Angband Philosophy I: Player choice

[Timo Pietilä]

So one of my big goals is to make the game easier to modify. Don't like hounds, or identify, or the mage spells? Change 'em.

Some sort of standardized spell file like monster.txt with easy to understand syntax that game then parses as spell?

N:1:Magic missile
T:Bolt:mana
C:multi
D:<damage code goes here in some fashion>

Something like that?

[debo]

What I find interesting now is how the apparent traffic on oook (ladder uploads) is largely divided between Sil and Poschengband, which basically represent the most extreme dipoles that one could take when designing an angband variant. I'm not sure that variants that just change a thing or two will have much traction, but I'm willing to find out. (It also helps that those two variants have fairlyt frequent rewleases , whereas most others have stagnated.)

[Therem Harth]

(1) By all means. Competitions should IMO prohibit save-scumming, but I don't see anything wrong with having it as a difficulty option, that is clearly marked in the save file.

- Note "difficulty option", not "cheat option". It makes the game easier. It doesn't make it not-a-even-a-game-anymore, which is what Cheat Death does.

- Also, since I am now working full-time, I can see very well where people would rather save-scum than have to restart from scratch every time a character dies.

tl;dr it's a game. It's supposed to be fun. It has to accommodate real life, not the other way around.

(2) Yes please. I'll admit that V and its quirky codebase have some charm, but that charm quickly wears thin when you get serious about adding new features.

...

So, yeah, looks like I agree completely.

[Nick]

I have outlined a few of my ideas about maintaining, but probably not very coherently. This (and maybe even follow-up posts) will be an attempt to be a bit more thorough.

It seems to me that one of the big strengths of Angband is the freedom of choice it gives to its players. There are two fixed objectives, and how you achieve those is very largely up to you. As a consequence, we have

Rule 1: Angband is a game you are playing against yourself.

So if you're "cheating", you're only cheating yourself (unless you're playing in a competition where there are defined rules and an honour system and you go against that).

Now I'm taking the responsibility for maintaining Angband, but that doesn't make me the boss of it. I'd certainly feel a bit silly telling someone like Timo how to play, and if it's like that for Timo, why should it be any different for a new player? Which brings us to

Rule 2: How you play Angband is up to you.

Back in the days of rgra, there used to be a standard pattern when anyone complained about some aspect of the game: a small amount of discussion, and then if they were still complaining, someone would say "You should make a variant".

So one of my big goals is to make the game easier to modify. Don't like hounds, or identify, or the mage spells? Change 'em. And while there will still be a standard (erm, Vanilla) Angband which is the one that's released, I will be encouraging people to mess with stuff and see whether they like it better.

Discuss.