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Hi. I was thinking about the discussion in the other thread about progression of monsters (e.g. baby dragon, young dragon, mature dragon, etc.) as well as progression in terms of level and the effect they have on learning the game "the hard way," i.e. by playing and dying a lot, not by memorizing the monster list (which I would recommend to new players who are serious about winning).
Some thoughts:
1. Breath weapon progression -- there seems to be a gap in the monster list where you pass from monsters that breathe for damage that is unlikely to kill a melee character by itself to breath weapons that will easily one shot a typical melee character of depth-appropriate level. You can see this in the mature dragon to ancient dragon gap (without resistance) as well as the ancient dragon to wyrm gap (with resistance, maybe). There are other well known examples, like drolems and to some extent the bigger hydras. It seems it would help to compress the dragon progression and space it out better. In general, there seems to be a gap between monsters with big breath weapons, e.g. drolems, and lesser breath weapons like the mature dragons. It would help to give players more preface to the big ones with more medium ones that will likely give them near death experiences.
2. Appearance of added effect melee -- in particular, I'm thinking of paralysis and confusion melee. It's often been suggested that the player should get a saving throw against these and maybe that's right. Paralysis with anything worse than a floating eye around is essentially death. Confusion can be almost as bad because (here I think of nightmares, which are doubly bad because they spawn awake and you can't expect to outrun them when they first appear). Here, since it's such a binary condition in both cases, it's not as obvious what to do. Experience with mushroom patches and molds gives some preface to these attacks, but not enough and not on sufficiently formidible monsters. Any new player is sure to die to ghouls a number of times and probably nightmares too before they get the idea. One thing that seems to work in other games is non-instantaneous paralysis attacks, but that might be too easy to defeat in a game with instant teleport on demand.
3. Speed progression -- I just wanted to throw this out there: In current angband, there's slow, normal speed, fast, very fast, and, what, incredibly fast (?) monster speeds. They correspond to speeds -10, +0, +10, +20, and +30. I get the feeling that a lot of what makes the threshold you feel around level depth 40 or so steep is that monsters are transitioning from an average of 0 to +10 while the player is making that transition much more gradually or not at all without using potions or something. It might make sense, since player speed is not locked into multiples of ten and usually isn't +0 by that stage, to smooth this out by moving monsters into the intermediate ranges. Maybe +5, +15 to keep it relatively simple.
Some thoughts:
1. Breath weapon progression -- there seems to be a gap in the monster list where you pass from monsters that breathe for damage that is unlikely to kill a melee character by itself to breath weapons that will easily one shot a typical melee character of depth-appropriate level. You can see this in the mature dragon to ancient dragon gap (without resistance) as well as the ancient dragon to wyrm gap (with resistance, maybe). There are other well known examples, like drolems and to some extent the bigger hydras. It seems it would help to compress the dragon progression and space it out better. In general, there seems to be a gap between monsters with big breath weapons, e.g. drolems, and lesser breath weapons like the mature dragons. It would help to give players more preface to the big ones with more medium ones that will likely give them near death experiences.
2. Appearance of added effect melee -- in particular, I'm thinking of paralysis and confusion melee. It's often been suggested that the player should get a saving throw against these and maybe that's right. Paralysis with anything worse than a floating eye around is essentially death. Confusion can be almost as bad because (here I think of nightmares, which are doubly bad because they spawn awake and you can't expect to outrun them when they first appear). Here, since it's such a binary condition in both cases, it's not as obvious what to do. Experience with mushroom patches and molds gives some preface to these attacks, but not enough and not on sufficiently formidible monsters. Any new player is sure to die to ghouls a number of times and probably nightmares too before they get the idea. One thing that seems to work in other games is non-instantaneous paralysis attacks, but that might be too easy to defeat in a game with instant teleport on demand.
3. Speed progression -- I just wanted to throw this out there: In current angband, there's slow, normal speed, fast, very fast, and, what, incredibly fast (?) monster speeds. They correspond to speeds -10, +0, +10, +20, and +30. I get the feeling that a lot of what makes the threshold you feel around level depth 40 or so steep is that monsters are transitioning from an average of 0 to +10 while the player is making that transition much more gradually or not at all without using potions or something. It might make sense, since player speed is not locked into multiples of ten and usually isn't +0 by that stage, to smooth this out by moving monsters into the intermediate ranges. Maybe +5, +15 to keep it relatively simple.
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