[3.5-dev] Gorged status missing?

[Derakon]

Could we just have a wand/spell of Mage Lock that magically jams the door? Saves us the special item type and command, but gives the same tactical benefit.

[Magnate]

I don't disagree with you, but I think adding stuff in and taking it out are not mere opposites, they are completely different considerations. A lot of the creative flavour you describe isn't in the game because nobody ever added it - rogues stealing, mages scribing spells, ventriloquism etc. None of that's been taken away - it was never there.

Stuff that's been taken away is stuff that's been deemed to be insufficient in the balance of flavour vs gameplay. The current/recent devteam have mainly been biased towards gameplay, but there are signs of the pendulum swinging back: takkaria acknowledged recently on IRC that it may have been a mistake to remove some of the junky/flavourful food items (they may even be back in master).

FWIW I don't think a mage lock spell offers quite the same tactical depth as a whole range of different locks and keys/picks/etc. But then again nobody's going to spend an inventory slot on door opening gear (and there's already wands and rods that do it). So I freely admit that this is variant territory.

[Derakon]

Spacebux, in response to your last post: many of these things are not implemented because nobody ever had the combination of motivation and skill needed to implement them, not because they're inherently bad ideas. Others were not implemented because they interfered with what people thought Vanilla Angband "ought" to be -- there's a strong movement in the community to keep Vanilla "pure" which interferes with the creative options of the developers, let alone the players!

Other oddities are for game balance and/or legacy purposes. The rogue is the combat/spellcaster hybrid for arcane magic, analogous to the paladin. Why did it shake out this way? You'd have to ask the original developers of Moria that.

Why can't mages cast all the spells in their spellbooks? The only examples of this I can remember are Detect Objects, which is only available to rogues, and Cure Light Wounds, which is only available to rangers. Both of these spells are extraordinarily powerful; Detect Objects lets you massively streamline your dungeon exploration, and Cure Light Wounds lets you very quickly recover from fights even in the late game. Mages used to have access to CLW but it was deemed too powerful, so it was limited to rangers only (i.e. the worst of the three arcane casters).

Splitting things out so that the three classes would be more distinct would mean having three sets of spellbooks that would share a massive amount of spells between them and would each only be useful to a single class. That's a lot of junk for everyone else to have to sort through.

Some kind of build-your-own-spellbook system, as you describe, would potentially ameliorate the problem, but doesn't exist because it's a lot more complicated to implement than hardcoded spellbooks. Plus it would have massive, massive ramifications on game balance.

I'm not trying to say that your ideas are bad, just that there's reasons for why Angband is the way it is. Those reasons aren't always good reasons, but it's not like there's some evil force out there trying to make Angband worse.

[Spacebux]

I don't disagree with you, but I think adding stuff in and taking it out are not mere opposites, they are completely different considerations. A lot of the creative flavour you describe isn't in the game because nobody ever added it - rogues stealing, mages scribing spells, ventriloquism etc. None of that's been taken away - it was never there.

Yet, just because something wasn't in the code does not mean it does not belong in the game.


Adding in a spell-scroll system for mages would require a huge amount of re-write of the whole spell code. I know that much. I'm not advocating we start in on that straight-away, but I'm betting the spell code structure needs a good re-write anyway. In my opinion, mages, rangers, and rogues are too similar to each other, class-wise. They really need more differentiation. Re-writing the spell code so that each class has its own set of spells / skills is (in my mind) the best way to do that.

The point I am trying to make is to work at increasing the options for the players ought to be given as much consideration as the current trend to simplify, ... the minimalist theory. No one wants code/feature creep, but the minimalist approach is starting to hit some nerves with me.

E.g., I fiddled with the code a while ago, put all the spells back in the mage books for mages. Didn't impact the overall play of the game at-all (in my trials) to let mages cook up their weapons and armor with enchantment. It had very little impact in the game, actually.


No, I'm all for adding creativity to the game. I think its been whittled away so much over the past revisions, that its getting to a point of monotony. I'm not a master coder by any means, but if I can modify the code to reduce the mundane, I will.

[Nick]

Splitting things out so that the three classes would be more distinct would mean having three sets of spellbooks that would share a massive amount of spells between them and would each only be useful to a single class. That's a lot of junk for everyone else to have to sort through.

O/FA have the same spellbooks, but different contents depending on which class you're playing. This would be quite easy to introduce to Vanilla. Maybe I should write a patch to do that, and at the same time introduce Druids. Or Necromancers. We could make it a birth option.

@Spacebux - you should play Oangband. Or possibly watch for an announcement soon about FAangband...

[Spacebux]

@Spacebux - you should play Oangband. Or possibly watch for an announcement soon about FAangband...

Nick - I did. Loved it. Don't know how you conceptually get a forest in the dungeon, or caverns large enough to have things fly around in 'em, but hey, I thought it was a great side-shoot with a lot of note-worthy items that Vanilla could implement or imitate.

I also thought parts of it were a bit too hard, especially on the inexperienced players, the early levels were a slaughter-house for the ill-prepared (like me). Oangband is also probably too complicated for any but the truly dedicated Angband player to get into. Understanding all the players skills and secondary skills and how they all work takes some fortitude. But, I was happy to see all the work someone did to implement all that code to give players quite a bit of control over their characters.

I don't play Oangband normally, I tend to stick to the current flavo(u)r of Vanilla. Its easier to gripe.

Something moans.

[DaviddesJ]

As I mentioned, the developers ought to consider a Birth Option to set hunger / no hunger in the game, so players like yourself can play without the hassle, as it seems.

