currently has "Restrict the use of stores/home", which isn't quite like townless in that you can hang around killing townspeople all you like, but why would you bother? I suppose that it could be modified to start you out on dlvl 1 and prevent using up stairs on that level, though.

Good idea. Starting in a non-functioning town feels weird.

Luckily for me, NPP has that option too. (It compiled on Debian like magic! It feels really, really weird to play this after countless hours of Fay playtesting. It's a completely different game.)