Angband 3.5-dev

[Derakon]

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.

Mm, there's a difference between suboptimal choices and unplayable choices, and D2 will certainly lead you to pick the latter if you aren't careful. I'm all for the tightly-optimized everything-planned-out character having a (much) easier time then the "screw it, let's just throw darts at the levelup screen" character, but I do think the game should be playable, and more importantly, fun either way.

Part of this, in D2's case, is that many skills are just out-and-out terrible (Magic Arrow, anyone?), and/or get completely outclassed a few levels after you get access to them (c.f. Firebolt). Better-designed skill systems ensure that no skill is useless, even if some skills are better than others.

Respecs are a common answer to this problem, and they do solve it in a way, but they're kind of an obvious rules patch. "Whoops! We did a crap job of designing the skill system, so let's let players fix their characters after we let them break them!" The better solution is to keep the problem from happening in the first place.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

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.

I know! S is one of my all-time favorites really.

You can call the Sangband system "elegant". It really is a masterwork. But it is elegant in an extremely baroque way that reminds me of RPG systems of yesteryear. The way that it works is non-transparent and requires lots of effort to understand. Thankfully the manual does a really, really good work at explaining it all.

I don't think anyone else except Leon could have pulled it off.

I have a really hard time communicating what I think of Sangband.

***

Angband's main strengths are resource management and interesting equipment choices. IMO Angband's stat/skill system should play to these strengths as much as possible.

I see the way that your equipment interact with your primal statistics as the key to the system. There is lots of untapped potential here. If every stat was important to every class, and the system was transparent to the player, how much more interesting would equipment choices become!

I'm afraid that any kind of skill tree system just hinders this interaction or makes it more opaque. In Angband, stats should be king.

[d_m]

Respecs are a common answer to this problem, and they do solve it in a way, but they're kind of an obvious rules patch. "Whoops! We did a crap job of designing the skill system, so let's let players fix their characters after we let them break them!" The better solution is to keep the problem from happening in the first place.

I don't totally agree.

Respecs do have this property but have another important one--they reassure the player that skill choices, etc. can be reconsidered.

Apart from whether e.g. summon golem is "good enough" to justify being a skill, is whether I enjoy casting it. If it turns out I don't enjoy summoning (which I couldn't have known until I tried it) it's a drag if I'm committed and can't reconsider.

[Magnate]

Very well said on both counts - "baroque" is an excellent description of Sangband - especially impressive if English isn't your first language. As with music, some like baroque and some don't, but it's undeniably elegant.

I also agree with you about V - the 'skills' are really just ways of summarising the interaction between your race/class/equipment and your stats. We certainly need to do more with all three of races, classes and stats (including re-working or removing Charisma) - hopefully someone will leap in and try some stuff in v4 - it's an as-yet unclaimed area.

[Magnate]

I don't totally agree.

Respecs do have this property but have another important one--they reassure the player that skill choices, etc. can be reconsidered.

Apart from whether e.g. summon golem is "good enough" to justify being a skill, is whether I enjoy casting it. If it turns out I don't enjoy summoning (which I couldn't have known until I tried it) it's a drag if I'm committed and can't reconsider.

But it isn't though! If you had fun trying summoning, and stopped when you decided you didn't like it, you start a warrior or a rogue or a non-summoning mage and have more fun - what have you lost? I don't think we can plan for every player to enjoy every build, so there will definitely be those which don't work for some. The key is making this experience of discovery fun, and allowing the player to choose easily to start over with something more suited to their playstyle.

I really hate the re-spec concept. I agree with Derakon that it's a horrible kludge which breaks the fourth wall. To the limited extent that these games are RPGs (and I know they're not really) it really ruins it for me that you can just 'unlearn' stuff.

That said, I don't think you can make every skill useful to every build either. I agree that every skill ought to be useful to *some* builds, but there's no point aspiring to proof every possible choice against redundancy. Sometimes players will make bad choices (e.g. a ranger keeping Cubragol and chucking Bard) - as long as the game allows them to learn and understand which choices were wrong and why, and that that process is fun, I don't see a problem.

