Silly idea for expert players (not me)

[Mark]

Randarts keeps the game varied for long-term players. (I've never used it myself)

The greatest cause of death for junior players is lack-of-knowledge-of-what-can-kill-you.

A really interesting and crazy equalizer for hardcore players could be "randMonsters", or at least "RandUniques" (except a very few)! Has any variant explored this possibility?

I wonder how many 'Kavlax' types the RNG would throw at you each time!?

[Estie]

It would be pretty boring. You just randomly die, its the "a rock falls on your head" type of hard.

The game is interesting when you make decisions based on risk evaulation; in a room, target down the breeder first before it wakes up, in a vault, dont open the room with Ancalagon inside. With limited information, this process just becomes more bland.

[OOD Town drunk]

Randarts keeps the game varied for long-term players. (I've never used it myself)

The greatest cause of death for junior players is lack-of-knowledge-of-what-can-kill-you.

A really interesting and crazy equalizer for hardcore players could be "randMonsters", or at least "RandUniques" (except a very few)! Has any variant explored this possibility?

I wonder how many 'Kavlax' types the RNG would throw at you each time!?

I can't recommend randarts enough. They make the game so much more exciting. Every unidentified artifact becomes Christmas Eve, and every identified artifact becomes a freshly opened present. Granted, you are occasionally going to get mismatched socks, but hey, at least you have your +10 boots of speed.

[mushroom patch]

Yeah, I think the role of memorizing the monster database is somewhat overstated (although, I admit I say this as someone who has memorized most of the monster database). I say this in practically every post, but the real insight that marks the difference between beginner/intermediate players and advanced "this game is easy" types is that you don't have to fight every monster and indeed you don't even want to fight most monsters.

As far as randomizing monsters, there are only a few things monsters do that you have to worry about. At low levels, it's paralysis attacks or spells and confusion branded melee. Later on, the main one is summoning, the next is high damage spells like mana storm, and then breath weapons. Mixing and matching the type of breath weapons would make some difference, but not that much. It's still the same dynamic: I don't want to get breathed on and I don't have to, so I'm either not going to wake this thing up or I'm going to teleport it away if it's awake. Mixing and matching paralysis, confusion melee, summoning, etc. -- I don't see how that could work.

[debo]

Randarts keeps the game varied for long-term players. (I've never used it myself)

The greatest cause of death for junior players is lack-of-knowledge-of-what-can-kill-you.

A really interesting and crazy equalizer for hardcore players could be "randMonsters", or at least "RandUniques" (except a very few)! Has any variant explored this possibility?

I wonder how many 'Kavlax' types the RNG would throw at you each time!?

HallucinationMushroom used to edit his Sil monster files so that all monsters had the glyph 'red D' and were called 'monster', so that he had to figure out what he was fighting based on what they did in their first few turns

Not really random since the monster types were still the same, they were just totally obscured.

[HallucinationMushroom]

Randarts keeps the game varied for long-term players. (I've never used it myself)

The greatest cause of death for junior players is lack-of-knowledge-of-what-can-kill-you.

A really interesting and crazy equalizer for hardcore players could be "randMonsters", or at least "RandUniques" (except a very few)! Has any variant explored this possibility?

I wonder how many 'Kavlax' types the RNG would throw at you each time!?

Yes, I would love this! I've mentioned this a few times on characters or the forum but I would love random monsters. Like Debo said I've tried masking existing monsters in V and Sil, but it's not quite the same since I can sort of figure out what I'm fighting. It's probably worth pointing out I only really play warriors so I can afford to soak the necessary damage to figure out what is going on.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=14068

V: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=11292

[bio_hazard]

Maybe just randomize some things about humanoids to give a little more variability and flavor- give a few in the adventurer parties resistances as if wearing magical armor, give a few orcs in the herd branded attacks, give some gnomes fire bolt instead of frost bolt, etc. But leave the red dragons with fire all the time.

[Jax]

as someone who relies on his monster knowledge in order to dive quickly and avoid nasty things as bread and butter to survive, this is the sort of thing i have nightmares about. no thank you

[Nivim]

Don't worry Jax; everyone is saying 'option' like randarts-- the worst you'll need to worry about is the option becoming a fad and other players asking you to try it.

[Magnate]

Randarts keeps the game varied for long-term players. (I've never used it myself)

The greatest cause of death for junior players is lack-of-knowledge-of-what-can-kill-you.

A really interesting and crazy equalizer for hardcore players could be "randMonsters", or at least "RandUniques" (except a very few)! Has any variant explored this possibility?

I wonder how many 'Kavlax' types the RNG would throw at you each time!?

This is one of several recurring ideas to which the devteam returns every year or two. It might well happen one day - when there's any space on the options screen.

[AnonymousHero]

Randarts keeps the game varied for long-term players. (I've never used it myself)

The greatest cause of death for junior players is lack-of-knowledge-of-what-can-kill-you.

A really interesting and crazy equalizer for hardcore players could be "randMonsters", or at least "RandUniques" (except a very few)! Has any variant explored this possibility?

I wonder how many 'Kavlax' types the RNG would throw at you each time!?

This is one of these things that needs an absurd amount of balancing to avoid ridiculous instadeaths. A classic case is the game-that-shall-not-be-mentioned-in-roguelike-circles[1] with its Fire Enchanted bosses that would instantly kill basically any character from full health when it died (rather than by hitting the player or anything else). Not that that particular example is particularly likely in Angband, but I could imagine similarly stupid scenarios.

[1] Alright, it's Diablo II.

[Derakon]

This is one of these things that needs an absurd amount of balancing to avoid ridiculous instadeaths. A classic case is the game-that-shall-not-be-mentioned-in-roguelike-circles[1] with its Fire Enchanted bosses that would instantly kill basically any character from full health when it died (rather than by hitting the player or anything else). Not that that particular example is particularly likely in Angband, but I could imagine similarly stupid scenarios.

I'd be more worried about the ToME4 problem. The game gives you complete monster info for every monster you encounter, but most of them are roadbumps, which encourages you to not really pay too much attention to what the monster can do. However, every once in awhile a monster will get a combination of abilities that makes it into a massive threat...and if you don't realize this pronto then it can readily kill you.

If we can figure out how to have randomized monsters without requiring the player to read the monster info on every monster they encounter, then great. The two approaches I'd be inclined to take are:

a) bonus template systems, where you take a base monster and apply a template to it that modifies its stats in known ways. For example a "Nimble Fire Hound" would have +5 speed, an "Armored Paladin" would have +25% AC, etc.

b) a randart approach, where every monster race is rerolled each game, but inside of a given game, all monsters of that race are identical (to the extent that any two monsters of the same race are currently identical, of course). Randarts took an awful lot of fiddling to avoid making inappropriately over/underpowered items, though, and I expect a randmonsters approach to have similar issues.

[AnonymousHero]

I'd be more worried about the ToME4 problem. The game gives you complete monster info for every monster you encounter, but most of them are roadbumps, which encourages you to not really pay too much attention to what the monster can do. However, every once in awhile a monster will get a combination of abilities that makes it into a massive threat...and if you don't realize this pronto then it can readily kill you.

You just summarized exactly what the D2 problem was. I say "was" because eventually everybody learned (either by experience or word-of-mouth) to never ever stand near a Fire Enchanted boss in D2/HC.