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Working on the User Manual has made me think about some things I like or don't like about Angband, and things I'd like to see done. I've been collecting these up, so I'm afraid I'm covering a spectrum of different ideas and possibility here, so my apologies for that.
Some of these come from flavour reasons, some from gameplay, but also there is a strong input from wrestling with the problem of what to do with all that cash you accumulate in later stages of the game. From being an incredibly important resource early on to buy needed items, money becomes almost completely irrelevant as far as I can see.
Some of these are fairly simple ideas, to do with cleaning up some aspects of the game, others are probably very complicated to implement and I appreciate may never happen or may not be wanted , but they may inspire someone to come up with something else that is more viable.
Also, before I get to the meat of my ideas, some explanation which hopefully may avoid any problems of misunderstanding:
1. I've only played Vanilla; it may be that some of my ideas have been implemented elsewhere, but I don't know about those variants and have neither time nor inclination to go through all the variants looking for 'the best'. I like Angband and just want to see some tweaks. So please don't flame me saying I shouldn't be posting these and should know they're to be found in (x)band.
2. I don't have a deep knowledge of past versions of Angband, or past discussions about changes, so if some of my ideas have been in previous versions and removed, or discussed and vetoed, then the comments under (1), above, apply as well.
3. It's a long time (20 years) since I coded in C, so I don't want to, and probably couldn't, read the code to see if my ideas are based on misunderstandings about the current version. Angband is a black box to me, and I base my ideas on what I see when playing it. If I have misunderstood, please let me know where and how I've gone wrong, but don't hold it against me
OK, ideas...
1. I would like to see some of the temporary status flags moved up to the top left.
The bottom line should, in my view, be kept for 'passive' flags like Searching, but key ones like Blind, Confused, Afraid, which alter what the character can do (particularly in combat), in my view belong up there with or even above the cuts and stuns. This would mean one less place to have to keep checking during large combats (ok, I may be an idiot, but I can't be the only one ever to have died due to not realising my character was Afraid and so wasn't actually hitting the monster just in front of me). I feel that the character would 'know' these things, so from a usability/ergonomics point of view, they should be more obvious to the player.
2. When activating something from the floor using -, if there's only one item on the floor that is possibly usable in that way, there shouldn't be a further prompt where you have to respond with a.
At the least, could I have a user option to do this?
3. When moving 'intelligently' using ., I would like it to stop short of dead ends when the light reaches the dead end, not the character
A silly, minor point, but you would stop walking, wouldn't you?
4. Object knowledge order
When displaying rings, potions, etc., could we have it in some sensible order? Personally I prefer to have cursed items first, and then good items in ascending order (I had hacked some files in 3.0.6 to do this), but alphabetical would do as well. At the moment they're in no order at all, due to just being taken in order from the item file, and that has evolved and grown over time.
5. Squelching
I'd like to be able to squelch flasks of, oil too - they're not listed anywhere
6. Monster drops
I had a Swordsman drop a Mace. Not very flavourful. I suspect this would require considerable work for not much noticeable result, but it would be good if drops from armed monsters (humans, orcs, goblins, etc.) would be weighted towards being in flavour. This particularly applies when I'm running short of arrows and I wish I could go knock some of those Black orcs around the corner on the head to scavenge their quivers!)
7. Item names
Someone on another feature request commented on the use of Enlightenment as a description for a staff and potion that do different things. I agree - who about using Surveying or Surveillance for the staff and for the scroll of magic mapping? I could extend this argument for using more flavourful names (e.g. changing Ring of Resist Fire to Ring of Warmth or Scroll of Trap Location to Scroll of Warning), but it's not a major point.
8. Item types
In looking at the philosophy of the differences between staves and wands, it appears that in general wands are aimed at a target, while staves affect an area or otherwise have a general effect. If this was carried through for consistency, Staff of Perception should be Wand of Perception.