In case anyone is wondering, I think this is relevant to angband development, e.g. for spell choices if you can't learn all spells. It doesn't only apply to skills.

[Djabanete]

Respecs do have this property but have another important one--they reassure the player that skill choices, etc. can be reconsidered.

It's much better to be able to assure the player that their skill choices are worthwhile or at least defensible.

It's unavoidable that some skills will be better than others, but in the ideal skill system, rational but suboptimal choices should still give you a chance to win. Experimenting with your build is fun. I'd go so far as to say that ideally (in my mind), what skills you choose should not significantly impact your chances to win, but should significantly impact the way you must play the game thereafter. Each choice should be transparent, be at least somewhat worthwhile, and should have a big impact on subsequent strategy.

I suppose I'm not strongly against respecs in principle, but if they're just a way for players to recover from horribly wrong choices that nobody should take, then they're just a band-aid for a design flaw.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I would love a skill system where the skill tree was procedurally generated in each game. There could be hundreds of skills in the game, but only 15 or so would be available to the player to choose from in each game.

EDIT: Hey, that's almost exactly how the board game Agricola handles skills!

[Djabanete]

I haven't played Agricola, but that does sound like Dominion, which I like a lot.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

It's unavoidable that some skills will be better than others, but in the ideal skill system, rational but suboptimal choices should still give you a chance to win. Experimenting with your build is fun. I'd go so far as to say that ideally (in my mind), what skills you choose should not significantly impact your chances to win, but should significantly impact the way you must play the game thereafter. Each choice should be transparent, be at least somewhat worthwhile, and should have a big impact on subsequent strategy.

That's exactly how I think about the six primal statistics!

[Cold_Heart]

+1 to procedurally-generated skills
+1 to making charisma useful
+1 to some or another form of crafting

[Mikko Lehtinen]

One way to do skills -- I'd rather call them specialties since Angband already has skills -- in Angband would be this. This is just brainstorming.

- They would be similar to Oangband specialties.
- There specialities would be learned in-game, preferably somewhere in dungeon, for example after freeing a prisoner or studying an ancient tome.
- You would need to succeed in a stat or skill roll to learn a specialty, and there would be only one chance. Not learning a specialty wouldn't matter that much because you could only learn a limited number of specialties anyway.

Another possibility: All specialties would be tied to a stat. As your Charisma score gets higher, your Intimidate specialty gets stronger. This would ensure that stats and equipment choices continue to be important.

[Djabanete]

I do like it when randomness and choice both play a role in character development. In Heroes of Might and Magic, whenever a hero levels up, you're given a choice between two randomly chosen skills. (Well... they're chosen from a pool that are appropriate for your hero's profession.) You get to make the strategic choices, but sometimes the game moves you a direction you're not familiar with. Something like that would be fun... you rescue a prisoner and he agrees to teach you your choice from among 3 specialties.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I do like it when randomness and choice both play a role in character development. In Heroes of Might and Magic, whenever a hero levels up, you're given a choice between two randomly chosen skills.

I like! Actually HoMM skill advancement has been popping in my mind often when I think about *band development.

Let's see... Every ten character levels or so you meet a "guru" who offers a teach you one specialty out of a list of three. Usually you need to succeed in an ability check to learn a specialty, and if you fail, you may choose another one on the list. One of the specialties on the list would always be "easy", with no ability check required.

[half]

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.

Crafting in Sil is like this except that it doesn't require any ingredients, which is better in some ways, worse in others. Actually, there is one ingredient (mithril) which works well for flavour and a bit of interest in melting down a few mithril items to get enough mithril to make a mithril corslet for example. I think this is enough ingredient related crafting without making the game into a scavenger hunt.

Diablo 2 is a bit problematic in my view

I completely agree with this analysis.

[Nick]

One way to do skills -- I'd rather call them specialties since Angband already has skills -- in Angband would be this. This is just brainstorming.

- They would be similar to Oangband specialties.
- There specialities would be learned in-game, preferably somewhere in dungeon, for example after freeing a prisoner or studying an ancient tome.

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