Angband 3.5-dev

[Djabanete]

So crafting and smithing are considered purely april fool's ideas? Makes me wonder why ...

Vanilla actually does have some elements of crafting, such as enchant weapon/armor spells and branding spells. But Vanilla design is deliberately conservative so that there will always be a core game from which variants can spring. It's not so much that crafting is a terrible idea, as that most people don't want to see drastic changes made to the core game. There's v4 for testing that stuff out.

[ghengiz]

So crafting and smithing are considered purely april fool's ideas? Makes me wonder why ...

If you like them, you could try Sil. IIRC it has at least smithing.

They are april fool's ideas in the context of this previous post.

[Shockbolt]

To me, the reasons for playing angband are:

1. Angband is fun
2. It's got characters & items related to Middle-earth
3. Discovery (both new npc's and not least new items of all kinds)
4. To beat the game

The game should be fast paced, just as it is now. Adding crafting would slow down the gameplay perhaps, so would puzzles, if they are required to be solved in order to go either up or down. Puzzles for chests or other containers would be fun though.

[Therem Harth]

Sil has crafting and it's nothing if not fast-paced.

Me playing V: "Oh, a centipede.... humm-de-dumm... Oh, another centipede."

Me playing Sil: "Oh crap Orcs, run! Oh crap they're coming down the stairs! Crap crap crap!"

Sil is a whole different game of course, but I think V could learn a few things from it.

[Philip]

Agreed. While playing Sil, when I get surrounded, I think for a minute and then fight for the corridor. In V, when I get surrounded, I read a scroll of phase door and start shooting, go to the corridor etc. Sil's lack of escapes and easy death by surrounding make it a more fun game.

[fizzix]

I like how the april fool's joke got turned into a reasonable discussion.

I wouldn't want crafting in V for the same reason that I don't want skills trees or anything of the like. Both are inherently not new-player friendly, and one of the nice things about V is that it's really hard to choose something that will make the game unwinnable in the future. I think Sil's mechanisms like crafting, and the many many variants that allow you to choose skills certainly do help with increasing replayability, but I'd still like V to be simplified in these regards. If a skills tree was ever introduced to V, I would require that it also come with default "best" recommendations, that at least lead to a winnable character.

I also know that many of the other members of the dev-team do not share my views on skills trees.

[Therem Harth]

Actually I'm not sure I like the whole skills thing and lack of character diversity... I just prefer the Sil style of gameplay, where you're immediately thrown into the thick of things and stairs are not necessarily safe. I think V would do well to ramp up the pace of gameplay in a similar fashion.

[ekolis]

The superhero (only human, but, at creation, can choose two traits of the other races, for example hold life and resist poison; STR, DEX and CON boosted).

This one actually sounds kind of interesting... Angband doesn't have all that many playable races, and this would add a bit more customization. Of course the superhero would probably need a large XP penalty...

[half]

I wouldn't want crafting in V for the same reason that I don't want skills trees or anything of the like. Both are inherently not new-player friendly...

This might be true for a game as long as Angband, but I think that skills and the ability trees in Sil are very new player friendly. For one thing, it is entirely possible to win without any investment in the special abilities, or even any investment in skills other than melee and evasion. Moreover, if you do invest in skills or abilities that don't help you very much, you notice this and don't do it next time, just like if you wear a ring of protection in Angband and then notice it wasn't very useful you learn and stop doing it.

This could be more of a problem in a game that takes many times longer to complete, but even then I'm sceptical, since the hypothetical new player is not going to win Angband on his or her first 20 attempts and this is enough time to get the hang of a reasonable skill system sufficiently well to be able to produce winning characters. Where a skill system could be particularly bad is in games without permadeath, since in those cases you really are stuck with your starting choices (e.g. Diablo II).

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I'm against skill trees in Angband for another reason.

Angband already has a perfectly good system for making characters distinguished: stats, skills, races, and classes! Except that it doesn't really work, since most stats and skills don't matter that much.

I'm been using much of my energy in Fay to make every stat and skill on the character sheet really matter. Other variants are trying to do the same thing, like Ironband and Un. The "skill tree" in these variants is rolling/choosing a different set of stats.

I like the Sangband skill system, but I find it a bit inelegant that the old, non-functioning stat & skill system still exists, too. The two systems don't really connect IMO.

I love how Sil reboots everything and starts with a brand new system without any legacy problems.

[Djabanete]

Re: Sil abilities: when I first played Sil one of things I really enjoyed was that whenever I picked an ability, I could immediately see how it impacted the game. Transparency and balance are key. I never felt cheated when I picked an ability. Skill trees can be noob-friendly (also, see Diablo 2).

