Those first few rings are crap

[ekolis]

Dunno if this has been fixed in recent versions, because I haven't played V much lately, but something that always bugged me about Angband and its variants is that the first few rings you find are ALWAYS junk - aggravation, stupidity, weakness, whatever! I think this is due to the min/max levels set for the various types of rings in the edit files somewhere, and the bad rings must be shallower than all the rest! Any hope of getting this changed so it's not so obvious to people who have played the game before / screwing over newbies?

[d_m]

Dunno if this has been fixed in recent versions, because I haven't played V much lately, but something that always bugged me about Angband and its variants is that the first few rings you find are ALWAYS junk - aggravation, stupidity, weakness, whatever! I think this is due to the min/max levels set for the various types of rings in the edit files somewhere, and the bad rings must be shallower than all the rest! Any hope of getting this changed so it's not so obvious to people who have played the game before / screwing over newbies?

At this point there are not a lot of shallow cursed rings. Some of the rings are kind of bad (i.e. =Dog, =Mouse) but you can figure that out and remove them.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Dunno if this has been fixed in recent versions, because I haven't played V much lately, but something that always bugged me about Angband and its variants is that the first few rings you find are ALWAYS junk - aggravation, stupidity, weakness, whatever! I think this is due to the min/max levels set for the various types of rings in the edit files somewhere, and the bad rings must be shallower than all the rest! Any hope of getting this changed so it's not so obvious to people who have played the game before / screwing over newbies?

You would be surprisef at how useful rings of the dog, slow digestion are for begining low level characters, rings of the dog give you fear resistance, and slow digestion can help when your food.got eaten or you run out. Rings of adornment, aggravation i think are leftovers from the old school playstyle of not being able to identify everything and hoping that ring you put on was good. With the increase in information in newer versions their is no longer any surprises, we learn all the items quickly, and abundant id makes it easy to leatn the item before it gets tried on. Random attributes to items is the direction v4 is going i think. But this could potentialy make game easier.

[ekolis]

OK, good - the dog/mouse rings I'd forgotten about, since I haven't played V much recently!

[fizzix]

Most of the low level rings are useful these days. Mouse is probably the most useless one, I guess it could be useful with a kobold rogue that can get legendary stealth at dlevel 10, but that's about it. Oh no wait feather falling is the most useless. Dog is useful for any non-stealthy class that wakes anything up anyway. slow digestion is pretty crappy. Teleportation is situationally useful. And =protection is actually a pretty good ring for the early game that can be gotten from town. Open Wounds is very useful. =Delving shows up too late, and I've never used =light. That's about it for low level rings.

[Nick]

Just play FAangband...

[Raxmei]

Dunno if this has been fixed in recent versions, because I haven't played V much lately, but something that always bugged me about Angband and its variants is that the first few rings you find are ALWAYS junk - aggravation, stupidity, weakness, whatever! I think this is due to the min/max levels set for the various types of rings in the edit files somewhere, and the bad rings must be shallower than all the rest! Any hope of getting this changed so it's not so obvious to people who have played the game before / screwing over newbies?

Stupidity, weakness, etc, cursed stat rings, and rings of aggravation no longer exist. Cursed items in the classic sense are barely in the game at all anymore. Their previous existence comes as quite a shock when I try to play variants not based on a recent version of V. In V you now can sensibly identify items by wielding them and seeing what happens. In the first few levels you're likely to get something disappointing like feather fall, slow digestion, or mouse, but it won't cripple your character and there's a reasonable chance even early on of getting something useful.

[buzzkill]

Stupidity, weakness, etc, cursed stat rings, and rings of aggravation no longer exist. Cursed items in the classic sense are barely in the game at all anymore... In the first few levels you're likely to get something,.... but it won't cripple your character....

[Philip]

Yeah, the early rings used to serve as a reminder that not everything is good and that wielding un-id'd things is bad. Neither is true in new angband. There are things that are useless, but almost everything is at least situationally usefull.
I remember that in oangband you could find non-cursed rings of aggravation. That was always fun. "Hey, why does everything I meet seem to be awake? Dammit, I'm dead. Ring of aggravation?"
Without bad items, junk has been cut down on, but been replaced by great items and lots of them. Without bad items, angband is less than it was before.

[Derakon]

The problem with the old rings was that you only got fooled by one bad ring once; after that, you learned to ID every ring before wearing them. Personally I'd be fine with having rings that aren't overtly bad but are probably not helpful to you (Ring of the Dog is approximately rFear + Aggravate), but we want to avoid game design that results in boring behavior, and IDing everything by scrolls/spells/etc. in the early game is boring behavior. ID-by-use is much more interesting, but it can't be valid unless it's more practical than "normal" ID.

I think in my ideal game, there would be no ID spell in any form; everything would have to be ID'd by use. However the things you'd ID would be the individual traits of items, so you'd learn to recognize Aggravate after figuring out that one item that has Aggravate on it. Of course that's no help for figuring out potions, scrolls, etc.

