NOT a statement of intent

[TJS]

Also, everyone for bonus points - which if the points is my favourite

Morgoth appearing < dvl100 ?

[MattB]

Ok, let me get this straight in my head...

Are you of the position both that winning should not be unusual and that winning should not be guaranteed with ideal play?

If winning were to be not not unusual, then presumably ideal play should not be not difficult to obtain and, in fact, should not be nigh on not impossible. Is this not opposite to your standpoint, or have I not got this not wrong?

[PowerWyrm]

Having already managed to start some detailed discussion with a few vague statements of broad philosophy, I thought I should give people something to really get their teeth into. So here are a bunch of ideas that I'm not suggesting (probably). They're more designed to provoke responses, and get people thinking about different possibilities.

Also maybe to test whether people read the preamble or just jump straight to the list, and because Antoine lobbed the LOS grenade into the other thread and everyone's throwing themselves on it.

1. At the start of each game, all objects get randomly (but according to their depth and rarity) allocated a minimum dungeon level they can start being generated.
2. Every generated level has at least one "challenge" (vault, or OOD monster, or something).
3. Certain behaviours (stairscumming, or taking the first available stair, for example) are rewarded or punished by affecting object/monster generation in some way.
4. Downstairs and/or recall from town go a random number of levels down, upstairs always up 1.
5. Difficulty level of monsters encountered depends on turncount not depth.
6. Morgoth may be on other levels apart from 100.
7. There is a "difficulty parameter" which can be set before starting any game.
8. All races and classes earn experience at the same rate, and there is more variation between races.
9. Winning should be unusual.
10. Repeating levels gets you less monsters and gear every time.
11. Winning should be guaranteed with ideal play.
12. Some levels have no up stairs.
13. Recall is a command, not a scroll.
14. All of the above should be obtainable by birth options.

1. I don't understand this point... The allocation system is already complex as it is and generates enough randomness IMHO.
2. Marginal change. And pointless unless the reward/risk ratio is balanced.
3. This introduces an unnecesary complexity. I'd rather see disconnected stairs as the default and more up/down staircases generated on each level.
4. Breaks force descent. As anyone else, I think the opposite should be true, along with force descent as default. For deep descent, there are scrolls now.
5. Why should a slow player get more difficult monsters? This is covered by choosing force descent at birth.
6. And if your character is named Fingolfin and wields Ringil, he can shout obscenities about his mother and make Morgoth appear in town too No, seriously, I don't see the point here. In the Silmarillion, Morgoth is more of a coward and almost never leaves the bottom of his fortress.
7. You mean something like "Easy", "Normal", "Hard", "Nightmare" modes like in TomeNET? You should check that game about how which mode affects the player. This would be a nice addition in fact...
8. I don't see how you can balance the races here.
9. Like in Moria?
10. Same as 5. The game should permit slow and fast play. Force descent covers that.
11. Lol, if you play ideally and don't win, this means only two things: either your character got wiped by a bug or by a random instagib, which means a poorly designed feature. I don't think the latest is possible anymore...
12. Ok why not. I'd think each level should have more staircases, but something like 1-5 down and 0-5 up should be fine. But of course, some classes have stair creation spell, which makes the change pointless unless the spell is changed t ocreate only down staircases.
13. Dunno. This seems nice and helpful (frees one inventory slot and the fear of having one's only recall source destroyed), but would require to replace the recall items/spells by something else.
14. If you plan on doing some code refactoring and separate the game core from the rest, some of these impact the code and some don't. And it's hard to set a "birth" option for changes that impact the game core.

[Derakon]

Ok, let me get this straight in my head...

Are you of the position both that winning should not be unusual and that winning should not be guaranteed with ideal play?

He threw out a bunch of ideas with the goal of getting people to brainstorm in their reactions to them. So what if some of the ideas are contradictory?

[MattB]

He threw out a bunch of ideas with the goal of getting people to brainstorm in their reactions to them. So what if some of the ideas are contradictory?

Actually, what I was saying (admittedly in an unnecessarily obtuse way) was that they are not in fact contradictory.

[Lionmaruu]

Hello! Long time "angbander" here (16 years or more), been some time since the last version I really played (3.0.x iirc).