Who's "yourself" in this sentence? I didn't hear anyone say that hunger is a hassle. I said it's a nonissue. I also said that proliferating options that make no difference (since hunger is so irrelevant, whether it's on or off) seems like a bad idea to me. Every extra option you create has a significant cost. You've got to implement it in the code and carry it through the game and maintain it every time anything else changes. Adding options for stuff that would have to be coded into the game and yet makes hardly any difference to gameplay, seems wrong to me.

[DaviddesJ]

A couple years ago, I also tried to introduce the idea that Mages ought to go and collect spell-scrolls and create their own spell-books from scrolls collected.

Well, there are other roguelike games with very different spell models. Why not play one of those? I guess I side with those who say to let this game be what it is, and make a different game if you want something different.

[Derakon]

Well, there are other roguelike games with very different spell models. Why not play one of those? I guess I side with those who say to let this game be what it is, and make a different game if you want something different.

There's nothing wrong with proposing new ideas, even if they never get implemented. Plenty of good ideas have come from these forums and been implemented into the game by someone else. Though I'll grant that spell-scrolls are unlikely to be done that way, simply because it's so much effort that you really have to be personally invested in the concept if you're going to put in the required work.

[Spacebux]

There's nothing wrong with proposing new ideas, even if they never get implemented. Plenty of good ideas have come from these forums and been implemented into the game by someone else. Though I'll grant that spell-scrolls are unlikely to be done that way, simply because it's so much effort that you really have to be personally invested in the concept if you're going to put in the required work.

I don't mind poking around and seeing if I can get some of my ideas to work on my own. If I get lucky, I'm happy to share my revelations. The last time I tried it with the 3.3 code, I found out just how inter-twined everything is/was.

That was a few years ago.
I've recovered.
I'm ready to give it another go.
But, I can't get even the current 3.5 nightly to build properly.

You want the impossible.. Luke, Episode V, Degoba.

[Magnate]

Yet, just because something wasn't in the code does not mean it does not belong in the game.

[...]

No, I'm all for adding creativity to the game. I think its been whittled away so much over the past revisions, that its getting to a point of monotony. I'm not a master coder by any means, but if I can modify the code to reduce the mundane, I will.

Excellent - welcome aboard. Telling the devteam what they should be doing isn't how this community works, but stepping up and doing stuff yourself most certainly is.

When I said that stuff had never been in the game I didn't mean that it *should* never be, merely that (as Derakon pointed out in his reply) nobody has yet added it. I'm all for seeing new stuff added, game balance wildly disrupted, old-timers here having a good old moan and everything getting fixed and settling back down. We've done that a few times.

[Magnate]

Who's "yourself" in this sentence? I didn't hear anyone say that hunger is a hassle. I said it's a nonissue. I also said that proliferating options that make no difference (since hunger is so irrelevant, whether it's on or off) seems like a bad idea to me. Every extra option you create has a significant cost. You've got to implement it in the code and carry it through the game and maintain it every time anything else changes. Adding options for stuff that would have to be coded into the game and yet makes hardly any difference to gameplay, seems wrong to me.

Just wanted to say that I completely agree with this. We want to maintain one game, not 2^N_OPTIONS games. People often think the simplest solution is just to make something contentious an option, but it's usually not. (I'm talking about gameplay; interface options are usually less hassle.)

[Spacebux]

80,000 turns later..

Ok, first me telling the devteam what to is like trying to dig into bear caves in the first few days of spring and hoping to pet the cute little sleeping bear is going to go well. It just ain't.


However, perhaps I misread the gist of what David & a few others were saying about the disgestion process finally being "fixed", such that Slow Digestion was now worth it.

To me, if you're going to go so far as have Slow Digestion take 80,000 resting turns to go from FULL to not FULL, and remove the penalty for being Gorged (in fact, remove the flag altogether), then why bother at all? Why not make it 800,000 or 50,000,000 turns to eat food? To me, (I often have to reiterate this in touchy-feely forums such as these) 1 tick per 100 game turns is already absurd enough, you might as well just take the digestion process out of the game equation altogether.

Something moans.

Yes, of course something moans. The Old Core, the Old Cadre hate it when someone new waltzes in and says, "hay is for horses!"; causes a rucus, spouting on-and-on about how to make things better; and, rather than evaluate the ideas---which is what Nick & Derekon did---Mr. David decided to combat the newbie---"who you callin' 'yourself'!?!?". Roooaarrrrr! woooah, scary!!!

Something moans.

Ok - so, I'll just be happy, happy, happy. Shut up about new ideas. And, just let the Old Cadre be happy in doing whatever they think is best. If you don't want to hear about new ideas or thoughts about the way things are - shut down this forum to new posters. Enjoy your same-ol', same-ol' world.

Something makes a soft pop.

[DaviddesJ]

To me, if you're going to go so far as have Slow Digestion take 80,000 resting turns to go from FULL to not FULL, and remove the penalty for being Gorged (in fact, remove the flag altogether), then why bother at all? Why not make it 800,000 or 50,000,000 turns to eat food? To me, (I often have to reiterate this in touchy-feely forums such as these) 1 tick per 100 game turns is already absurd enough, you might as well just take the digestion process out of the game equation altogether.

Or you might as well not. If it doesn't matter, then this way is just as good as your way.

[Derakon]

Please believe me when I say that DaviddesJ is not a Angband dev and in fact has no particular authority in this community. If you don't like him, don't listen to him and don't try to engage him in conversation. From observation it seems like such conversations will simply never end -- or at least, they won't end until the party that isn't DaviddesJ gives up and walks away.