melee hit probability

[Bogatyr]

Generally speaking, I agree, I just don't know what to do about that. Probing is slow and monster descriptions are not that describing.

Maybe monsters should have "rune-based ID" as well, so that you could tell what they can or might be able to do before actually encountering that something they do.

probing is absolutely not ideal, but it's all we have, if we don't have ancestral memory on the character or simply memory from earlier games or reading the code. I wish that probing gave full damage info immediately, rather than waiting to take damage from the monster first before it's revealed. As it stands I generally assume the worst (1000-1600?) about breath weapons unless I know for certain it's less.

[Carnivean]

Maybe monsters should have "rune-based ID" as well, so that you could tell what they can or might be able to do before actually encountering that something they do.

Combine that with the various different suggestions for low level variations of monsters, and I think you have a very workable system.

Do you, however, have to randomise the monsters into flavours?

(Also, I don't want to have to ID by use any time monsters)

[Timo Pietilä]

(Also, I don't want to have to ID by use any time monsters)

ID by use Time Monster:

Wait, didn't I just do this?
Or did I just think about doing it?
I'm confused.

Maybe time attack should make you confused.

[Derakon]

Maybe monsters should have "rune-based ID" as well, so that you could tell what they can or might be able to do before actually encountering that something they do.

I like this. The hounds would then ID most of the breath attacks for you, so you can recognize them on sight in the later monsters that can hit for hundreds of damage.

There's also the "vent" monsters I proposed awhile back that are basically stationary turrets for the various exotic elements -- poison vent, chaos vent, plasma vent, time vent, water vent, etc. They were explicitly intended to teach players what the various elements do without doing much direct damage, so they'd breathe fairly often but have next to no HP.

[EpicMan]

We do have the monster memory system, which if you turn on full info provides a lot of data. If you add in the max damage of each attack, breath, etc on the description, and maybe highlight in bright colors ones that are higher than your max (or current) HP, the player should be able to assess the danger of any monster they can see. Provide all this info up front, mention inspecting monsters you aren't familiar with, and everyone should be fairly well informed on their current danger level.

Rods of probing require you to spend a turn in LOS of monsters and thus risk instakill if they can one-shot you; they are OK in the earlier levels but are not useful deeper in the dungeon, which is exactly when you need to know that info. They are a bad solution for learning who is dangerous and who is not.

[Derakon]

We do have the monster memory system, which if you turn on full info provides a lot of data. If you add in the max damage of each attack, breath, etc on the description, and maybe highlight in bright colors ones that are higher than your max (or current) HP, the player should be able to assess the danger of any monster they can see. Provide all this info up front, mention inspecting monsters you aren't familiar with, and everyone should be fairly well informed on their current danger level.

The difficulty here is that full monster memory is labeled as a cheat option. If we decided we wanted to make full monster memory automatic, that would also solve the problem, and would require rather less coding work.

Rods of probing require you to spend a turn in LOS of monsters and thus risk instakill if they can one-shot you; they are OK in the earlier levels but are not useful deeper in the dungeon, which is exactly when you need to know that info. They are a bad solution for learning who is dangerous and who is not.

To be fair to probing, it is possible to use it safely by setting up a hockeystick situation, so that the turn you spend using probing, the monster spends moving into LOS. But I'm still not a huge fan of relying on this approach, especially since newbies are still liable to eat a few instadeaths before they figure out that they should be probing every new monster.

[EpicMan]

The difficulty here is that full monster memory is labeled as a cheat option. If we decided we wanted to make full monster memory automatic, that would also solve the problem, and would require rather less coding work.

That would be even better.

[TJS]

I wouldn't be remotely surprised if there wasn't any real guiding principle behind a lot of the design "decisions" in Angband. However, the system does, for the most part, work well as it is implemented. It's opaque and mechanically kind of silly (hulking warriors using the tiniest daggers they can find with the biggest possible enchantments, for example), but it's pretty well-balanced and has a fairly smooth curve.

I'm not sure about the fairly smooth curve bit, when you start as a warrior with an unenchanted dagger you can do around 12 damage, but when you find a reasonably well enchanted light weapon you can do more than double the damage immediately.