9. Level feelings
Now we're on to some bigger things. I find level feelings illogical from a flavour point of view - whys should the length of time you spend on a level govern your hunch about the next level you go to? I understand the gameplay rationale, but I;d prefer flavour to win. How about looking at having a hunch about a level once you've arrived on it, but after an variable length of time based on character level, class, and wisdom, and what the feeling is. So landing on a superb level you'd know much sooner (something in the air...), but a low level character (or someone with no common sense) would have to wait longer than a veteran explorer. Rogues thieves and rangers would probably have an advantage. If you wanted to get complicated about it, perhaps warriors would be particularly sensitive to weapons, while mages would pick up earlier on powerful amulets, rings, etc..
Perhaps it would be possible to get revised - and more accurate - feelings the longer you were on a level.
If you wanted to do this, how about also having scrolls or potions (or staves) that gave you level feelings - a Scroll/Staff of Intuition?
If the idea of moving some status flags up to the top left (see above) was adopted, some of the bottom line could then be given over permanently to the level feeling.
10. Enchanting weapons and armour
My understanding is this: the chances of using such a scroll is inversely proportional to the current enchantment (I'm guessing +1 = 90%, +2 = 80%, etc), so you can't get beyond +10 (and that's a tiny chance, 5 or 1% I assume).
The *Enchant* scrolls give a chance of 1-3 points of increase, but with the same base chance of success. By the time you start finding them, you've probably enchanted anything useful up to 9 or 10 anyway, so the only (tiny) advantage is that if it's at 9, you might - might - get +11 or +12. I don;t think this makes these scrolls very attractive at all.
It also seems to me to be too easy to use these scrolls (Enchant or *Enchant*) on artifacts and ego items – items which have such powerful enchantments on them to start with should be
very difficult to enhance, as I feel the logic of magic would be that you'd have to overcome existing enchantments in order to add to it. It seems that they use the same rules for determining success chance for the enchantment as boring vanilla weapons, above.
My suggestion would be as follows, which would not only provide for more logic and flavour, but would add more scrolls (and spells?) to the list of stuff to find, and would give more expensive items to hopefully spend those barrowloads of useless gold on in the later game.
1. Enchant. As now, but with little or no chance of enchanting an artifact or ego-item
2. *Enchant*. Only increases by 1 point, but higher chance of success, and also some chance (although low) of success beyond +10. Again, shouldn't work on artifacts or ego-items
3. Enhance. Can enchant artifacts or ego-items. Probably the same chance (or less?) of success as for Enchant (and perhaps a very high chance of success if you chose to 'waste' it on a vanilla item?)
4. *Enhance*. As 2, but for artifacts and ego-items.
5. Endow. Can turn an ordinary weapon or armour into an ego-item. A very rare and fabulously expensive scroll. Could be random, or perhaps the scroll would be generated with a name which would indicate what it would create – e.g. Endow Blade of Frost, Endow Armour of Resist Heat?
An even more complicated idea following on from this would be to have Manuals of Weaponsmithing/Armoury (books for warriors, yeah!) which could be found in the dungeons, and which could be used to make such items. Once you have such a book (which would contain a random selection of ego item types that could be manufactured), it would require you to collect bits and pieces from various magical beasts, and magical items like scrolls and wands, which would be used in the manufacturing process. Fighting those water hounds might become a more enticing prospect if you need their hides to complete a shield of resist acid!
11.Themed levels
This idea arose from thinking about level feelings and also from looking at monster pits. Level feelings are a little bit flavour, but mostly utilitarian, and I was wondering what other uses could be made of these.
It would be very atmospheric if level feelings might occasionally say something like 'There is a chill in the air as your breath billows out in clouds...'. This would of course imply a cold-themed level – with frost giant handlers whipping on packs of ice hounds, white dragons coiled in corners, yetis wandering the corridors, and so on.
Some possible themes could be: cold levels, hot levels, levels filled with spiders or snakes, or army levels – with every room holding regiments and platoons of orcs and soldiers ready to march out against Morgoth's enemies on the surface. This could be linked to the presence of uniques, so (e.g.) Azog wouldn't just have an escort, but a whole level teeming with his legions.