In my opinion, Angband is a game in witch you have the options to grind or not, and I like it this way, so if the intent is of putting some kind of "timing" on the game or forcing players to not do it I'm totally against it.

The best thing about angband is that you can play as you like, with nothing hurrying you to finish it, so imho no "turn count" or "timer" hurrying me to go down.

Saying that, for people who like it, maybe game with fixed level generation (once a level is generated it never changes and there are never new monsters in it) would be nice too, at least as a birth option, so people would be prevented to scumming for better levels and would not have much reason to go back (without the need to take the stairs up).

This way people would have the option of fully exploring the level or not but it would be their choice.

[Nick]

Just want to clear up one thing: currently you could theoretically scum level 1 for any item; number 1 would make that no longer true.

Also
15. Optional permanent levels

[fizzix]

Yay, ideas. Here are my thoughts.

[*]At the start of each game, all objects get randomly (but according to their depth and rarity) allocated a minimum dungeon level they can start being generated.

I kind of like this idea. OoD items in vaults and special rooms are still generable right? There are probably ramifications I haven't thought of yet though.

[*]Every generated level has at least one "challenge" (vault, or OOD monster, or something).

Meh. Let's go for every level having one or more interesting "features." These could be terrains or pits, or whatever.

[*]Certain behaviours (stairscumming, or taking the first available stair, for example) are rewarded or punished by affecting object/monster generation in some way.

If you want to prevent stairscumming then prevent it. Collapse the stairs (Sil) or create empty levels at whatever depth you are in.

[*]Downstairs and/or recall from town go a random number of levels down, upstairs always up 1.

We should probably make the option of going down multiple levels, but I dunno how I feel about making it a requirement.

[*]Difficulty level of monsters encountered depends on turncount not depth.

Playing for optimum turncount is kind of fun in it's way, but it's a very different game. Having to optimize time in town or dungeon pathing is tedious and annoying. Turning off turncount for town would actually solve a lot of problems. Then it seems you don't gain much that you wouldn't gain by implementing diminishing returns.

[*]Morgoth may be on other levels apart from 100.

Not sure what this gets you.

[*]There is a "difficulty parameter" which can be set before starting any game.

There already are. Most game difficulty parameters have dumb scalings, like monster HP, or reduced resources. I don't like these. I'd rather allow players to delve into dungeon generation probabilities and change these. Lots of vaults, or lots of pits, or high monster density, etc. Right now you can change basic allocations through the edit file, but some customization options seem nice. I'm thinking like Civilization which lets you adjust the features of the world you'll play on, or dwarf fortress which lets you select the difficulty of your fortress based on the parameters of the land you embark on. I'm not worried about crap like ladder comparisons. They're kind of dumb anyway.

However, we should be very clear that only the standard settings, whatever we choose them to be, are guaranteed to be balanced.

[*]All races and classes earn experience at the same rate, and there is more variation between races.

The devil's in the details on this one. Depending on what changes they are, this could either be cool or awful.

[*]Winning should be unusual.

Not a game for me. I like a game where winning (standard) is a reasonable challenge, but there are harder difficulties available. I actually think Angband gets the difficulty ok right now.

[*]Repeating levels gets you less monsters and gear every time.

I think this is superior to some of the other methods. I also think it should be an option.

[*]Winning should be guaranteed with ideal play.

Agreed. Otherwise you have unfair deaths, which I don't think are fun. Early, unavoidable deaths are not too bad though.

[*]Some levels have no up stairs.

No real opinion.

[*]Recall is a command, not a scroll.

I'm of the opinion that recall should be a terrain feature. Portals to towns. I could see it being a high level wizard spell as well.

[*]All of the above should be obtainable by birth options.

There's a prevailing theory of development recently that options are bad. And indeed, when you're worried about propagating changes through revisions, or balancing various things, options are bad. However, if you make no promises about balance, then that avoids the second problem. And I imagine, someone smarter than me can figure out the first one.

Angband already has a ton of customization abilities in the edit files. And I think, maybe I design goal should be that any of these customization options should also be things accessible from the edit files.

[Derakon]

There's a prevailing theory of development recently that options are bad. And indeed, when you're worried about propagating changes through revisions, or balancing various things, options are bad. However, if you make no promises about balance, then that avoids the second problem. And I imagine, someone smarter than me can figure out the first one.

