RFE Inspection Messages for +Stat Items

[Nick]

Well, that's quite a long list, and I'm sure I've missed some important changes (feel free to suggest where I've gone wrong), but hopefully it's a useful starting point for people thinking about what would be good or bad to borrow from Sil.

That's a great summary, thanks. I'm planning some similar things and some very different things for Beleriand - I'll probably post on the state of my thinking some time soon.

I have played Sil a little; I guess my main feeling is that I don't have the time/thinking space to do justice to learning Sil properly at this point.

[fizzix]

Thanks Scatha! That's a useful post.

As Derakon says, I don't think Angband will ever force player descent. However, what we will do is ensure that a forced descent ironman game is always viable for the people who want that challenge. Some people like a slow game that let's them remain at a depth for as long as they want, and I'd be loath to turn that player off from Angband.

As far as decreased XP per type of monster. V does have decreasing XP benefit as your level goes up, which sort of has the same effect. Sil has a very different approach to levels and XP so I'm not sure how much of a comparison is useful here. There are other ways to bring players out of their comfort zones. The most common is to limit the monsters with permanent or semi-permanent levels. Another approach touches on the monster genocide idea, namely a player should be able to kill off all monsters of a certain type. The approach here is the converse of that. Hell Wyrms are lucrative so you limit their number.

I think the beginning of Angband has a decent ramp to difficulty. Perhaps the reason players here don't think it's difficult is because they are not beginners. I remember dying on dlevels 1 and 2 when I started. I don't actually think early dungeon ease is a huge problem (3.4 is harder than 3.3, I'm not sure where v4 falls.)

Lastly on escapes. Right now Vanilla needs escapes because the game presents too many situations that are downright unhandleable. Arrive in a dungeon in a room of timehounds? Maeglin summons Ungoliant and the Tarrasque? Arrive near a graveyard? All of these situations require escapes. I'm personally of the opinion that we need to reduce/remove these situations. Make pits/graveyards smaller. Make time/gravity hounds less dangerous and have smaller pack size. Allow the player to weaken summons by killing monsters. I'm not a fan of spawning monsters either. I think you should be able to clear out a dungeon level without having monsters constantly arriving on it. But these are my own opinions and they engender much disagreement. In summary, I would like us to be in a position where we can start limiting escapes, but we need to change the essential flow of the late game dungeon to implement that.

[Scatha]

(I edited my previous post to mention game length, which is a significant departure of Sil from V I'd managed to forget.)

At this point, I think the only convincing reasons we still have multiple "use" keys are to a) reduce the odds of accidentally using the wrong item, and b) enable more keymaps (since you can do both @m1 to bind your spellbook, and @z1 to bind a rod, for example). If we had a better keymap system that let you say e.g. "Cast a spell from Magic for Beginners, whatever slot it's in", then we'd be a lot closer to being able to do away with all of the varied use keys.

Otherwise, what other commands do you think we could remove from Angband?

This was less a specific proposal than a suggestion that it's worth keeping in mind; the complexity of the command set is often cited as a reason people don't get into roguelikes.

Sil is certainly not the only recent roguelike to make some effort to make the commands more accessible, but since its changes were from an Angband-like system, they might be relevant here:
- Added a unified (u)se command and promoted this to new players. The old, specific use commands almost all still exist.
- Similarly added a unified method for terrain interaction.

Vanilla needs to have some room for players to experiment with the game mechanics, I think. But there's no need for this to be more than one or two levels' worth of the dungeon. Right now we have a fairly smooth difficulty ramp from level 1 through level 20; if we cliff-faced that at level 3, say, then the game would get "interesting" much more quickly.

Fair point about giving people room (Sil essentially takes the approach that it's okay for people to die a lot near the start while they're learning, but in some ways that's unnecessarily cruel), and interesting idea. The problem I see with cliff-facing like that is that it's not transparent to the player; why should they expect level 3 to be so much tougher? And if it is, why shouldn't level 4 be tougher too? This is avoidable if you can somehow label it as a different part of the dungeon.

Edit: Perhaps it's okay to do this to players anyway, even if a little unexpected. It's early enough in the game that it's easily learned, and it is natural in some ways.

v4's combat system makes half the classes, more or less, rely on attack spam. But we could probably compress this to "You hit the Foo 4 out of 6 times" or something.

Sounds to me like that would be an improvement. (Sil manages something similar to v4 combat but has the light weapon users achieve parity through criticals rather than extra attacks.)

Monster attacks usually could be handled similarly, though there are a few monsters who have varied effects on their attacks (e.g. hit to hurt, touch to drain charges, and bite to drain experience).

