Making V play more like Sil

[fizzix]

This will probably sound off, but IMO unavoidable death by monster mob is better than avoidable death by overconfidence bred of boredom. Mind, neither is in any way desirable. But I think there's a lot more to gain than to lose by having denser levels.

Deaths from overconfidence are usually resolved by diving quicker. If you're dying from overconfidence due to boredom you are not diving quick enough. If you require the game to dictate the level at which you progress, then there are some options. You can either play ironman or a variant that forces you to dive deeper. Sil would be such a variant, so would Halls of Mist.

You often hear people say, "I'm sick of scumming for gear, I'm going to stop playing this character." When really they should say, "I'm sick of scumming for gear, I'm going to go fight Morgoth whether I win or lose."

[Oramin]

I'm not switching over to 3.4.0 just yet so my comments are on 3.3.2

If people want a more challenging game, then they're welcome to dive faster even to the point of suicidal recklessness.

If people are worried about Mages played by newbies having problems starting out, why discuss making the game harder? And, no, I think people should die because of their carelessness and not because programmers greatly increase the frequency of random no-win scenarios.

Of my recent characters, I played a High Elf Ranger (died at level 35, IIRC, see the thread), a Dwarf Priest (winner), a Gnome Mage (died on level 1 to a Yellow Mold), a Gnome Mage (winner), and a Half-Troll Warrior (l48 down on l60 of the dungeon).

The Spellcasters and Ranger weren't the hard ones to play - the H-T Warrior is; at least at the middle game. Why? Mostly because of the limited storage space in the house. I had to play the spellcasting classes to figure out what I would end up needing from accessories (i.e. Rods) to have the information to survive lower levels.

Instead of making Angband more like a variant, feel free to go play the variant. Otherwise you might as well make the dungeon one way all the way down, remove Recall, and have us get the Amulet of Yendor before we can go back up.

[Therem Harth]

Hey, easy, I've already got one variant going!

[Oramin]

Hey, easy, I've already got one variant going!

*chuckle*

Oh, and don't forget about having us get the Potion of Cure Dianthoritis for our daughters...

[Antoine]

That would suck!

OK, well, how about just making the mage class a bit less puny at low CLs and leave it at that?

[Timo Pietilä]

I have opined before that the low levels of V are rather boring.

Don't agree, low levels are the only place which is interesting. As a place.

(or do you mean "low levels" as shallow level as in smaller number level, and not deep level?)

Problem I see is that game actually divides to two phases

1. you develop your char
2. you develop your char equipment

Problem with first stage is that dungeon itself is rather boring, you just kill things and try not to get killed in the process

Problem at second stage is that boring parts of the first stage are gone and dungeon itself is now interesting, but you don't see your char abilities developing anymore so game is collecting items from dungeon and drops. Clarification: you might get point or two at CON which allows you to use different gear to keep your maxed CON maxed, but what you see is still your gear changing, not your char even when change originates at the change in char. IOW you gain "maxed char" a lot faster than you actually max your char. After that it is just change in gear and get level every now and then for the rest of the game.

What we need is vaults and stuff appear earlier, and maybe some themed levels for first stage (a mid-game goals maybe), and for second stage character development needs to be slowed down or maybe make it a "get one point here and lose it there" -kind of system where your char can change indefinitely independent of your gear. Make skills more important and more dependent to level and class than stats.

While stats are important they should not be the main factor, and especially CON should lose some importance in gaining HP so that it would not be so critical to get max or near-max CON for deeper level survival, and stealth as skill that develops with the level (different rates with different classes), and less with the gear you have.

For stealth: Low level warrior would be noisy, high level very stealthy, ranger maxes out at approx same as warrior, but starts with more stealth, rogue starts with high stealth and keeps highest stealth entire game (but difference between warrior and rogue should be smaller at the high level than it is at low level), mage, priest and paladin starts with higher stealth than warrior but don't get much better even at high levels.

- Make monster spawning occur around stairs.

This I like. Somewhere close to stairs, preferably at downstairs so that when you start to wander to groups of monsters that are already awake you can assume that you are near stairs. This OTOH could lead to difficulty to actually reaching the stairs which can lead to boredom.

[half]

There are a couple major changes that I think are important to get a Sil style gameplay.

Very perceptive comments fizzix -- thanks.

Regarding making some/all monsters more powerful if you linger, we did indeed try this in early versions of Sil and had difficulty getting it to work well. There were two issues:

1) Letting the player know what was going on so they could actually be nudged in the right direction. Without due explanation, a natural response is to see things getting harder and try to slow down you descent.

