Fear!!!!

[will_asher]

DaJAngband's solution (not in the current release but will be in the next one) is that most tougher monsters get breathe fear instead of the scare spell, and they will breathe fear even if the player has fear resistance because it still does some damage and it has a small chance of bypassing resistance.

[Anne]

Just a random thought that occurred while reading this thread, but it would be realistic for the first appearance of certain monsters to cause fear in a hero, since the dangers are still unknown about it. And then once he's defeated the first one (or first several?), he becomes more confident - he knows more about that monster's attacks and what to do to defeat it, so maybe he'd be immune to fear from that type of monster from that point on. Maybe coding that would be more of a pain than it's worth anyway, just thought I'd mention it.

[takkaria]

I wrote a patch a few months ago that kind of fixed the fear in Angband (or at least I think I does); I changed it so that the chance of successfully attacking a monster (via ANY means - melee, ranged or attack spells) is based on how close you are to the nearest hostile monster. Eg. you would have a 5% chance of attacking if there was a wakened monster right beside you, and a 95% of attacking a monster if the nearest awake monster were, say, ten squares away. The chance reduces linearly between the two. This way, it keeps the current system where you can't really melee when you're afraid, and you can still use ranged/spell attacks from a distance, but fixes the incongruities of being able to shoot an arrow at point blank but not attack. I had to add another flag in spell.txt to say whether a given spell is an 'attack' spell or not.

It adds more tactical strategies to fighting; eg. a mage might phase door away to get a better (farther) shot on a monster. Also, it makes the really weak monsters on the level important again - if a high level monster casts fear on you from a distance and there happens to be a mouse right beside you, the mouse there will prevent you from attacking the high level monster. I tested this out on the first thousand feet or so and it seemed to work ok, though it might need some tweaking.

I think that having a (very small) chance to melee the monsters when feared is much more interesting than the flat out all-or-nothing it is now. (EDIT: changed 'not melee' to 'melee')

I'd be interested in seeing this patch, though I think perhaps it is a bit more complex than it needs to be. For now, I've made the following changes relating to fear: (these will be in the upcoming 3.1 beta)

- Being afraid gives you a to-hit penalty of 20, so ranged attacks become much harder, but also an AC bonus of 8
- Being afraid adds a 20% failure chance to spells/prayers, before the minimum fail rate kicks in, but spells that cure fear have had their fail rates reduced by 20% as well, so this balances out
- Potions that cure fear are cheaper still

Ideas for the future include:
- Not disallowing melee attacks as at present, but instead just having that huge to-hit penalty, and an appropriate warning when an attack fails ("You miss the x because you are too afraid!")
- Only increasing failure chances on combat spells

Thoughts?

[Mangojuice]

I'd be interested in seeing this patch, though I think perhaps it is a bit more complex than it needs to be. For now, I've made the following changes relating to fear: (these will be in the upcoming 3.1 beta)

- Being afraid gives you a to-hit penalty of 20, so ranged attacks become much harder, but also an AC bonus of 8
- Being afraid adds a 20% failure chance to spells/prayers, before the minimum fail rate kicks in, but spells that cure fear have had their fail rates reduced by 20% as well, so this balances out
- Potions that cure fear are cheaper still

Ideas for the future include:
- Not disallowing melee attacks as at present, but instead just having that huge to-hit penalty, and an appropriate warning when an attack fails ("You miss the x because you are too afraid!")
- Only increasing failure chances on combat spells

Thoughts?

I don't like the to-hit penalty idea: it doesn't make sense to me that it would effectively be harder to overcome fear against heavily armored opponents.

Instead, being terrified should be something you have to overcome before you attack, but once you do your attack should be at full quality. What about the following simple system:

On every turn, if the player wants to do anything other than move (or certain other move actions, like opening a door) they have to make some kind of saving throw; perhaps they have a 50% chance of being able to do anything other than move. If they fail the saving throw, they expend no energy but instead enter a state where the game remembers that you are afraid and failed your saving throw, and then no new saving throw is allowed; you automatically fail. The only action you can take is to move.

The current system is actually a little stupid. If you are too afraid to attack a monster, why would you waste a turn not attacking them? A real afraid person would simply not try to attack the monster... in effect the waste of a turn is a penalty on the player for bad roleplaying (they're not pretending to be scared).

Some kinds of actions should be maybe considered low-fear, like quaffing a potion; others may be high-fear (such as attacking a monster in melee). Or maybe all actions become high fear when a monster is next to you?

If it's desired for fear to affect your ability to do things other than fight, I think this is a good way to go.

[Elsairon]

Just a random thought that occurred while reading this thread, but it would be realistic for the first appearance of certain monsters to cause fear in a hero, since the dangers are still unknown about it. And then once he's defeated the first one (or first several?), he becomes more confident - he knows more about that monster's attacks and what to do to defeat it, so maybe he'd be immune to fear from that type of monster from that point on.

I like this idea. Uniques would need handling in a different manner ( since they each only die once, the player would always be afraid ).

A way around this would be resist fear effects that could wear off after n turns (already in place?).

[d_m]

Just a random thought that occurred while reading this thread, but it would be realistic for the first appearance of certain monsters to cause fear in a hero, since the dangers are still unknown about it. And then once he's defeated the first one (or first several?), he becomes more confident - he knows more about that monster's attacks and what to do to defeat it, so maybe he'd be immune to fear from that type of monster from that point on. Maybe coding that would be more of a pain than it's worth anyway, just thought I'd mention it.

This seems OK as long as there was also some depth check. If I dive to dungeon-level 20 and then randomly encounter a white centipede for the first time, I'm not sure fear would be appropriate.

Maybe it could be such that encountering out-of-depth monsters (e.g. monsters who are from a much lower dungeon level) have a % chance to generate a fear effect?

[Big Al]

I'd be interested in seeing this patch, though I think perhaps it is a bit more complex than it needs to be.

I reformatted my hard drive several months ago and I'm pretty sure that it got lost somewhere along the way. I'm sure it would only take half a hour or so to piece together again from what I can remember from a year ago.

Your solution works too probably; I'll have to play around with it for a while to see how it plays out though. I don't really like the idea of making *all* spells harder to cast though: things like teleporting away or healing yourself should be not me penalized IMHO. I think that in my patch I added another field in spell.txt that determines if a spell is offensive or not. I like idea of a mage teleporting away at the last moment from a narrative viewpoint.

Edit: I like Anne's idea (in theory at least) too, but not sure how it would actually play out. Right now, pretty much the only way to get afraid is my magical means; but I like the idea of a huge ancient dragon towering over and terrifying you. Narratively, I like the of monsters that are out of depth enough terrifying you.

[Big Al]

And another thought: now melee, ranged weapons and spells are penalized. What about wands? If we're going to take away spell casting, then should all magic go? A penalty to wand usage might be realistic in keeping with the theme of the rest of these changes, but is that too much?

In playing a bit of the new version this afternoon, I found myself feared and trapped in a corridor with no escape. The situation looked hopeless until I remembered the (otherwise often useless) wand of magic missiles I had picked up and blasted through with that. It was... more fun than normal play.

Also, my old patch is 90% rewritten, but I need sleep; I'll post it in the morning I hope. It was pretty straight forward so far.