I would imagine this would require some work, as there would have to be some tagging of monsters to indicate which would fit within each theme.
I would think there would have to be someplanning in the generation of levels so that the player would always enter in an uninhabited bit of the level, but it could be fun, couldn't it?
12.Customisable spell books
I suspect this one may go against most people's preferences for having gameplay that restricts a player and makes him/her think, but it does irritate me that later in the game I often have 5 or 6 slots filled with spell books, and yet need only 1 or 2 spells from each book. Playing as a ranger, I only use 2 spells from MfB, 1 from C&T, 1 or 2 from I&I, 1 from S&E, and small numbers from the higher books.
How about being able to buy exorbitantly expensive blank spell books, into which you can then have spells copied for even more money? This would be another shop – the Scribe – and I would suggest you would need to donate a copy of the relevant book to the Scribe each time you want a spell entering in the new book (so if you want several spells from high-end books, this would be very hard work and very expensive to achieve). The Scribe would probably then take over buying/selling ordinary spell books from the Magic Shop.
13. Improved teleporting and other spells
I feel there is room for an extra spell at high level of controlled teleporting, allowing you to choose where your character ended up (with some chance of it misfiring and being random, of course). This would be particularly useful if themed levels (above) were implemented, as the high numbers of monsters would make it particularly fraught to be teleporting at random.
To make it less than foolproof, it should as mentioned have some chance of misfiring, but also I came up with the idea that perhaps you need to place an enchanted object at the point where you want to teleport to – so you have to have cleared a location first, and also there is a risk a wandering monster might pick it up and get you into big trouble
Of course, I realised after I'd come up with it that this teleport anchor is similar to the portkey in Harry Potter, but I honestly hadn't been thinking of that at first!
Warding spells – I often accumulate lots of items I want to take to the surface on my next return, but which hamper my movement round the current level and ability to pick up and examine new finds. How about a Ward of Protection spell that expands on Rune of Protection and protects items in the current room or in line of sight from being picked up by monsters/thieves (with a chance they can break through the protection)? This would also be beneficial to anyone using an anchored teleport method as above.
Some of these come from flavour reasons, some from gameplay, but also there is a strong input from wrestling with the problem of what to do with all that cash you accumulate in later stages of the game. From being an incredibly important resource early on to buy needed items, money becomes almost completely irrelevant as far as I can see.
Some of these are fairly simple ideas, to do with cleaning up some aspects of the game, others are probably very complicated to implement and I appreciate may never happen or may not be wanted , but they may inspire someone to come up with something else that is more viable.
Also, before I get to the meat of my ideas, some explanation which hopefully may avoid any problems of misunderstanding:
1. I've only played Vanilla; it may be that some of my ideas have been implemented elsewhere, but I don't know about those variants and have neither time nor inclination to go through all the variants looking for 'the best'. I like Angband and just want to see some tweaks. So please don't flame me saying I shouldn't be posting these and should know they're to be found in (x)band.
2. I don't have a deep knowledge of past versions of Angband, or past discussions about changes, so if some of my ideas have been in previous versions and removed, or discussed and vetoed, then the comments under (1), above, apply as well.
3. It's a long time (20 years) since I coded in C, so I don't want to, and probably couldn't, read the code to see if my ideas are based on misunderstandings about the current version. Angband is a black box to me, and I base my ideas on what I see when playing it. If I have misunderstood, please let me know where and how I've gone wrong, but don't hold it against me
OK, ideas...
1. I would like to see some of the temporary status flags moved up to the top left.
The bottom line should, in my view, be kept for 'passive' flags like Searching, but key ones like Blind, Confused, Afraid, which alter what the character can do (particularly in combat), in my view belong up there with or even above the cuts and stuns. This would mean one less place to have to keep checking during large combats (ok, I may be an idiot, but I can't be the only one ever to have died due to not realising my character was Afraid and so wasn't actually hitting the monster just in front of me). I feel that the character would 'know' these things, so from a usability/ergonomics point of view, they should be more obvious to the player.
