Angband Philosophy II: Magic

[Nick]

I don't think any of this is necessary. The ideal solution would be to have an earlier heavy poison breather with lower damage that is *easy* to avoid. Evil and moves slowly. Drolems should be moved later. They should be the counterpart to bronze golems and bone golems.

I'm thinking about dungeon level 60 - they're still a nasty surprise, but it's a bit deeper than things like Dracolisks and Dracoliches.

[MattB]

I'm thinking about dungeon level 60 - they're still a nasty surprise, but it's a bit deeper than things like Dracolisks and Dracoliches.

Maybe we should keep them where they are, but e-mail out a cut-out-and-keep badge that people can wear, once they've earned it, that says:

"I've been instakilled
by the first Drolem
I came across!"

[AnonymousHero]

Maybe we should keep them where they are, but e-mail out a cut-out-and-keep badge that people can wear, once they've earned it, that says:

"I've been instakilled
by the first Drolem
I came across!"

"My name is AnonymousHero, and I approve[1] this message."

[1] Never understood why they didn't say "approve of" or "approved", but this is what they actually said.

[Nick]

I'm still confused why Angband keeps changing. At what point is the game... 'finished'? Or, is it that it will never be finished? If I want to play what I consider to be Angband, I play 3.0.6. This is not meant to be an offense to anybody, but just what version I'm comfortable with. I always assumed 'maintainership' was some kind of awful thankless job of just making sure the game could be played on new versions of OS's as they came out.

That's a really good question, which doesn't really have a neat answer. Here are a few reasons I want to change stuff:

1. Angband is an old game. Many of its design decisions are excellent and have been made for excellent reasons, but there are some which were enforced by constraints which no longer apply. Having a rethink of these can be a good idea.
2. Angband gets a fair bit of critical comment from the rest of the roguelike community, usually for being "too grindy", because you can just keep regenerating level 1 until you get all the gear you need. While such criticisms neglect changes to the game, and the fact that the heat-death of the universe would come first, they are not completely invalid. I would like to do more to discourage boring play, without forbidding it.
3. Another criticism Angband gets is that it's thematically confused - mostly it's a Tolkien-themed game, but there are still bits of other mythologies in there too, and it's definitely full of anachronism. The second of those I'm basically deeming fixed by the new splashscreen, and I'd like to do some work on the first too.
4. Change is an Angband tradition. It's been around about 22 years, and the longest time between versions is less than two years. So in that way it's never going to be finished, until it's dead.
5. The world has changed in those 22 years. There are many more games around which appeal to the sort of people who like Angband, so people are less likely to spend massive swathes of time playing a single character, and we need to work a bit harder to keep people's attention. The move (both from the game and from the community's perception of it) to a faster play style has helped with this, but there's more to do.
6. As Derakon says, maintainers need some fun in their lives

[MattB]

There are many more games around which appeal to the sort of people who like Angband, so people are less likely to spend massive swathes of time playing a single character, and we need to work a bit harder to keep people's attention.

Personally, I'm really not convinced that this is true.

[topazg]

I first played Frog Knows .. so to some extent, that's still analogous to "Angband" to me. Having said that, and having repeatedly sort of revisited it on and off for the last 20 years, I would never want to go back. I like the addition of colour to a number of places in the game, I like the fact speed is handled much better, I like the way macros have been built in nicely, I like the additional info on "things seen" and whatnot, I love the new vaults, rooms, and level feeling descriptions.

I somewhat miss haggling (I know, a bit weird, and even on ones I can turn it on, I quickly get bored of it, but it was the flavour of it somehow), I somewhat miss needing to kill lots of mobs of the same type before unlocking a decent amount of info on them ... but overall, each iteration feels improved, and I enjoy jumping into the new one. That's part of the Angband experience for me to be honest.

[AnonymousHero]

Personally, I'm really not convinced that this is true.

Truth. I've played a single character in (no-reload) Baldur's Gate Trology for about 1-2 years at this point. (I acknowledge that I'm an edge case simply because I actually do this kind of thing... but we do exist!)

[MattB]

Truth. I've played a single character in (no-reload) Baldur's Gate Trology for about 1-2 years at this point. (I acknowledge that I'm an edge case simply because I actually do this kind of thing... but we do exist!)

Oh, I'm sure you do!

It was just the phrase 'so people are less likely to...' that struck me as a massive generalisation.

I have many games on PC (including Baldur's Gate), PS3, Wii-U and iPad, but I spend literally ten times more time playing Angband than all the others put together. Yes, literally.

EDIT: (Of course, maybe I'm just an edge case...)

[Nick]

It was just the phrase 'so people are less likely to...' that struck me as a massive generalisation.

Yes, quite right. I guess I was thinking about people who are looking for a game to play, and how long they'd be prepared to try Angband for before moving on to one of the many other choices - but it's probably pretty marginal. Good! Scratch number 5 then

[AnonymousHero]

Yes, quite right. I guess I was thinking about people who are looking for a game to play, and how long they'd be prepared to try Angband for before moving on to one of the many other choices - but it's probably pretty marginal. Good! Scratch number 5 then

I'm already sold on the whole Angband/Roguelike idea, but I *would* be wary of entirely mehcanical-doesn't-take-into-account-me mechanic.

BTW: There's *NOTHING* like winning BG without ever having your PC die. It's just spectacular. Yeah, it's better than beating Angband and/or whatever...

[AnonymousHero]

It was just the phrase 'so people are less likely to...' that struck me as a massive generalisation.

TBF I don't think that was actually something I said, so...

[MattB]

Yes, quite right. I guess I was thinking about people who are looking for a game to play, and how long they'd be prepared to try Angband for before moving on to one of the many other choices

Fair enough - a good point.

Good! Scratch number 5 then

See! We're making progress. Soon you'll have nothing to do at all!

On a serious note, maybe there is a debate here about how much we should change Angband to attract new players, compared with how much we should concentrate on making Angband even greater for the people who already play it.

(Of course, by 'we', I mean 'you'.)

Maybe the answer is that once someone has made a decent iTunes version (Anyone?...Bueller?...Anyone?...Anyone?...), there could be an Angband Lite which is touchscreen and all Shockbolt-y (insert favourite tile artist here) so that it is not to much of a shock to the system. Where you have to survive to level 20 and kill, I don't know, Shagrat, and be told on winning that there is a whole new world of lost eveinings out there on PC/Mac/Linux that is also free!

[MattB]

TBF I don't think that was actually something I said, so...

No you didn't. Nick did. See post #94.
That was the post I was replying to.
Apologies for any confusion caused.

[AnonymousHero]

I have many games on PC (including Baldur's Gate), PS3, Wii-U and iPad, but I spend literally ten times more time playing Angband than all the others put together. Yes, literally.

You should play BG no-reload more. It's just incredible. Not sure about PS3/Wii/Whatever, but BG2 no-reload is crazy hard and interesting. It was never intentended to played that way, but it works. OMG, it works!

[AnonymousHero]

No you didn't. Nick did. See post #94.
That was the post I was replying to.
Apologies for any confusion caused.

My bad. Apologies.