What Eddie Plays

[Derakon]

@Derakon:
I just don't get this. If you've had enough of a particular monster, just don't attack anymore. Avoiding hounds is pretty easy once you have ESP. And orcs become nothing more than speed bumps, literally, pretty quickly.

The intent was to communicate "Okay, you've killed hundreds of these things, they're clearly not a threat any more, so we're going to remove the XP from them but also make them non-entities". Maybe this isn't necessary, I'm just brainstorming here.

If you want to teach players, you can write a guide or make a "lets play", why would you want to change your game and annoy everyone else who is not interested in your teachings ? A tutorial mode is one thing, but altering all of the game for the purpose of teaching sounds like a very bad idea to me.
Try to make the best game you can and let the players worry about how to play it. They will surprise you.

There's different kinds of teaching in games. The kind you describe is very intrusive and didactic, and I agree it's almost always a bad thing. But if you can subtly guide the player to do the right thing, then a) they don't get frustrated by getting stuck, b) they feel clever for figuring stuff out "on their own", and c) they don't even realize you're helping them! That kind of guidance is pretty much unalloyed good.

Go replay Portal with the dev commentary sometime and you'll see how much time they dedicated to guiding players through their puzzles without making said guidance obvious. The amount of effort that must be expended to get a player in an FPS to look up is amusing. (EDIT: or watch this analysis of the opening stage of Mega Man X and how it compares to later games by the same devs that aren't as elegantly-made).

The Angband parallel, then, is to figure out how to guide players to play in ways that aren't badly self-destructive without outright telling them "the way you play is about to get you killed". It's a tricky problem, not least because of Angband's roguelike nature (and thus, procedurally-generated content with wildly random threat types).

[Pete Mack]

TJS:
It depends on how you play the game. The only challenges you need face are Sauron and Morgoth. Anything else is either a risk, a distraction or an opportunity. The more the game diverges from that, the less it feels like a roguelike

[TJS]

We absolutely want to teach the player that there are times when they should just leave the level. If you look at moderately-experienced newbies, one of their leading causes of death is sticking around on the level because they wanted to see a vault through to the end, or they insisted on killing every unique when they found them, etc.

Ideally at the time a player figures out that they can flee levels, they'll also figure out that they aren't really missing anything important by doing so, either -- whatever was on the level that they didn't see, will be replaced by equivalent content on the next level. Nothing in Angband is ever lost unless you're playing no-preserve mode, and the only time fleeing a level has any remotely significant penalty is when you're playing forced-descent. Even then you have something like twice as much game content as you actually need to put together a winning build.

I dunno, encouraging the player to avoid any interesting and challenging parts of a level doesn't seem to be the right way of going about things to me.

[fizzix]

One reason I play Angband and not LoL or other games that are designed around "teaching players" and psychology is that it doesnt constantly annoy me with achievements I dont care about or - heaven forbid - popups. If you go that route, you should also consider using popups!

In all seriousness, the way I'd implement "achievements" is just a notice board in town that you could check if you so chose. It could also be displayed as a dump option on character death, and something you could check on the info screen (where you can see the other town stuff).

[Pete Mack]

@Derakon:
I just don't get this. If you've had enough of a particular monster, just don't attack anymore. Avoiding hounds is pretty easy once you have ESP. And orcs become nothing more than speed bumps, literally, pretty quickly.

[Estie]

One reason I play Angband and not LoL or other games that are designed around "teaching players" and psychology is that it doesnt constantly annoy me with achievements I dont care about or - heaven forbid - popups. If you go that route, you should also consider using popups!

The red dragon breathes fire. You die. Popup a window, telling you: "You have gained the achievement: burnt to a crisp. In Angband, certain monsters use elemental attacks. To protect from that, use an item that gives resistance to that element."

If you want to teach players, you can write a guide or make a "lets play", why would you want to change your game and annoy everyone else who is not interested in your teachings ? A tutorial mode is one thing, but altering all of the game for the purpose of teaching sounds like a very bad idea to me.
Try to make the best game you can and let the players worry about how to play it. They will surprise you.

[Derakon]

"You have unlocked achievement: Slay 1000 zephyr hounds. The town minstrel has composed a song in your honor, or would have if you didn't keep butchering the singing happy drunks."

Yeah, see, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Marginally more seriously, maybe once you kill enough of a type of monster, they start running away from you and refusing to attack you (including casting spells). The game could still generate them (to avoid throwing the composition of the dungeon out of whack) but they wouldn't be a threat any more. I imagine players would probably enjoy seeing the hordes of orcs flee from their terrible visage.

