Is the unavoidable death really a bad thing?

[Timo Pietilä]

I have noticed a bit pattern in my games, and not only angband:

After some point of the game "I have won" without actually winning. After that point it only takes careful play and patience. This leads to phenomenon where I rather start new game than play that endgame, whatever that might be, because of knowledge of the fact that I can win if I just "play it right".

So, is the possibility of unavodable death really a bad thing? I remember losing game in some exceptional way longer than winning it.

I want unfair phenomenons. Surviving and/or dying from clearly unfair thing is fun. Dying only from own mistake not so much, because that leads to some way of playing that always leads to victory.

It breathes poison -more- You die -more- is not actually a bad thing if you know that this is the way game goes and there was nothing you could have prevented it.

Discussion: Do you agree/disagree and if you agree, how to do that "properly", if disagree, why?

[PowerWyrm]

Play TomeNET and do ironman dungeons. Even your most overpowered character that nothing can harm has a chance to die if going downstairs lands you in the middle of a large vault with the "no teleport" flag.

Unavoidable deaths IMHO ruin the fun of a game, because winning would then be a simple matter of luck. The best thing to do is make the endgame more difficult by balancing stuff that makes it too simple.

[Timo Pietilä]

The best thing to do is make the endgame more difficult by balancing stuff that makes it too simple.

OK. How? Using vanilla as model. What would you change?

[PowerWyrm]

Escapes should come at a cost. For example: teleport other and banishment get a saving throw, destruction hurts the character badly, teleport level gets a delay like recall. I'd keep teleport as it is, since you still can teleport into something nasty.

Then I'd add some more powerful monsters to fill the gap between levels 80 and 98, which only contain uniques that don't appear often and can be skipped. For example: split wyrms in two parts, normal wyrms at +10 speed and summon dragon, ancient wyrms at +20 speed and summon ancient dragons (I think demons and undead are fine as they are). Maybe modify the monster generation routine to ensure that deep levels get more deep monsters.

Add level restrictions that can appear randomly deep in the dungeon: no map, no banish, no destruction.

Of course, the best change would be to introduce cooldowns on resources like in tome4 (potions, scrolls, spells) so that the character needs to think carefully before healing, teleporting, casting and such... but that would be probably too much for V.

[Bimbul]

After some point of the game "I have won" without actually winning. After that point it only takes careful play and patience. This leads to phenomenon where I rather start new game than play that endgame, whatever that might be, because of knowledge of the fact that I can win if I just "play it right".

This is why I quit Nethack and moved across as it's a new challenge, yeah I got to the point where I knew I was essentially invulnerable, the rest became boring. I guess eventually you just tire of a game, no matter how good it is.

I'm not convinced the solution is just to have random death as a possibility - there's little skill in avoiding that, just luck.

[Timo Pietilä]

Escapes should come at a cost. For example: teleport other and banishment get a saving throw, destruction hurts the character badly, teleport level gets a delay like recall. I'd keep teleport as it is, since you still can teleport into something nasty.

This is basically creating unavoidable death if you rely on them, if you don't then it just adds tedium.

[Timo Pietilä]

This is why I quit Nethack and moved across as it's a new challenge, yeah I got to the point where I knew I was essentially invulnerable, the rest became boring. I guess eventually you just tire of a game, no matter how good it is.

I'm not convinced the solution is just to have random death as a possibility - there's little skill in avoiding that, just luck.

Maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not talking about "roll a dice, you die" -type of situation, but a more a type of unfair death where combination of things lead to practically unavoidable death no matter how good you are. Get a "perfect storm" of events more likely than it is now. If you suck at the game you die more easily than if you are good at it, but even the best, most OCD player should get into situation(s) where escape isn't obvious.

Getting killed every now and then is refreshing. Not necessarily every game, but sometimes.

Currently game is too "clean" if you know what I'm talking about. Too clinical and too straightforward.

[fizzix]

I think a lot of the design is really inherent to the way Angband plays, as opposed to many other games (let's use Sil as an example, but DCSS also works).

Angband (from dlevel 50 onwards) has a lot of effects that are high damage, they do >50% of a players hp unavoidably. These are usually fairly rare events but high damage. Proper play requires knowing what monsters can do those attacks and avoiding them, or ensuring you have enough hp to survive the blow. It also requires players to ensure that they are always dealing with 1 on 1 situations, where there is only one monster around that can do a >50% hp attack. Unsurprisingly, a lot of player deaths (probably all of mine after dlevel 50) are deaths by a high damage attack. Consequently, Angband gives the players tools to deal with these monsters if it can't handle them. You can essentially "pass" on them. You get no reward, but you skip the risk.