We had a similar issue in Sil (but no monster had more than two attacks). Our solution was to make them attack just once each round, but randomise which attack they used. I don't know whether that would be of use here.

One big way that Angband and similar games get interesting is by getting you in over your head. You know that whole "ignorance breeds fear" thing? Well, when you don't know if you can handle a challenge, you become afraid -- and being frightened, in a game, is interesting!

I agree with your whole digression on danger and escapes, but wanted to highlight this section as I think it's particularly insightful. Of course frequent and easy escapes can only go if the deadly situations that require them are also much rarer. (I don't know the history here. I'd assumed that escapes were easy and then more deadly situations were added to keep the game interesting, because it was harder to imagine it flowing in the other direction, but perhaps they've both always been around.)

Generally I don't see why we should actively prevent players from grinding if that's what they want to do.

I certainly agree that there is a space for games which allow grinding (and I think Angband should probably be one of them), but let me explain why you might not want to:

Allowing grinding in some sense makes the game a continuous "choose your own difficulty level" as you go. This can be great for people pottering around having fun with their character. But it makes the game less of a challenge to be beaten. At least personally, something I enjoy is trying to optimise my play. This runs into problems if "optimal" play is to grind a lot, which I don't enjoy.

Perhaps that's something I should have mentioned in my list:
- Ensure optimal play is interesting.

You can have a challenge like "win the game in as few turns as possible", but this has a couple of problems:
- Without external reference (e.g. the ladder) or playing a lot of times you have no yardstick to measure yourself against.
- It's terrible as a goal when you're learning the game and have no idea what the late game is like.

The forced descent is a way of saying: "You don't have to choose your difficulty level, we've done that for you." This may annoy some players, but it's great for those enjoy meeting and overcoming external challenges. It also helps us from a game balance point of view to try to construct situations which stay dangerous for a majority of characters through the game while not being unfair on others.

Interestingly, Angband has an option which prevents grinding: Ironman. Is playing Ironman a sensible way to learn the game? I'm not sure. There's a lot of weight in default settings; if you thought that no grinding was the best way to play then making Ironman the default with an option not to would significantly change the perspective of new players to the game, while doing very little to old players who know how they prefer to approach the game.

As far as decreased XP per type of monster. V does have decreasing XP benefit as your level goes up, which sort of has the same effect. Sil has a very different approach to levels and XP so I'm not sure how much of a comparison is useful here.

What kind of decay function does V use? I spent a while thinking about these approaches some time ago. You can use decay functions to get the effect that when you've reached a certain level the current level gives you nothing. This is a similar, but not quite the same as Sil, which actively rewards seeking out new foes, and might induce you to try to fight one of a certain type of nasty enemy for the bonus for the first kill rather than run away every time you see them.

Of course you're right that Sil's experience system as a whole is quite different, but I think this part translates over quite easily, freely of the other aspects.

[Magnate]

What kind of decay function does V use? I spent a while thinking about these approaches some time ago. You can use decay functions to get the effect that when you've reached a certain level the current level gives you nothing. This is a similar, but not quite the same as Sil, which actively rewards seeking out new foes, and might induce you to try to fight one of a certain type of nasty enemy for the bonus for the first kill rather than run away every time you see them.

V uses a very simple system: the XP for each monster is divided by clev. So when you hit cl2 everything is worth half as much. When you go from cl10 to 11 everything is worth about 10% less. Later on in the game it's not really noticeable.

I agree that there is considerable scope for improvement in V here. The problem is, every time I think about reforming xp I end up re-creating Sangband.

[Scatha]

V uses a very simple system: the XP for each monster is divided by clev. So when you hit cl2 everything is worth half as much. When you go from cl10 to 11 everything is worth about 10% less. Later on in the game it's not really noticeable.

I agree that there is considerable scope for improvement in V here. The problem is, every time I think about reforming xp I end up re-creating Sangband.

Ah, I'm afraid to have to point out that this system doesn't really achieve anything. Or rather, it's equivalent to just multiplying the experience gap between level n and level n+1 by n (modulo some boundary conditions depending on exactly what happens when a single kill gives you a lot of experience and takes you over a boundary). At least to me it would then feel more elegant and transparent to just have experience from a monster unchanged with level and rescale the level boundaries (I think this can work fine). Or perhaps to push all of the scaling to this decay so the level scale can be linear (e.g. 0-999 = level 1, 1000 - 1,999 = level 2, etc.).

