The Future of Angband?

[luneya]

The problem with caverns is that their layout is just too wide-open. I'm not going to venture into a cavern level past 1000' without perfect monster detection (i.e. able to detect non-evil invisible monsters) because it's just too dangerous. If the generator could be modified to greatly reduce the number of tiles in LOS at a time, and to add more 1-tile chokepoints, then it'd be more worthwhile to explore them.

In my experience, the biggest inconvenience with caverns is that light spells only cover a small radius around the player--a considerable nerfing compared to the full-room-coverage of most open spaces in a normal level. Magical detection is important, but it's no substitute for being able to light things up and actually see all monsters that are within LOS (and thus able to cast spells on you).

Some possible improvements:
1. Allow caverns to be lit all at once. Arguably overpowers the light spell, but this should solve the problem of players skipping caverns without attempting to explore.
2. Define each segment of a cavern as a "room" for purposes of the light spell.
3. Change the light spell to illuminate all tiles within LOS rather than depending on the layout of rooms. I think this would actually be a good thing as a global change, but making this behavior happen only in cavern levels is also an option.
4. Eliminate cavern levels entirely.

Needless to say, references to light spell apply equally to the clerical spell, the arcane spell, and objects like the Phial and the staff of light. This isn't the sort of situation where we want to give an advantage to certain classes.

[Nivra]

Moving away from the cavern level discussion, I had a couple thoughts inspired by two of Egavagtip's ideas:

(1) fungus covered walls: I imagined a very flammable fungus. Imagine a corridor covered in fungus. If I throw a flaming flask/firebolt/arrow of fire on one tile, the entire corridor erupts in flame, damaging everything in it, including @. This could be extended to generalized terrain modifiers that spread effects (e.g. wading in a room flooded with water(lightning), or dense fog(frost), or a room made of wood/metal that's acid susceptible and creates rubble.

(2) artifacts/ego items could be embedded in rock. Maybe make it easier so that it's only embedded in magma that's exposed on at least one side, so you don't need detection to see it. It would make sense in epic battles that an artifact may get stuck in some molten magma flow and hardened over time. Only the ones enchanted could so survive.

[Nivra]

The themed level talk got me thinking about one of my annoyances. The balance between inventory and situational planning/use.

Rather than just equipping a resFire item for flame levels, it would be nice to also imbibe a fire resist potion.

However, that's not really possible. Like blessing scrolls before them, !roFire almost always get squelched(tossed from @'s kit) fairly early on. There are so many situational consumables that I never hold onto, simply because of inventory issues.

I understand part of angband is the inventory management dance. Otoh, to have all these extra flavor items quickly become obsolete (some get auto-squished the moment I see them) seems ... less than ideal.

I'm not sure what the fix is. Perhaps a limited potion bag or scroll box similar to the quiver? But maybe change stack size to 10, so that it still takes a # of inventory slots when I descend with 20 !clw and 20 ?phase. This would allow some limited hoarding of situational items such as !resFire and ?blessing.

[Nomad]

The themed level talk got me thinking about one of my annoyances. The balance between inventory and situational planning/use.

Rather than just equipping a resFire item for flame levels, it would be nice to also imbibe a fire resist potion.

However, that's not really possible. Like blessing scrolls before them, !roFire almost always get squelched(tossed from @'s kit) fairly early on. There are so many situational consumables that I never hold onto, simply because of inventory issues.

Maybe one answer is to combine themed rooms/levels with themed drops? If it's common for fire monsters to be found together, and also common for fire monsters to drop potions of Resist Fire, then you'll be in a situation where killing the first couple will drop potions useful against the others. Similarly, you could have treasure stashes on themed levels that contain potions/jewellery/armour with the right resistances or ammo and weapons with the right slays to match the monsters on that level. Maybe you wouldn't normally keep a weapon of Slay Troll, but if you find it on the "troll town" level, it could be worth equipping for a while. (It even makes a vague sort of in-game sense if you assume the monsters have killed lots of previous adventurers and seized all the level-appropriate equipment they brought with them. )

[budswell]

The variant I played the most is ToME2, but I am not sure if I should recommend it. It was polished for the day, but if you are used to vanilla standards, it will seem outdated.
There are various ways to play and win that game that are completely different from anything in vanilla...

There was a bloke on the ToME forums ("wastrel" I think) who wrote a "day in the life" of a win with a halfling whose only offense was charm monster and setting traps. I was astounded. Unfortunately the old forums are gone, so cannot link to it.