[fizzix]

I think in my ideal game, there would be no ID spell in any form; everything would have to be ID'd by use. However the things you'd ID would be the individual traits of items, so you'd learn to recognize Aggravate after figuring out that one item that has Aggravate on it. Of course that's no help for figuring out potions, scrolls, etc.

Here's my ideal.

Potions, scrolls, wands, rods and staves have flavors and get ID'd when you use them. It's the only way to ID them.

All wearables, including rings, amulets and ammo have no flavors and are instead distinguished by runes (like in v4). Removing flavors for jewelry also saves a lot of stupid hackish coding like with special artifacts. If you really want to distinguish between jewelry you can make some sval distinctions like you have with armor, where each sval has a range of specific types that it can have. This way you can get broad power ideas from LOS but need walkover or pickup to get full details with all runes known.

Example for jewelry
necklace: adornment, inertia, teleportation, charisma, infravision
amulet: regeneration, wisdom, adornment
jeweled amulet: devotion, trickery, weaponmastery, magi

and so on

I haven't figure out how to deal with squelch yet in this system. I think the obvious system is to let someone squelch by type immediately and just ignore the problem of info leakage. So from the beginning of the game you can squelch all inertia jewelry, and as soon as you pick up the first jewelry with -1 speed, you know it's inertia and you squelch it.

[Malak Darkhunter]

The problem with the old rings was that you only got fooled by one bad ring once; after that, you learned to ID every ring before wearing them. Personally I'd be fine with having rings that aren't overtly bad but are probably not helpful to you (Ring of the Dog is approximately rFear + Aggravate), but we want to avoid game design that results in boring behavior, and IDing everything by scrolls/spells/etc. in the early game is boring behavior. ID-by-use is much more interesting, but it can't be valid unless it's more practical than "normal" ID.

I think in my ideal game, there would be no ID spell in any form; everything would have to be ID'd by use. However the things you'd ID would be the individual traits of items, so you'd learn to recognize Aggravate after figuring out that one item that has Aggravate on it. Of course that's no help for figuring out potions, scrolls, etc.

Good idea, I think I like the idea of being able to automaticaly *know* and learn certain item types by class. Warriors knowing all about weapons and armor, and minor enchantments and then as their level grows they learn even more qualities of items to the point of knowing all weapon armor enchantments at high levels, but not at low levels.

for mages, they intrisicaly know all detection and damage wands/staffs with the exception of holy/heal type items, that would be the realm of the priests, as well as potions for both mages and priests. and again they learn the more damaging items when their level grows, to where they automaticaly identify items dependent on character level and class.

Rangers/Rogues/Paladins/ would have to be a mix of inbetween these skills as they know armor/weapons/ and magic devices.

I would get rid of id and call it *Lore* but be able to ID by use but put some restraints on being able to use too powerful items to early.

[Nick]

All wearables, including rings, amulets and ammo have no flavors and are instead distinguished by runes (like in v4). Removing flavors for jewelry also saves a lot of stupid hackish coding like with special artifacts. If you really want to distinguish between jewelry you can make some sval distinctions like you have with armor, where each sval has a range of specific types that it can have. This way you can get broad power ideas from LOS but need walkover or pickup to get full details with all runes known.

FA has almost exactly this...

Rings and amulets still have 'flavours' (metals for rings, gemstones for amulets), but they are basically mini-randarts. The flavor dictates how much potential the item has - so a steel ring has small potential, but a gold one has lots. Then the potential is used to 'buy' properties.

[Derakon]

Good idea, I think I like the idea of being able to automaticaly *know* and learn certain item types by class. Warriors knowing all about weapons and armor, and minor enchantments and then as their level grows they learn even more qualities of items to the point of knowing all weapon armor enchantments at high levels, but not at low levels.

for mages, they intrisicaly know all detection and damage wands/staffs with the exception of holy/heal type items, that would be the realm of the priests, as well as potions for both mages and priests. and again they learn the more damaging items when their level grows, to where they automaticaly identify items dependent on character level and class.

I was thinking more along the lines of v4's rune-learning system. Every character starts out knowing nothing about any equipment modifiers, but if they find e.g. a Ring of Strength and equip it, then they realize that one of the runes on the ring is +STR, and can then recognize that rune on any other item.

As for learning about consumables, I figured that would always be done via experimentation.

[fizzix]

FA has almost exactly this...

well of course, I could've guessed that...

Rings and amulets still have 'flavours' (metals for rings, gemstones for amulets), but they are basically mini-randarts. The flavor dictates how much potential the item has - so a steel ring has small potential, but a gold one has lots. Then the potential is used to 'buy' properties.

How do you deal with squelch. Do you squelch based on power, such as all steel rings? Or something else?