2. When activating something from the floor using -, if there's only one item on the floor that is possibly usable in that way, there shouldn't be a further prompt where you have to respond with a.
At the least, could I have a user option to do this?
3. When moving 'intelligently' using ., I would like it to stop short of dead ends when the light reaches the dead end, not the character
A silly, minor point, but you would stop walking, wouldn't you?
4. Object knowledge order
When displaying rings, potions, etc., could we have it in some sensible order? Personally I prefer to have cursed items first, and then good items in ascending order (I had hacked some files in 3.0.6 to do this), but alphabetical would do as well. At the moment they're in no order at all, due to just being taken in order from the item file, and that has evolved and grown over time.
5. Squelching
I'd like to be able to squelch flasks of, oil too - they're not listed anywhere
6. Monster drops
I had a Swordsman drop a Mace. Not very flavourful. I suspect this would require considerable work for not much noticeable result, but it would be good if drops from armed monsters (humans, orcs, goblins, etc.) would be weighted towards being in flavour. This particularly applies when I'm running short of arrows and I wish I could go knock some of those Black orcs around the corner on the head to scavenge their quivers!)
7. Item names
Someone on another feature request commented on the use of Enlightenment as a description for a staff and potion that do different things. I agree - who about using Surveying or Surveillance for the staff and for the scroll of magic mapping? I could extend this argument for using more flavourful names (e.g. changing Ring of Resist Fire to Ring of Warmth or Scroll of Trap Location to Scroll of Warning), but it's not a major point.
8. Item types
In looking at the philosophy of the differences between staves and wands, it appears that in general wands are aimed at a target, while staves affect an area or otherwise have a general effect. If this was carried through for consistency, Staff of Perception should be Wand of Perception.
9. Level feelings
Now we're on to some bigger things. I find level feelings illogical from a flavour point of view - whys should the length of time you spend on a level govern your hunch about the next level you go to? I understand the gameplay rationale, but I;d prefer flavour to win. How about looking at having a hunch about a level once you've arrived on it, but after an variable length of time based on character level, class, and wisdom, and what the feeling is. So landing on a superb level you'd know much sooner (something in the air...), but a low level character (or someone with no common sense) would have to wait longer than a veteran explorer. Rogues thieves and rangers would probably have an advantage. If you wanted to get complicated about it, perhaps warriors would be particularly sensitive to weapons, while mages would pick up earlier on powerful amulets, rings, etc..
Perhaps it would be possible to get revised - and more accurate - feelings the longer you were on a level.
If you wanted to do this, how about also having scrolls or potions (or staves) that gave you level feelings - a Scroll/Staff of Intuition?
If the idea of moving some status flags up to the top left (see above) was adopted, some of the bottom line could then be given over permanently to the level feeling.
10. Enchanting weapons and armour
My understanding is this: the chances of using such a scroll is inversely proportional to the current enchantment (I'm guessing +1 = 90%, +2 = 80%, etc), so you can't get beyond +10 (and that's a tiny chance, 5 or 1% I assume).
The *Enchant* scrolls give a chance of 1-3 points of increase, but with the same base chance of success. By the time you start finding them, you've probably enchanted anything useful up to 9 or 10 anyway, so the only (tiny) advantage is that if it's at 9, you might - might - get +11 or +12. I don;t think this makes these scrolls very attractive at all.
It also seems to me to be too easy to use these scrolls (Enchant or *Enchant*) on artifacts and ego items – items which have such powerful enchantments on them to start with should be
very difficult to enhance, as I feel the logic of magic would be that you'd have to overcome existing enchantments in order to add to it. It seems that they use the same rules for determining success chance for the enchantment as boring vanilla weapons, above.
My suggestion would be as follows, which would not only provide for more logic and flavour, but would add more scrolls (and spells?) to the list of stuff to find, and would give more expensive items to hopefully spend those barrowloads of useless gold on in the later game.