Apart from the Sil mechanic, one example of a system which has a genuinely different kind of effect would be:

If at character level n you kill a monster of level m < n, then the experience gained is divided by some increasing function of (n-m) (e.g. (10/9)^(n-m)). If you kill a monster of equal or greater level you get the usual amount of experience.

The effect of this would be that you are fairly rewarded for killing monsters of equal or greater level to you (and as deeper monsters will tend to be worth more experience, particularly rewarded for defeating these, as per the current system), but when you get to a certain point the experience for shallow monsters really dries up.

[fizzix]

Ah, I'm afraid to have to point out that this system doesn't really achieve anything. Or rather, it's equivalent to just multiplying the experience gap between level n and level n+1 by n
...
The effect of this would be that you are fairly rewarded for killing monsters of equal or greater level to you (and as deeper monsters will tend to be worth more experience, particularly rewarded for defeating these, as per the current system), but when you get to a certain point the experience for shallow monsters really dries up.

I'm confused. The current system which you state does nothing, pretty much does exactly what you describe in the last paragraph. If you kill 10 wolves at dlevel 8, you are likely to gain one or two levels. If you kill 10 wolves at dlevel 20, you won't really gain any experience of note.

There are two issues with the experience discounting, and they both have to do with the function rather than the methodology. 1) The player can only get up to level 50 while the monsters can go up to level 100. This means that there's never any discounting for monsters greater than level 50. (ok, because most monsters this deep are uniques or very dangerous anyway.) 2) As monsters go up in level the relative discount gets less. (ok because the spacing between level increases goes up also which is what determines the relative discount deeper in the dungeon.) I haven't noticed that the XP system in Vanilla is a major problem. Both of the biggest issues are actually fine for gameplay. That's not to say that the Sil system isn't good also, it almost certainly is. I just don't think Vanilla is broken in this regard. In fact, the progression of player levels seems to be one of the best balanced mechanics right now.

[Nick]

I'm confused. The current system which you state does nothing, pretty much does exactly what you describe in the last paragraph. If you kill 10 wolves at dlevel 8, you are likely to gain one or two levels. If you kill 10 wolves at dlevel 20, you won't really gain any experience of note.

IIUC the point is that you could get the same effect by keeping XP constant and adjusting the amount of XP needed for each character level.

[PowerWyrm]

IIUC the point is that you could get the same effect by keeping XP constant and adjusting the amount of XP needed for each character level.

The experience increases are already exponential... doing this would require scoring billions of experience points at level 50 no?

[wobbly]

IIUC the point is that you could get the same effect by keeping XP constant and adjusting the amount of XP needed for each character level.

With the exception that being 1 XP point below level 2 doubles the XP for a kill, if I'm reading the mechanics right.

[Derakon]

Sil is certainly not the only recent roguelike to make some effort to make the commands more accessible, but since its changes were from an Angband-like system, they might be relevant here:
- Added a unified (u)se command and promoted this to new players. The old, specific use commands almost all still exist.
- Similarly added a unified method for terrain interaction.

Oddly enough Vanilla already has an "interact with terrain" command (ctrl + direction) that picks the most sensible interaction depending on the terrain type. I think the only remotely common situation in which this produces undesirable results is jammed doors, where you'd rather try to tunnel through or bash down the door than fruitlessly attempt to open it over and over again.

The way I think I'm going to handle item usage in Pyrel is to make items discoverable via the inventory screen. Players are likely to stumble across the inventory command on their own. It will allow users to select items using the arrow keys and the enter key -- an intuitive interface. When an item is selected, you're given a list of commands you can perform with it, e.g.

12 Potions of Cure Light Wounds. Would you like to:
(u)se (quaff)
(q)uaff
(I)nspect
(v)olley (throw)
(d)rop
(k)ill (squelch)

Fair point about giving people room (Sil essentially takes the approach that it's okay for people to die a lot near the start while they're learning, but in some ways that's unnecessarily cruel), and interesting idea. The problem I see with cliff-facing like that is that it's not transparent to the player; why should they expect level 3 to be so much tougher? And if it is, why shouldn't level 4 be tougher too? This is avoidable if you can somehow label it as a different part of the dungeon.

One possible way to do this would be to have townspeople wandering around the first two dungeon levels. Having them vanish from the third level on would send a message that things are no longer as safe.

We had a similar issue in Sil (but no monster had more than two attacks). Our solution was to make them attack just once each round, but randomise which attack they used. I don't know whether that would be of use here.

I don't think so. For example, Sauron's drain-charges ability becomes much less worrisome if he only has a (chance to hit) * (.25)% chance of using it on any given round. Not to mention we'd have to rescale damage values to keep the player taking the right amount of damage each turn.

