Ring of Slaying vs. Ring of Damage

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I'm sorry if my post implied that it *was* possible. I do think it would have been better if V had been developed more radically, but I understand that that battle has been fought and lost.

Somehow Oangband manages to be both both faithful to the Angband legacy and pretty radically developed in some respects.

O can't compete with Sil's functional minimalism, but it has enough Grognardian elegance in it to strike me as a well designed game. Pyrel seems to be following O's footsteps.

[Derakon]

Oh! In that case I think I still prefer my "all monsters have an Evasion percentage" to the needless calculation of 75 - monster Evasion every time you consider attacking somebody.

Accuracy could be either rerolls or you could substract Accuracy from Evasion (exactly like it works in the current system).

EDIT: If monsters with Evasion are rare enough, your current system is better than my proposal.

The expectation is that most monsters will have an evasion of 0 and an absorption (per-blow damage reduction) of 0. Some monsters will be unusually evasive, and some will have absorption. This ties into the finesse/prowess combat system: finesse characters do well against evasive monsters and poorly against absorptive monsters since they get many weak blows per round, and prowess characters do well against absorptive monsters and poorly against evasive monsters, since they deal their damage in single large chunks.

If/when items that boost accuracy are added to the game, we could also add items that give absorption penetration, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

This ties into the finesse/prowess combat system: finesse characters do well against evasive monsters and poorly against absorptive monsters since they get many weak blows per round, and prowess characters do well against absorptive monsters and poorly against evasive monsters, since they deal their damage in single large chunks.

This balance works with monsters with low hitpoints, yeah, but finesse characters don't seem to have any edge against monsters with high evasion and lots of hitpoints -- like most evasive uniques, I'd guess.

(Edit: prowess characters may actually be better against evasive, powerful uniques. You often gets lots of tries at fighting a tough monster in Angband -- just teleport away, rest and try again. Fighting with a prowess weapon against an evasive monster is like buying a lottery ticket -- when you hit, you hit hard. With lots of tries, you have a better chance of winning than the guy with a predictable, low-damage weapon. Or am I miscalculating something?)

Finesse characters do seem like they would be better against group monsters (with low hitpoints), and that might be enough to make them balanced?

It's interesting that attack spells and wands are good against both evasive and absorptive monsters.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

In Halls of Mist, I'm planning to give some monsters a binary Evasion ability. It gives a 50 % chance of dodging the first successful melee or missile attack in an attack sequence. The more blows you have per round, the better your chances.

[Magnate]

Somehow Oangband manages to be both both faithful to the Angband legacy and pretty radically developed in some respects.

O can't compete with Sil's functional minimalism, but it has enough Grognardian elegance in it to strike me as a well designed game. Pyrel seems to be following O's footsteps.

Yes and yes. Very well said. Leon Marrick would have made a great V maintainer.

[Nick]

Yes and yes. Very well said. Leon Marrick would have made a great V maintainer.

Well, yes and no. After all, the "O" in Oangband is for opinion, and not everyone would have shared those opinions.

For years the standard advice to someone who suggested radical change to Vanilla has been "go and make a variant", and lots of people have. So V has remained largely a compromise that most of the community is reasonably happy with, which in my opinion is a good outcome.

[Derakon]

This balance works with monsters with low hitpoints, yeah, but finesse characters don't seem to have any edge against monsters with high evasion and lots of hitpoints -- like most evasive uniques, I'd guess.

(Edit: prowess characters may actually be better against evasive, powerful uniques. You often gets lots of tries at fighting a tough monster in Angband -- just teleport away, rest and try again. Fighting with a prowess weapon against an evasive monster is like buying a lottery ticket -- when you hit, you hit hard. With lots of tries, you have a better chance of winning than the guy with a predictable, low-damage weapon. Or am I miscalculating something?)

Finesse characters do seem like they would be better against group monsters (with low hitpoints), and that might be enough to make them balanced?

I don't think I really buy that prowess characters are better against evasive uniques, because any unique is going to require a lot of hits to take down no matter what your combat style is. But you're right that in the long run a finesse character has no advantage against evasive enemies than a prowess character does -- evasion effectively reduces incoming damage by a percentage.

However, I think the vast majority of uniques will have 0 evasion and 0 absorption; most evasive monsters will be fragile, and there the finesse character definitely has an advantage. If a prowess character needs 1 blow to kill the monster, and the finesse character needs 2, but the finesse character has 4 blows/round to the prowess character's 1, then the finesse character will score a kill faster in most cases.