1. Enchant. As now, but with little or no chance of enchanting an artifact or ego-item
2. *Enchant*. Only increases by 1 point, but higher chance of success, and also some chance (although low) of success beyond +10. Again, shouldn't work on artifacts or ego-items
3. Enhance. Can enchant artifacts or ego-items. Probably the same chance (or less?) of success as for Enchant (and perhaps a very high chance of success if you chose to 'waste' it on a vanilla item?)
4. *Enhance*. As 2, but for artifacts and ego-items.
5. Endow. Can turn an ordinary weapon or armour into an ego-item. A very rare and fabulously expensive scroll. Could be random, or perhaps the scroll would be generated with a name which would indicate what it would create – e.g. Endow Blade of Frost, Endow Armour of Resist Heat?
An even more complicated idea following on from this would be to have Manuals of Weaponsmithing/Armoury (books for warriors, yeah!) which could be found in the dungeons, and which could be used to make such items. Once you have such a book (which would contain a random selection of ego item types that could be manufactured), it would require you to collect bits and pieces from various magical beasts, and magical items like scrolls and wands, which would be used in the manufacturing process. Fighting those water hounds might become a more enticing prospect if you need their hides to complete a shield of resist acid!
11.Themed levels
This idea arose from thinking about level feelings and also from looking at monster pits. Level feelings are a little bit flavour, but mostly utilitarian, and I was wondering what other uses could be made of these.
It would be very atmospheric if level feelings might occasionally say something like 'There is a chill in the air as your breath billows out in clouds...'. This would of course imply a cold-themed level – with frost giant handlers whipping on packs of ice hounds, white dragons coiled in corners, yetis wandering the corridors, and so on.
Some possible themes could be: cold levels, hot levels, levels filled with spiders or snakes, or army levels – with every room holding regiments and platoons of orcs and soldiers ready to march out against Morgoth's enemies on the surface. This could be linked to the presence of uniques, so (e.g.) Azog wouldn't just have an escort, but a whole level teeming with his legions.
I would imagine this would require some work, as there would have to be some tagging of monsters to indicate which would fit within each theme.
I would think there would have to be someplanning in the generation of levels so that the player would always enter in an uninhabited bit of the level, but it could be fun, couldn't it?
12.Customisable spell books
I suspect this one may go against most people's preferences for having gameplay that restricts a player and makes him/her think, but it does irritate me that later in the game I often have 5 or 6 slots filled with spell books, and yet need only 1 or 2 spells from each book. Playing as a ranger, I only use 2 spells from MfB, 1 from C&T, 1 or 2 from I&I, 1 from S&E, and small numbers from the higher books.
How about being able to buy exorbitantly expensive blank spell books, into which you can then have spells copied for even more money? This would be another shop – the Scribe – and I would suggest you would need to donate a copy of the relevant book to the Scribe each time you want a spell entering in the new book (so if you want several spells from high-end books, this would be very hard work and very expensive to achieve). The Scribe would probably then take over buying/selling ordinary spell books from the Magic Shop.
13. Improved teleporting and other spells
I feel there is room for an extra spell at high level of controlled teleporting, allowing you to choose where your character ended up (with some chance of it misfiring and being random, of course). This would be particularly useful if themed levels (above) were implemented, as the high numbers of monsters would make it particularly fraught to be teleporting at random.
To make it less than foolproof, it should as mentioned have some chance of misfiring, but also I came up with the idea that perhaps you need to place an enchanted object at the point where you want to teleport to – so you have to have cleared a location first, and also there is a risk a wandering monster might pick it up and get you into big trouble
Of course, I realised after I'd come up with it that this teleport anchor is similar to the portkey in Harry Potter, but I honestly hadn't been thinking of that at first!Warding spells – I often accumulate lots of items I want to take to the surface on my next return, but which hamper my movement round the current level and ability to pick up and examine new finds. How about a Ward of Protection spell that expands on Rune of Protection and protects items in the current room or in line of sight from being picked up by monsters/thieves (with a chance they can break through the protection)? This would also be beneficial to anyone using an anchored teleport method as above.
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