That said, I don't think Vanilla needs skill trees.

Edit: ... for the reasons Mikko just mentioned. If anything, it needs to figure out what the heck is the deal with Charisma.

[Derakon]

One interesting take on crafting is what Dungeon of Dredmor does. There, crafting essentially is a hedge against getting screwed by the RNG equipment-wise. Crafting ingredients are plentiful enough that you should always be able to make the items you need to fill in the gaps in your equipment. A strong investment in crafting skills will also let you access high-level gear earlier than you "should" be able to get it -- but you've attained that skill in crafting at the cost of skill in other areas, and eventually that high-level gear will drop for non-crafting players anyway. In short, crafting smooths out the difficulty curve.

Diablo 2 is a bit problematic in my view mostly because there are many skills that don't scale well to the endgame. Most characters will tend to invest their skillpoints as soon as they level up, which results in a Sorceress with 3 points sunk into Firebolt, for example -- functionally useless as that spell is almost entirely ineffective after the first chapter. They did eventually mitigate this issue by making every skill give passive bonuses to related skills, so your points in Firebolt weren't completely wasted so long as you stuck with fire skills, but it's still disappointing to get to level 30 (or whatever), look at your skill tree, and wish you had done things completely differently.

[Magnate]

I like the Sangband skill system, but I find it a bit inelegant that the old, non-functioning stat & skill system still exists, too. The two systems don't really connect IMO.

You need to do a bit of source-diving in Sang - this criticism isn't really fair. The "old" skills (melee, shooting, perception, disarming etc. etc.) are very carefully governed by the player's chosen skill expenditure - they're basically just ways of communicating the results of the new skill system. Stats are also carefully meshed with the skill system. It's really very well done indeed. The main reason I don't think V needs any kind of player-selected skill development is because it's already been done - Sangband *is* V-with-skills (or rather, O-with-skills).

I love how Sil reboots everything and starts with a brand new system without any legacy problems.

I really must play Sil. It sounds as if it has borrowed the best bits of angband and mixed them with the best bits of Crawl.

JFTR, I am actually quite interested in v4 (not V) one day having some sort of forging or crafting mechanism. But again, it's done very well in S (where it is inextricably tied to the skill system), and I haven't yet thought of any improvement on that. I was hoping that Craftband would mature and then we could just nick the best ideas from that ...

[Magnate]

Diablo 2 is a bit problematic in my view mostly because there are many skills that don't scale well to the endgame. Most characters will tend to invest their skillpoints as soon as they level up, which results in a Sorceress with 3 points sunk into Firebolt, for example -- functionally useless as that spell is almost entirely ineffective after the first chapter. They did eventually mitigate this issue by making every skill give passive bonuses to related skills, so your points in Firebolt weren't completely wasted so long as you stuck with fire skills, but it's still disappointing to get to level 30 (or whatever), look at your skill tree, and wish you had done things completely differently.

I've never really understood the idea that being "new player friendly" somehow means "new players can optimise immediately". To me, part of the fun and replay value in a game is that I can play a few characters, know that I'm making suboptimal choices, and then play my next characters knowing that I'm making much more effective choices. This is precisely why D2 lived for so long on my hard drive (and ditto Titan Quest, though that allowed re-speccing). It seems to me completely self-defeating that a game would steer a new player towards optimum choices, as that diminishes replay value.

Now that's not to say that the choices should be in any way obscured or misleading - they weren't in D2, it's just that you needed the experience of playing the higher levels to understand what your optimum choices would have been (if you could have survived without spending all your points early - another feature which rewarded experience and better play).

To me, "new player friendly" is something different. It's about the choices being clear and easy to understand what they're about, not necessarily easy to see what the best choice is.

[ekolis]

Diablo 2 is a bit problematic in my view mostly because there are many skills that don't scale well to the endgame. Most characters will tend to invest their skillpoints as soon as they level up, which results in a Sorceress with 3 points sunk into Firebolt, for example -- functionally useless as that spell is almost entirely ineffective after the first chapter. They did eventually mitigate this issue by making every skill give passive bonuses to related skills, so your points in Firebolt weren't completely wasted so long as you stuck with fire skills, but it's still disappointing to get to level 30 (or whatever), look at your skill tree, and wish you had done things completely differently.

Perhaps this could also have been overcome with a "respec" feature - pay some price (say, gold or XP) to delete some of your skills and regain the skill points for use elsewhere? Dungeon Defenders and Space Pirates & Zombies both feature this...