V 3.5 now in feature freeze

[Tregonsee]

If you wanted to "ensure" safety relative to exactly what's around you at the time of teleporting, you could do "out-of-LoS-of-every-monster-in-your-current-LoS".

Could you incorporate telepathy (if you have it) into that definition?

[AnonymousHero]

Beyond your LoS radius. If you try to escape from dragon and land back on LoS you might be toast. You still might get toasted if that D was at same direction as your destination point, but it just makes it more unlikely.

If you wanted to "ensure" safety relative to exactly what's around you at the time of teleporting, you could do "out-of-LoS-of-every-monster-in-your-current-LoS".

EDIT: Of course that's still dangerous if monsters are faster than you, but that's par for the course.

[fizzix]

Beyond your LoS radius. If you try to escape from dragon and land back on LoS you might be toast. You still might get toasted if that D was at same direction as your destination point, but it just makes it more unlikely.

I'm actually ok with teleport occasionally not putting you very far away at all occasionally.

[Timo Pietilä]

I like that. What about 'any possible point beyond the phase door radius'?

Beyond your LoS radius. If you try to escape from dragon and land back on LoS you might be toast. You still might get toasted if that D was at same direction as your destination point, but it just makes it more unlikely.

[scud]

Simply make teleport other and all player teleports (with the exception of phase doors) move to any possbile field, uniformly at random.

I like that. What about 'any possible point beyond the phase door radius'?

[quarague]

felt like throwing in one more idea for teleportation.
Simply make teleport other and all player teleports (with the exception of phase doors) move to any possbile field, uniformly at random.
The number of available squares grows roughly like distance squared until you hit the edge of the map, so on average you would be teleported relatively far away. You can teleport to the field right next to you but this is unlikely.
This completely avoides the situation of bouncing back and forth between two places but every time you cast it you know that maybe you will teleport to a place just a few steps away.
In other words, teleport has the desired effect most of the time but not always and the odds of getting unlucky multiple times in a row are rapidly approaching zero.

[Derakon]

Well, the teleport function is pretty well-separated, so once the game hits alpha people can easily test their own theories.

[Beirlis]

The difficulty is that when the game tries to place you far away, it has very few valid locations where you can land. That's what creates the problem with the current system. The spell needs to accept closer targets.

I suspect when we test it that we'll find that the spell is basically as reliable as it used to be, i.e. you shouldn't cast it when you're 1 turn from death anyway. My hope is that it will fix the problem where you get bounced between 2 or 3 bad situations when there's plenty of dungeon left that you could land in.

Ahh, I get it. Well I can think of a few ways to do it so that it still solves that problem, but is still weighted towards sending you further away. So iterate over all of the spaces that are max_distance away and make an array of open spaces, but exclude those that are less than x distance (maybe less than 20% of your max?). Then, you know the exact number of places you can go and pick a random number as an index into that array. But this would involve allocated and freeing the array.

The second solution I can think of (which isn't as pretty) is just keep choosing numbers between 0 and max * max * 4 and then check the location of that offset until you find a valid location.

The only other problem I can see is when you get into those maze levels where the distance from one end to the other isn't that far. So maybe the min distance should be sensitive to the level size.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Warriors don't need nerfing, especially with magic devices.

I was just proposing that you tie Warrior's Magic Device progression purely to his Power stat -- or let's say Intelligence -- and not to gaining warrior levels. Other classes would also gain bonuses to Magic Device from experience levels, but not warriors.

You could do the same thing with Wisdom and Spell Save. Make the stat much more meaningful, and reduce the relevance of gaining levels. Late game would be identical to what it is now, but early game would be more varied.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

We've had this conversation a number of times before. A couple of cautions:

Yeah, I know. The removal of Charisma made me happy, and that inspired some new brainstorming.

Thanks for reminding me that stats max out in Vanilla, and that limits design possibilities. I tend to forget it since I mostly play my own variant where stats almost never hit the maximum.

[Derakon]

We've had this conversation a number of times before. A couple of cautions:

* Warriors don't need nerfing, especially with magic devices. They're totally reliant on detection items to be playable at all; meanwhile, they don't get much use out of the others (attack items, rare rods, artifact activations, etc.) already. So the current balance is fine, really.

* Stealth, as currently implemented, only has 32 possible values; it uses exponentiation (every +3 stealth makes you about twice as stealthy). As a result, there's not much room to "play". This is fine currently because stealth is just race modifier + class modifier + equipment modifier. But if you make Stealth a "first-class" stat, then that implies to me the existence of Potions of Stealth that permanently make you more stealthy. I mean, what's the difference otherwise between the first-class stats and the others?

Assuming you fix that, if you want stealth to have a meaningful progression, then you end up with practically everyone aggravating monsters in the early game and being nigh-totally silent in the late game. Fixing that would require scaling monster alertness with depth, so that e.g. great hell wyrms would be preternaturally alert compared to novice rogues. And at this point I'm really not certain what we've gained.

I'm not saying these problems can't be overcome, but you will need solutions to them, and I'd say you also need to demonstrate that the new system would be superior to the old.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

On the other hand, I like pretty much all the wildly different takes on Charisma introduced in variants. (At least Un, Iron, PosCheng, and HoM come to mind.)

I had to check what Ironband did with Charisma... "Charisma has been replaced by four new stats - Agility, Stealth, Perception, Luck." So Ironband doesn't actually have any Charisma mechanics, sorry!

To me, both Stealth and Perception make more sense as Angband stats than Charisma.

How about this:

Strength
Dexterity
Constitution
Power (magical ability)
Cunning (Perception + Stealth)

Power should contribute heavily to the Magic Device skill. Especially Warriors with low Power stat would be completely useless with devices. Power would also increase your spell save.

[takkaria]

There's still one or two junk stats left, INT and/or WIS depending on class. Thankfully there's only one non-spellcaster class in Angband, so usually you only have one junk stat.

I think it would be good to use the non-spellcasting int/wis stat as the fail rate stat. I'm not going to lobby for this to go into V but it would make sense.

[Derakon]

I wouldn't want to see that spell (and effect) become so unreliable. I would prefer to see it weighted towards teleporting you far away. So something like distance = max - rand_range(0, max * max - 1) / max where the median distance is 75% of your max distance.

The difficulty is that when the game tries to place you far away, it has very few valid locations where you can land. That's what creates the problem with the current system. The spell needs to accept closer targets.

I suspect when we test it that we'll find that the spell is basically as reliable as it used to be, i.e. you shouldn't cast it when you're 1 turn from death anyway. My hope is that it will fix the problem where you get bounced between 2 or 3 bad situations when there's plenty of dungeon left that you could land in.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

OTOH, one "junk" stat wasn't that bad. Every time lose one -gain one hit CHR that was free stat boost, nexus scramble hit when CHR was already max could give you sudden huge boost to one stat.

There's still one or two junk stats left, INT and/or WIS depending on class. Thankfully there's only one non-spellcaster class in Angband, so usually you only have one junk stat.