Tweet
I'm a new Angband player, and after having extensively played other roguelikes like NetHack where spoilers are pretty much required, I wonder how the Angband community thinks about them. Does the community consider full monster spoilers cheating, and do most players use / not use them?
-
-
They aren't typically viewed as that bad. They're a lot less important than NetHack, but they do still include some things to watch out for - mostly which enemies can 1-shot you from range. Mostly unresisted breath attacks.I'm trying to think of an analogy, and the best I can come up with is Angband is like fishing for sharks, and Sil is like hunting a bear with a pocket knife and a pair of chopsticks. It's not great. -Nick -
Yeah, the only "insider knowledge" that's really vital to successful play is knowing which monsters can one-shot you, and as a corollary, how to avoid getting into situations in which you can get one-shot. There's nothing game-changing the way knowing about Elbereth is in NetHack. And the vast majority of players do not consider use of monster spoilers to be cheating.Comment
-
I used to play through several games, probing absolutely everything, even going back to town and descending a second time just to probe every little monster that I missed, and on second or third games, leaving every unique alive that hadn't been probed then returning to town and descending until I found them all. Even did it again at Christmas once, just to add Red-hatted elves and Father Christmas to the file. A painfully time consuming way to get an absolutely full knowledge file.
I tend to run with a full knowledge lore.txt file now. I've played the game so many times now that I know what all the monsters do, but I still have "senior" moments when I forget the difference between say, a Nightwalker and a Nightcrawler. I don't consider it cheating, but rather obviating the need for me to take notes. Trying to remember which monster does what or playing multiple "probing" games no longer interests me.“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadComment
-
Very good example. I too always wonder which is this, the one that breathes nether or the one that hits to disenchant. Or were they both on just one of the types, in which case which is it? Can't remember now either.
Not that that has much difference to my playing though. Just that when I don't have full memory I tend to use rDisen as main resist, and when I do it is a swap (if there is another, better alternative).Comment
-
I wouldn't call it cheating, and I don't judge anybody for using them, but I just don't feel right about using full spoilers in my own play.Comment
-
To me it's all about player preferences. If you're the kind of person who likes to discover these things organically, then don't use spoilers. If you're the kind of person who likes all the information up front, then definitely do use them. I wouldn't judge you either way.Comment
-
Agreed, and I think that most folks (at least here on oook) feel mostly similarly.
I don't like the perverse incentive to do as Ingwe described and run a boring probe-centric character just to have a "legit" monster memory savefile. But I also don't like for unspoiled players (or runs) to feel devalued...it *is* more challenging to play without the spoiler and that perhaps deserves some recognition e.g. as an ironman option or something similar. I started started out with no spoilers, moved to spoilers, and now sometimes use spoil runs but sometimes like to test my memory (and sanity...) with no-spoil characters.
The Timo-style memory-by-playing-and-dying does I think deserve some sort of credit. Perhaps these things would nicely wrap together as an ironman_ignorance birth option that has no starting memory (or even no accumulating memory!) and removes probing. That could be fun for challenging oneself and displaying a certain type of prowess. I sense in e.g. Timo's posts (though maybe I'm sensing something not really there) a certain distaste for devaluing characters that do it the old fashioned way, and frankly I agree with the sentiment.Comment
-
My style doesn't include dying
I'm just really careful around monsters I don't know. You don't really need to know what the monster does, but you do need to know what the monster might be able to do. If you are prepared for all possible instances of instant death you don't die encountering unknown monster. If the game introduces new way of instantly killing you I would probably die once to that, but only once. Key is to learn from your mistakes. If you die analyze what killed you and figure out how to avoid that situation next time.Comment
Comment