The jump is even greater for castor types who find an enchanted weapon with large dice (from 2.5 -> 15ish)

AC values are massive, so it is hard to visualise what 1 point is worth and it makes enchanting armour a complete waste of time.

By the way I remember reading that AC values were doubled a while back, but I wonder if the bonus from bless and heroism was doubled at the same time. If not then their bonus was basically halved.

[wobbly]

Rods of probing require you to spend a turn in LOS of monsters and thus risk instakill if they can one-shot you; they are OK in the earlier levels but are not useful deeper in the dungeon, which is exactly when you need to know that info. They are a bad solution for learning who is dangerous and who is not.

Probing works well on a high stealth character like a rogue or hobbit ranger. Which seems reasonable.

[debo]

Probing works well on a high stealth character like a rogue or hobbit ranger. Which seems reasonable.

The green aliens in zapm also wield probes! You should look into those for inspiration....

[Derakon]

I'm not sure about the fairly smooth curve bit, when you start as a warrior with an unenchanted dagger you can do around 12 damage, but when you find a reasonably well enchanted light weapon you can do more than double the damage immediately.

The jump is even greater for castor types who find an enchanted weapon with large dice (from 2.5 -> 15ish)

The early game doesn't count, in my opinion. It's pretty smooth from around 800' onwards.

AC values are massive, so it is hard to visualise what 1 point is worth and it makes enchanting armour a complete waste of time.

This (among other things) is what I meant by it being opaque.

By the way I remember reading that AC values were doubled a while back, but I wonder if the bonus from bless and heroism was doubled at the same time. If not then their bonus was basically halved.

If I recall correctly, what was going on here is that the formula that used AC to determine hit rate had a 2/3rds multiplier in it applied to the AC value -- that is, each point of "visible" AC only corresponded to 2/3rds of a point of "actual" AC. The change that inflated visible AC values was to remove that multiplier, but the game should behave exactly the same otherwise.

[Timo Pietilä]

(Full monster memory automatic)

That would be even better.

Why on earth would that be better? I personally like having new monsters that I don't know everything about every now and then. It's more fun that way.

In fact, if we add that "rune-based ID" for monsters as well, I vote for resetting monster memories for every char.

[quarague]

On probing and breath damage IIRC we currently also have an issue with knowing game mechanics. Probing does tell you the monsters current hitpoints and it does tell you which elements it can breathe. If you know the game mechanic that a breath is always 1/3 of current hitpoint in raw damage you do know exactly for how much damage the monster can breathe. But that game mechanic is never explained anywhere in game, you only learn about it by reading it in the forums. If you don't know the game mechanic the inspect screen will only add in the breath damage once the monster has used a breath attack.

[Timo Pietilä]

On probing and breath damage IIRC we currently also have an issue with knowing game mechanics. Probing does tell you the monsters current hitpoints and it does tell you which elements it can breathe. If you know the game mechanic that a breath is always 1/3 of current hitpoint in raw damage you do know exactly for how much damage the monster can breathe. But that game mechanic is never explained anywhere in game, you only learn about it by reading it in the forums.

It's not that simple anyway, breaths can be something between 1/3 to 1/6 of the current HP.

Probing does tell you how much (max) damage monster does with the breath, so you only need to learn that that damage does go down when monster HP drops (and then learn in hard way that the really big ones need to be hurt a lot before that actually happens).

[EpicMan]

(Full monster memory automatic)



Why on earth would that be better? I personally like having new monsters that I don't know everything about every now and then. It's more fun that way.

In fact, if we add that "rune-based ID" for monsters as well, I vote for resetting monster memories for every char.

It would allow new players a lot of info (breath damage caps, breath damage lowered by HP, etc) so they can die by poor choices as opposed to dying to ignorance constantly. Dying from ignorance of a monster gets old when there are hundreds of new monsters. And it would be a lot handier for more experienced players that looking at the edit files, plus removing the hassle of re-using the same save over and over or losing your memories (or was memories moved out of savefiles in the new version?)

If you don't want to learn about a monster, don't (R)ecall their abilities. Monster memory is something you don't have to use if you don't want to.