This is one of those things that will need fairly extensive playtesting to get right, though.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

However, I think the vast majority of uniques will have 0 evasion and 0 absorption; most evasive monsters will be fragile, and there the finesse character definitely has an advantage.

Good. This is exactly how I would use the ability were it in my variant. Evasion seems like a "narrow" ability in that it is interesting and flavourful if used in a small subset of monsters. There's nothing wrong with narrow mechanics as long as they are only used where they belong.

There can't be too many low-hp, high-evasion monsters in the game because those monsters aren't easy just for finesse characters but for mages and wand-wielders too. You can't make all of them resist all elements.

Absorption seems to be a broad mechanic and you could potentially put it on lots of monsters, but in the interest of balance you need to limit yourself there, too. Were this my variant, I would perhaps drop Evasion alltogether, give all weapons some extra points of damage, and then use the Absorption mechanic to make some monsters easy to kill with light weapons and some hard.

Negative Absorption would work well, too, if you can make the flavour work. "Fragile" monsters would be easy to kill with weapons, especially with light weapons, and harder to kill with magic. Unarmored monsters having negative absorption seems realistic but is a bit clunky as game mechanic.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Well, yes and no. After all, the "O" in Oangband is for opinion, and not everyone would have shared those opinions.

BTW, do you think that your dungeon-only FA is the best version of O one could play today?

[clouded]

BTW, do you think that your dungeon-only FA is the best version of O one could play today?

FA and O have different feels, FA is rich and has more flavour whereas O is sparse and bleak. O has 1/3 to 2/3 of the drops and once you are deeper monsters show up much earlier (compare: FA, Winged Dragon of Ice - DL77, Winged Dragon of Chaos - DL88 -- O, Great Ice Wyrm - DL66, Great Wyrm of Chaos - DL74). In O you always feel as if you are struggling, desperately trying to find things to make you stronger, but FA is less frustrating in this regard. FA obviously has a much better interface too, it actually has pseudo ID and does not have *identify* which makes it so much less oppressive.

Ideally I think I would like the difficulty of FA from DL1-30, O from DL31-80 and then a mix from DL80-100. O is too slow to start and too hard to gather consumables later, FA fixes that. O is brutal but it keeps drawing you in for more punishment, I should try and win it again...

By the way, I'm looking forward to the next Mist release, it sounds like it will be a good one.

[Magnate]

Well, yes and no. After all, the "O" in Oangband is for opinion, and not everyone would have shared those opinions.

For years the standard advice to someone who suggested radical change to Vanilla has been "go and make a variant", and lots of people have. So V has remained largely a compromise that most of the community is reasonably happy with, which in my opinion is a good outcome.

You are quite right. I meant

"Leon would have made a great maintainer on this particular issue of radical redesign"

not

"Leon would have made a great maintainer and kept everybody happy".

[Nick]

BTW, do you think that your dungeon-only FA is the best version of O one could play today?

clouded has described it much better than I could. I still tend think of FA as being essentially like O in gameplay, but it really isn't. Objects and monsters have changed a lot, and the dungeon-only version has come back to being dungeon-only via wilderness, which has led to all sorts of changes.

[Derakon]

Negative Absorption would work well, too, if you can make the flavour work. "Fragile" monsters would be easy to kill with weapons, especially with light weapons, and harder to kill with magic. Unarmored monsters having negative absorption seems realistic but is a bit clunky as game mechanic.

That's a fantastic idea. Along similar lines, we could have elemental absorption/vulnerability (i.e. flat damage adjustment instead of the percentage-based reduction provided by resistances).

I admit I hadn't really given much consideration to magic/device-based combat vs. melee/missile combat, though. I think part of the problem is that most characters are either "caster" (spells/devices) fighters or physical fighters; very few have practical options for doing both. So if you want to encourage the player to use different means to kill different monster types, you need to make things obviously one-sided (e.g. a monster that's all but immune to spells and incredibly vulnerable to physical damage, or vice versa). Even then, if such monsters aren't sufficiently common, the player may opt to simply avoid them when they do show up, rather than carry the necessary tools to deal with them.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It's already the case that prowess fighters and finesse fighters have some monsters they'd each rather avoid (e.g. iron golems for finesse fighters, will o' the wisps for prowess fighters). To the extent that some monsters are obstacles rather than challenges, it's not a bad thing to have different kinds of obstacles.