2) Making sure it is balanced such that it really is best to speed up your descent. It is easy to come up with a scheme such as "generate monsters as if they were one level deeper if you are too shallow" which can actually encourage going slower instead of faster.

I think these could both be overcome, but we decided to just go for a more direct route, forcing the player to encounter both more difficult monsters and better treasure.

[half]

Thanks for the in depth comments Derakon.

Sil is its own variant, and if you want to play it, you should play it; you shouldn't try to turn V into Sil.

The main thing to consider with Vanilla is that it is the entry point for players new to Angband and its derivatives. In other words, Vanilla gets all the newbies.

I think there is actually a tension between these statements. If there were just an unordered collection of variants, then it would gain nothing to 'turn one into another', and you would lose one. However, since one is blessed with the status of being the main game and having the famous name, it can matter. Of course no-one is talking about wholesale replacing V with Sil, just different degrees to which one could be inspired to copy features or copy pacing or the like, but this point is still relevant.

In creating Sil, I rewrote Angband how I would have liked it to have always been. I acted as if I were an Angband Developer with a free hand. The main goal was to produce the game I wanted to play, and let others play it too. However, I also hoped that some/many of the new developments would find their way into Angband if people liked them. It would be a bit tragic actually for me to have actively *stopped* Angband developing in the direction I wanted because now people say 'oh if you like that kind of thing, just play Sil'.

I should also stress that there is a *lot* of gap between Angband and Sil. Angband could have 2 years of constant Dev-time trying to make it as Sil-like as possible and still not get that close. It took me many more years than that to make all the changes. In all, I don't think the idea of not pushing V in the direction of one of the variants because you could just play that variant really works.

Personally, my take on this is that Angband proper should have a tutorial mode.

Yes, I think this is part of any good solution to this problem. Check out the Sil tutorial to get an idea of what can be done relatively easily (should only take 20 minutes including installing it, and you'll then know quite a bit more about Sil too). It basically ticks all the boxes you mention (except it starts with a ready made character rather than creating one, but this is less of an issue in Sil as it tells you how to increase Skills and Abilities during the tutorial).

[half]

Sil does a lot of things differently, so it can be difficult to isolate which things create this feeling.

Lack of teleportation is another big thing. More generally, in Sil it is difficult to escape or otherwise reset the situation, so gameplay doesn't revolve around safely trying to fight things, then safely resetting if things go bad. Instead, you need to manage the tactical situation around you as it develops. Things like getting more value from potions of Quickness and Constitution if you quaff them earlier in a fight are a good example. V has a lot less of this evolving tactical situation due to so many resets. Probably the times that V has these features are around vaults or uniques where the player really doesn't want to reset things.

[Timo Pietilä]

Sil is its own variant, and if you want to play it, you should play it; you shouldn't try to turn V into Sil.

The main thing to consider with Vanilla is that it is the entry point for players new to Angband and its derivatives. In other words, Vanilla gets all the newbies.

I think there is actually a tension between these statements. If there were just an unordered collection of variants, then it would gain nothing to 'turn one into another', and you would lose one.

I don't think there is tension between the two comments. I don't even see how those two comments are in any way related.

I think Sil is not Angband, hardly even a relative to Angband, and as such Angband should not move towards Sil gameplay at any way. It can take few features from it, just as it could take some features from Sangband and NPP. But not go toward any of them.

I also think that vanilla gets most of the new players. As simple as that. And because angband gets new players it should stay "opinion free" game, IE not force player to play in any set way like Sil does. There are only two goals in angband: kill Sauron, then kill Morgoth. How you get to those goals is up to you, game doesn't try to force you to do anything.

Sil has one EXTREMELY ugly feature which is main reason I don't play it: it tries to force people play at certain speed. I don't like that at all. IMO that's about the worst thing you can do in Angband-like game. It turns Sil into Nethack with angband-like graphics. Sil is also just a very different game. period. This means that angband should never ever "try to go toward" it. Getting few features, fine, but you could as well get features from Monopoly as you could from Sil.

If Angband at some day turns to Sil-derivate I would stop playing for good (those versions at least). It would not be angband anymore, just some variant while real angband would stay without maintainer (or team of maintainers, as it is now).

[Scatha]

It can take few features from it, just as it could take some features from Sangband and NPP. But not go toward any of them.

I'm afraid I'm not sure what that means.

