Angband Philosophy II: Magic

[Nick]

The problem with Vanilla as it stands of course is that the player's defensive options are so strong that giving them even one turn of survival is tantamount to saying that the player can never die with even minimally intelligent play.

And yet I still die. What are you trying to say?

I guess it's different for people who have been playing the game for a thousand years.

[debo]

And yet I still die. What are you trying to say?

I guess it's different for people who have been playing the game for a thousand years.

I thought you became maintainer so that you'd have an excuse for your embarrassing competition performance.

[Derakon]

And yet I still die. What are you trying to say?

I guess it's different for people who have been playing the game for a thousand years.

Okay, that statement was overly strong. I don't have a 100% win rate either. But what I was trying to say is that if the game were unable to kill you in a single turn, then you should, assuming you're reasonably awake/alert/not intoxicated, realize "Oh hey, this encounter is going poorly, I should use one of my many escape options." Thus the game "needs" instadeaths to keep players on their toes.

[Nick]

Okay, that statement was overly strong. I don't have a 100% win rate either. But what I was trying to say is that if the game were unable to kill you in a single turn, then you should, assuming you're reasonably awake/alert/not intoxicated, realize "Oh hey, this encounter is going poorly, I should use one of my many escape options." Thus the game "needs" instadeaths to keep players on their toes.

I see your point, but I think it's a bit more subtle than that. The decision on exactly when to bail out of a fight is not always clear-cut, and the player can simply run out of foolproof escapes.

I think what I'm trying to say is that there's a grey area between instadeath and complete escape.

[Tibarius]

re: Derakon instadeaths

I think it is a good idea to move the game away from instadeaths, even tho i think it is a major design aspect of it.

New players are surely frustrated and it is not much better for veterans, they just knew usually they risk their character because they are too deep / without resistances / without required protections etc.

This will have major impact on many aspects tho. A mage without teleport other, phase door ... hard to stay alive at all.

[Tarrasque]

What is meant by "instadeath"?

Most numbers in this post are meant to be approximate.

Some of this is obvious or already in the game.

I don't think eliminating instadeaths is neccessarily a good goal, because a player will play as riskily as they feel comfortable. If the difficulty curve is too shallow it makes having 100 floors kinda pointless.

A one turn death might be OK if a "moderately cautious" player has a "high chance" of being able to avoid it. Say a new character speed dives down 10 floors without leveling, finds 15 ?s of Deep Descent along the way, then reads them all one after the other. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect an unavoidable death if a level 1 player spends any time on DL 60, since being in that situation is easily avoidable in the first place.

An extreme example of an unfair death would be if you had a 50% chance of dying automatically when you reach CLevel 30. Ignoring level feelings for now, if you clear out every floor and you aren't going below half health in any of your fights, I think an instadeath one floor lower would probably be unfair. The dungeon shouldn't get too difficult too quickly, and new status effects or elemental attacks should be introduced gradually with easy monsters. That being said, if your level feelings have all been 3s and 4s, and your next one is "Omens of death haunt this place" I think that level should be appropriately risky.

If level feelings are ever redone it might be nice if monsters in vaults only counted half as much towards the feeling of danger since they're probably only getting out if the player wants them out, while objects in vaults would affect the treasure feeling, say, 3/4th as much as usual because you would have to open the vault to get to them.

[Sky]

Im not a lotr expert, but as i understand it, there is no magic.

Elven weapons are not magic, they are simply "well made". The elves explain this to Sam when he is gifted a rope which ties and unties itself.

Sure, its magic, but not as we understand it. The five wizards are the only wizards in middle earth. Even then it's a far cry from the high magic milieu of d&d.

Staves of teleport and scrolls of destruction do not fit with lotr lore ... but they dont have to.

The rings, are exceptional BECAUSE they are magic. Its as if someone could turn invisible IRL, you wouldn't just say "oh its a ring of invisibility" because you' d know there is no such thing.

I liked very much tome 1, but i prefer angband because its simpler and it has less randomness and no excessive minmaxing.

I think, in the end, that angband should be perfected, not expanded.