If we contrast this to Sil, it has very few (if any) monsters that do this even in the late game. Furthermore, these monsters when they do exist (ururauku) tend to have very low hp, so provided you aren't surprised, you can usually kill them easily. Instead of killing you in one blow, Sil often kills you by cutting off your escapes and forcing you to fight a monster that you cannot defeat or run from. In fact, it has monsters who's specific purpose is to block you (Grotesque). Consequently, Sil doesn't have anything near the range of escapes that Angband does. There are no teleport or destruction spells. The best you can do is stuff like "exchange places" to get by a monster blocking you in.

To simplify, Angband kills you quickly over a few turns, while Sil prolongs the agony leading to a slow inevitable death.

My personal opinion is that the way Angband currently plays limits design space. If the player can't survive two breaths, then late game debuffs (like confusion) are too debilitating. The player must have a way to either resist it entirely or cure out of it in a failsafe way. Similarly, escapes must work 100% and occur immediately, since you only have a few turns to live anyway. Whereas, in Sil, if you recognize the danger before things get bad, you can usually make a run for the exit, absorbing the 10-20 rounds of combat along the way. Since Angband always throws monsters at you that you cannot handle, or ones that there's really no benefit to dealing with (beholders), the game requires you to have a way of avoiding those fights. Whether it be by removing the monster or removing yourself from the area.

If I was in charge (and it's probably good that I'm not) I would actually reduce a lot of the high damage monster spells and breaths. Then, and only then, would I make escapes less powerful in some of the ways that PowerWyrm suggests.

[yyt16384]

Completely unavoidable death (purely luck-based) is bad IMO. I often find it frustrating to lose in a game when I did nothing wrong.

However, it is too obvious in Angband when you have to escape. Everyone knows he should run away when he sees two breathers in front of him. We should make it less obvious. Currently it's like "If I don't run away now I will likely die the next turn", but it's better to have "If I don't run away in 5 turns I will likely die in 50 turns".

[Bogatyr]

I have noticed a bit pattern in my games, and not only angband:
[...snip...]
After some point of the game "I have won" without actually winning.
Discussion: Do you agree/disagree and if you agree, how to do that "properly", if disagree, why?

That just may be the character of the game. There are official ways to make it (much) harder: full ironman, for instance, and the various option in between (no connecting stairs, no recall, etc.). Some games, if you play them for a few decades, you just get good at, and the game may cease being fun. Taking a break (for a year or two perhaps) can help in this case.

As fizzix pointed out, survival requires monster attack knowledge, and managing encounters. Take away detection and ESP, for example, and you can stumble into deadly situations easily (packs of gravity hounds or Neekerbreekers, e.g.). But with no detection, there's no strategy.

One way perhaps would be to have (some) random monsters or random uniques who resist rod of probing. Maybe they are "monster mimics" ("oops, that apprentice is really an Arch Lich" or some other random thing).

For me, I like the game the way it is, but I definitely suffer from the "game is won before it's won" phenomenon. My current gnome mage has just found all dungeon spellbooks at clev 39 and now "it's just a matter of technique." But I'm diving well below safe dlevel for my hit points (heading to 98) so that keeps it interesting.

[Carnivean]

The card game Solitaire (Patience in some countries) has a maximum win ratio of 80% or so. With perfect knowledge and perfect play, you'll lose 20% of your games. It's addictive because it's short. If a winning game was going to take 20 hours, then noone would play it. I don't think I'd want to play Angband if I was going to die no matter what I did 20% of the time, or even any percent.

That said, I can see scope for the game to make it harder to play perfectly. Programming the game to be able to predict human behaviour to create traps that require strategy to overcome would be difficult, but if achieved very rewarding.

If I was in charge (and it's probably good that I'm not) I would actually reduce a lot of the high damage monster spells and breaths. Then, and only then, would I make escapes less powerful in some of the ways that PowerWyrm suggests.

If you were to double the number of monsters, but halve their damage output and limit summons to a set number (or total power) per level, that might work towards that end.

Perhaps you could introduce monsters that affect escapes? The teleport version of shrieker mushrooms. Or perhaps spell casters could cast temporary teleport blocking spells, with a d8(?) round timer.

[Thraalbee]

Unfair phenomenons: YES PLEASE: But not as "You die" out of nowhere.

Already in my second win I felt the need for this. In the end I was ideally placed in a vault to melee Morgoth. I had 15 !Life and plenty !*healing* available. I knew I could not lose unless I fumblefingered the fight. So why keep playing? The only reason would be to get the *Winner* flag for the forum but I already had a win. What did I do? For the entire final fight I would only heal myself with the 5% fail rate Holy World to keep the game open - I could still lose.