(I don't know the history here. I'd assumed that escapes were easy and then more deadly situations were added to keep the game interesting, because it was harder to imagine it flowing in the other direction, but perhaps they've both always been around.)

I believe what's going on here is mostly that while escapes were plentiful, people were also much more likely to not use them. Part of that was ignorance (we really had no idea what "optimal" play looked like), and part of it was down to the lack of preserve mode, since players were typically not willing to abandon special levels. Of course that latter excuse goes out the window as soon as the preserve option was added (sometime shortly after Ben took over, IIRC), leaving us with just the former.

Angband's always been pretty deadly. I don't think that's changed much -- the only major make-it-more-deadly changes that come to mind are the addition of Julian's new monsters, which include a bunch of high-powered uniques; the removal of confusion resistance from chaos resistance (which nerfed Thorin, a very common equip), and the more recent changes.

I certainly agree that there is a space for games which allow grinding (and I think Angband should probably be one of them), but let me explain why you might not want to:

Allowing grinding in some sense makes the game a continuous "choose your own difficulty level" as you go. This can be great for people pottering around having fun with their character. But it makes the game less of a challenge to be beaten. At least personally, something I enjoy is trying to optimise my play. This runs into problems if "optimal" play is to grind a lot, which I don't enjoy.

One of the neat things about Angband is how limited grinding is. It can be helpful in the early game, when character level has a big impact on your ability to kill things. But it rapidly becomes much less useful than equipment and stats. So again I tend to think of this as catering to new players who want a gentler introduction to the game.

Of course, you can also grind for equipment and stats. Ideally you should never need to grind for the former, and the latter should happen fairly organically as you play. But people used to hang out at 1650' until they maxed their stats out. *shrug*

Perhaps that's something I should have mentioned in my list:
- Ensure optimal play is interesting.

You can have a challenge like "win the game in as few turns as possible", but this has a couple of problems:
- Without external reference (e.g. the ladder) or playing a lot of times you have no yardstick to measure yourself against.
- It's terrible as a goal when you're learning the game and have no idea what the late game is like.

The forced descent is a way of saying: "You don't have to choose your difficulty level, we've done that for you." This may annoy some players, but it's great for those enjoy meeting and overcoming external challenges. It also helps us from a game balance point of view to try to construct situations which stay dangerous for a majority of characters through the game while not being unfair on others.

There's definitely something to be said for removing options, both for making the game easier to design, and for making the remaining options more interesting to optimize from the player's perspective.

Interestingly, Angband has an option which prevents grinding: Ironman. Is playing Ironman a sensible way to learn the game? I'm not sure. There's a lot of weight in default settings; if you thought that no grinding was the best way to play then making Ironman the default with an option not to would significantly change the perspective of new players to the game, while doing very little to old players who know how they prefer to approach the game.

Back in the day, the few gameplay options we had were presented to the user as yes/no questions during character creation. IIRC this was mostly just limited to maximize and preserve mode. But I think it'd be a good idea to present more of the significant gameplay options to the player during character creation so they're more willing to experiment with them. Right now birth options are basically never going to be found unless you read the docs or the forums, and our options interface does a bad job of explaining what all the options do and why you might want to use them.

That said, I doubt we'd be able to swing making Ironman the default option, for the same reason that we wouldn't be able to remove the town from the game outright.

[ekolis]

12 Potions of Cure Light Wounds. Would you like to:
(u)se (quaff)
(q)uaff
(I)nspect
(v)olley (throw)
(d)rop
(k)ill (squelch)

So THAT explains why the throw command is "v"!

[fizzix]

So THAT explains why the throw command is "v"!

heh, and here I thought it was "impart (v)elocity to"

[Magnate]

With the exception that being 1 XP point below level 2 doubles the XP for a kill, if I'm reading the mechanics right.

Indeed. But Scatha is right - this system does nothing meaningful to prevent grinding, because you get the same xp for the millionth orc killed at level X as for the first orc killed at level X. The Sil system, IIUC, reduces the xp for each successive monster killed of the same type.

[ekolis]

heh, and here I thought it was "impart (v)elocity to"

You are reminded that the momentum of objects is preserved as they pass through a portal. In layman's terms, "speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out"!

Sorry, couldn't resist!

[Nick]

heh, and here I thought it was "impart (v)elocity to"

I've always thought 'v' was reasonable without tracking down why - I now, weirdly, realise it's because it sounds like the first letter of 'werfen'. Sometimes I wonder about myself.