Angband already has a ton of customization abilities in the edit files. And I think, maybe I design goal should be that any of these customization options should also be things accessible from the edit files.

Giving access to parameters via options is a great way to increase flexibility of the game without much of an increase in code complexity. I mean, if you look at, say, the game configuration screen in Civilization V, there are a ton of options you can set. But they mostly just determine the initial conditions of the map or toggle certain settings on/off, which is very easy to implement.

Things you could tweak in Angband with a similar degree of ease:

* Ease of passing OOD checks on monsters/items
* Number of bonus artifact chances unique monsters get
* Frequency of special rooms (pits, vaults)
* Size of levels
* Frequency of up/down stairs
* Cost of items in stores
* Spawn rate of monsters
* Monster spell failure rate
* Chance of supercharging items

Should all of these be options? Probably not. But anything that amounts to "get a number from the user, then plug that number into a formula in the code" could be an option.

[fizzix]

Giving access to parameters via options is a great way to increase flexibility of the game without much of an increase in code complexity. I mean, if you look at, say, the game configuration screen in Civilization V, there are a ton of options you can set. But they mostly just determine the initial conditions of the map or toggle certain settings on/off, which is very easy to implement.

Things you could tweak in Angband with a similar degree of ease:

* Ease of passing OOD checks on monsters/items
* Number of bonus artifact chances unique monsters get
* Frequency of special rooms (pits, vaults)
* Size of levels
* Frequency of up/down stairs
* Cost of items in stores
* Spawn rate of monsters
* Monster spell failure rate
* Chance of supercharging items

Should all of these be options? Probably not. But anything that amounts to "get a number from the user, then plug that number into a formula in the code" could be an option.

I think all of these should be options, and they should be customizable in the edit files. (things like item cost already are, but not the "markup" of BM) The game interface should help with selection in an intuitive way, and perhaps give you a couple defaults, so you could just select "more challenging terrain" and you get reduced stairs and more open areas or something.

[PowerWyrm]

Just want to clear up one thing: currently you could theoretically scum level 1 for any item; number 1 would make that no longer true.

Also
15. Optional permanent levels

This already exists in my variant. You can "build" your own levels in a (basic) editor, save the result as a "level.depth" file and activate an option to make the game look for such files and make the resulting "depth" static. Currently, this is mainly used to add extra towns in the dungeon.

[kaypy]

Morgoth may be on other levels apart from 100.

Not sure what this gets you.

Other folks have raised a "Morgoth comes to get you if you dont go fast enough" mechanic, but even with Morgoth at a fixed random depth it does mean that you can't go and sit one level away to do your grinding, because you're not quite sure where that level is.

This already exists in my variant. You can "build" your own levels in a (basic) editor, save the result as a "level.depth" file and activate an option to make the game look for such files and make the resulting "depth" static. Currently, this is mainly used to add extra towns in the dungeon.

I think Nick was referring to persistent levels- where the game remembers the layout & contents rather than regenerating a level when you return to it.

[TJS]

Just want to clear up one thing: currently you could theoretically scum level 1 for any item; number 1 would make that no longer true.

The problem I see with this is that the player doesn't know if the item isn't dropping because they have been unlucky or whether that item has a randomly deeper level attached to it. Better keep searching for another couple of hours just in case.

15. Optional permanent levels

I'm starting to come around to the way of thinking with permanent levels. It might work quite well if the best items are on the ground so grinding monsters isn't really that worth it.

[Carnivean]

[*]Downstairs and/or recall from town go a random number of levels down, upstairs always up 1.

You could have 2 types of stairs. The standard stairs that goes 1 level, and an "unexplored entrance winding into the wall" that takes you somewhere random. Run out of food on 250'? The hole in the wall might take you to 50' and close to safety, or down to 500'

Added risk/reward behaviour could be given to the current "deep descent" scroll, in that it could take you to a random level between -3 to +7 of current.

[Carnivean]

I'm starting to come around to the way of thinking with permanent levels. It might work quite well if the best items are on the ground so grinding monsters isn't really that worth it.

Permanent levels could feature honeypot style additions. Ancient Dragon on 500' guarding guaranteed excellent loot? Orc town featuring all the Orc-ish Uniques with their best loot? Worth trying to crack into?