The Armageddon trap in some variants as well as the blood curse on killing some uniques are ok, but personally I prefer challenge options. Currently I only play with Forced Decent and No Recall (ironman).

How about adding a new birth option "challenge_levels" = {never | voluntary | mandatory}. The game could then throw an optional OOD challenge level at @ every now and then. The trigger would be on rare occasions when using a downstair leading to e.g. the message: "On your way to the next level you notice a corridor, heavily blocked with logs, ropes and magical runes. Would you like to investigate?" The challenge level could be generated like any other level except more OOD and with the "<" collapsing on entry and the (only) ">" in the exact other end of the level. After having generated (but not yet displayed) the level, you could also insert a hint on what type danger you would be facing in the challenge prompt.

[Estie]

For a beginning character, there are dozens of unfair ways to die. A trap can kill a low level character; invisible monsters can attack ("unfair, I never had a chance to see it!"), he can get paralyzed, breathed at from out of LoS etc etc.

Playing a game of Angband can be looked at as shutting down all these more or less instant, more or less unfair ways to die one by one. You get detection, teleportation, free action, hit points etc up to the point where basically nothing can kill you unless you really mess up.

I agree with Timo that the early stages where the character is weak are the more interesting ones, and that means having many unfair ways to die. I suggest not to focus on fair vs unfair too much. Part of Angband is exploration, and that means incomplete information and therefor inevitable unfairness. This is really only a question of the degree of unfairness. And knowing that, I could live with the floating eye killing my character when he takes the stairs down for the first time.

I am not saying the game should necessarily return to that stage (eye moves first, paralyzes the paralyzed and does its own damage), but getting fussed up over such a death suggests that the person in question isnt aware of how random their other deaths are. "I could have avoided that death by phasing in time, so it was my own fault" - in hindsight, yes, but to avoid the same fate again, you need to adapt a strategy of phasing at low danger level every time, and that might well mean you die from phasing next to a nasty next time when you could have survived by sticking it out instead.

TL;DR: fair death is an illusion, most Angband deaths are unfair.



About moving towards lower monster damage and less player escape options:

There are many many roguelikes out there that do exactly that, and for the most part I dont like them much. The feature of (Vanilla) Angband is that the combat itself is bland: for the most part, just a press of the direction key.

It is all about the circumstances and prepartions that lead to said combat. Looting a vault can be a veritable puzzle of planning and on the fly thinking when something goes wrong. Thats where the fun is. Prolonging the trading of blows, while it does open up new design options like meaningfull debuffs, is imho better suited for graphically advanced games and is being explored there in depths.
Needless to say, killing a character who has a tp scroll with 1 breath isnt any more unfair than taking away his scroll and delivering the damage over 3 turns.
Thats the abovementioned illusion again.

NB - it has been suggested to disable detection in vaults, I think that is a horrible idea. Planning the take out is all the fun, and you cant do any of that if you dont know what you are facing.

[Nick]

ISurviving and/or dying from clearly unfair thing is fun. Dying only from own mistake not so much, because that leads to some way of playing that always leads to victory.

Maybe the most fun is being presented with a series of choices, where you have to balance risk and reward.

I suspect the "correct play gets me a win" thing comes about because the correct choice is always don't take the risk, you'll get the reward later anyway. And I think the solution is going to be nudging the game in the correct direction rather than making sweeping changes.

Note that I'm not saying there won't be sweeping changes

[Derakon]

Maybe the most fun is being presented with a series of choices, where you have to balance risk and reward.

I think for these decisions to be meaningful, we have to take away the "well, I can always do it later" option, which in turn goes against a big part of what makes Angband Angband (viz the infinite dungeon that you can proceed through at your own pace). In other words, in order for there to be interesting risk, the player has to have something on the line -- but in an infinite game with decent escapes, you can always just leave and assume something equivalent or better will come along later.

So how do you present the player with a choice where they know that foregoing this opportunity means missing out on something they won't be easily able to replace?

One random thought: limit the total supply of certain items over the course of the game. So e.g. there can be at most 50 Potions of Strength ever generated. This acts as a sort of weak "no-preserve mode". Of course it also goes against the infinite-dungeon ethos, but we could also just make it so that after the last potion is generated, the rarity gets greatly increased. You can still find more if you really need them, but they won't be easy to find.

If you do that, then you can start just outright telling the player what's in each vault -- put a sign up outside saying "This vault has 1 Scroll of Word of Destruction, 1 Potion of Constitution, and Mordenkeinan's Escapes" and the player knows that they need to go after a certain number of such vaults or other challenges if they want to have what they need for the endgame.