Sil has one EXTREMELY ugly feature which is main reason I don't play it: it tries to force people play at certain speed.

While I think this rule has an important role (to remove the awkward tension between fun play and 'good' play), it doesn't actually impact the gameplay all that much, and that's particularly true of the early game. So I don't think it's massively relevant to the discussion here. (That said, fizzix had some good analysis of how it lets us balance the challenge level of the deeper dungeon.)

[half]

I think Sil is not Angband,

I agree with this. I think it is roughly to Angband as Angband is to Moria. That is a descendent with enough changes to make it warrant a different name.

And because angband gets new players it should stay "opinion free" game, IE not force player to play in any set way like Sil does. There are only two goals in angband: kill Sauron, then kill Morgoth. How you get to those goals is up to you, game doesn't try to force you to do anything.

I think this is mistaken. Angband is just as 'opinionated' as Sil, at least as far as I can make sense of that term. It forces you to play in various particular ways, such as 'classes'. Also, Sil has even fewer constraints. You don't even need to kill Morgoth or Sauron. You are of course alluding to the forced descent, but this is just one constraint and both games have many others.

IMO that's about the worst thing you can do in Angband-like game. It turns Sil into Nethack with angband-like graphics.

This is just silly. It is obviously not a contender for "the worst thing you can do", and Sil is obviously not Nethack. Try going onto a Nethack forum and saying that it is!

I'm quite happy to talk about pros and cons of the forced descent method or other methods of pacing, but not to just hear silly exaggerations that insult the developers and don't add value to the forum (in fact, they make it worse by decreasing the signal to noise ratio and distracting attention from careful discussion of mechanics).

I'm actually curious as to whether you have tried Sil, and it so, for how long. The forced descent is actually pretty slow and my guess is that it would have almost no effect on you as you would naturally descend faster than it, at least once you were a bit experienced with Sil.

[debo]

I also think that vanilla gets most of the new players. As simple as that. And because angband gets new players it should stay "opinion free" game, IE not force player to play in any set way like Sil does. There are only two goals in angband: kill Sauron, then kill Morgoth. How you get to those goals is up to you, game doesn't try to force you to do anything.

I also think this is one of the plusses of Angband. It's more "free-world" than most other roguelikes. My complaint is that most of the things you can do with that freedom are incredibly boring. I do have a very short attention span though, so I realize I'm not normal in this regard.

I was also horribly addicted to Angband until I had my first win. So, the game is doing something right IMO

Sil has one EXTREMELY ugly feature which is main reason I don't play it: it tries to force people play at certain speed. I don't like that at all. IMO that's about the worst thing you can do in Angband-like game. It turns Sil into Nethack with angband-like graphics.

This was a reasonable argument until that very last statement.

The timer in Sil is largely innocuous. Because of the XP scaling and the "themes" around the sorts of monsters and equipment you find at each level, there's really no point in running a level more than once or twice. You're not going to get any stronger, and since everything in Sil is dangerous, the risk/reward ratio isn't really to your benefit.

Most of the time I feel that the timer is there just to remind you of that fact. Some builds (e.g. smiths) suffer from the timer a bit, but they're the same builds who would be able to exploit stairscumming / floating around 900' to make an invincible setup.

[Timo Pietilä]

I'm actually curious as to whether you have tried Sil, and it so, for how long. The forced descent is actually pretty slow and my guess is that it would have almost no effect on you as you would naturally descend faster than it, at least once you were a bit experienced with Sil.

I don't descend all of time. I actually visit early levels every now and then just for fun. I might even stay 10000 turns to town in order to kill townsfolk. The fact that I can dive fast doesn't mean that I want to dive fast. I sometimes play really really long games and can use 100000 turns on single level (if that is what it needs to get something I want from that level).

Anyway, my point was that angband should stay angband, and not try to go to any other direction. Moving angband toward sil is stupid, IMO, but who cares, I don't play any angband variant much anymore, angband itself has stagnated badly at the half-done stage (I guess lack of actual maintainer has that effect) and I get bored pretty quickly in all of the variants. Sangband I think was the variant I could stay longest.

[tungtn]

Sil has one EXTREMELY ugly feature which is main reason I don't play it: it tries to force people play at certain speed. I don't like that at all. IMO that's about the worst thing you can do in Angband-like game. It turns Sil into Nethack with angband-like graphics.

This was a reasonable argument until that very last statement.

The statement is incorrect anyway: NetHack has no such timer or pressure to move forward or play at a certain pace.