Just make sure to give such terrified creatures the ability to swap places with other monsters, so they don't gum up the dungeon.

[fizzix]

It might suffice to give players a completely nominal reward -- that is, one that has almost no gameplay significance but is still something. I mean, people don't really complain much about killing packs of Fire Hounds even when they're level 40 and the 10 XP (or however much it is) per hound is completely swamped by a single young dragon, let alone an actually significant threat.

"You have unlocked achievement: Slay 1000 zephyr hounds. The town minstrel has composed a song in your honor, or would have if you didn't keep butchering the singing happy drunks."

[Derakon]

So Sil also uses a similar EXP scheme to Eddie's (although there exp gained is halved for each monster killed). I think it works reasonably well for Sil. We could think about something like that for angband. The trick will be to make things like dropless monster packs less frustrating to deal with.

It might suffice to give players a completely nominal reward -- that is, one that has almost no gameplay significance but is still something. I mean, people don't really complain much about killing packs of Fire Hounds even when they're level 40 and the 10 XP (or however much it is) per hound is completely swamped by a single young dragon, let alone an actually significant threat.

The reward doesn't even necessarily need to be experience, if you can think of something else that would work mechanically. I mean, you could make it be something like "+.1 to the level of the next dropped item" if you could figure out a way to explain that that didn't sound gamey as hell.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, player psychology is weird.

[fizzix]

So Sil also uses a similar EXP scheme to Eddie's (although there exp gained is halved for each monster killed). I think it works reasonably well for Sil. We could think about something like that for angband. The trick will be to make things like dropless monster packs less frustrating to deal with.

[Derakon]

If we want to teach the player not to explore/clear an entire level (and I'm not sure we do actually want that, what's wrong with clearing levels?)...

We absolutely want to teach the player that there are times when they should just leave the level. If you look at moderately-experienced newbies, one of their leading causes of death is sticking around on the level because they wanted to see a vault through to the end, or they insisted on killing every unique when they found them, etc.

Ideally at the time a player figures out that they can flee levels, they'll also figure out that they aren't really missing anything important by doing so, either -- whatever was on the level that they didn't see, will be replaced by equivalent content on the next level. Nothing in Angband is ever lost unless you're playing no-preserve mode, and the only time fleeing a level has any remotely significant penalty is when you're playing forced-descent. Even then you have something like twice as much game content as you actually need to put together a winning build.

[TJS]

Come on. You and I both know what kind of game play hounds in 3.0.x produced. Every single level you had to sit around the corner and wait for each hound to individually poke its head around so you can snipe it. It's not fun, it's tedious. The only difficulty it really introduced was in overcoming the urge to just quit the game and play something else.

Not only that, the hounds didn't even successfully serve the purpose of forcing players to descend. They just forced players not to hang out in specific ranges of levels where they were the most common.

I remember detecting one time and there were almost 100 hounds visible in the detection radius in 3.0.x.

Dealing with hounds wasn't just boring but incredible time consuming.

If we want to teach the player not to explore/clear an entire level (and I'm not sure we do actually want that, what's wrong with clearing levels?) then we could do it by having harder monsters come up the stairs from lower levels after being on a level too long. Or have ethereal creatures slowly drift in from the edges. Anything but hundreds of hounds every level.

[Bogatyr]

That's a different problem. My opinion remains consistent on this. A fixed amount of exp per monster type killed is my answer. I play with 1 exp per monster type killed and 1 exp per flavor learned, which works fine. I wouldn't necessarily argue with a different ratio for kills vs learning.

I nerfed hounds a bit in my own way, so it's fair to say that I'm not entirely on board with 3.0, but I'm less on board with 3.1+.

I will state that the numbers of *summoned* hounds in 3.0 are absurd. I'm not entirely insane.

Yeah, mystics and rangers are incredibly dangerous in 3.0 at hound depths, I never fight them in an open room. In fact I just avoid them for the most part unless I take take them out quickly.

[PowerDiver]

(I used to pick up well over 100k EXP from a single pack of chaos or ethereal hounds. Just over the top.)

That's a different problem. My opinion remains consistent on this. A fixed amount of exp per monster type killed is my answer. I play with 1 exp per monster type killed and 1 exp per flavor learned, which works fine. I wouldn't necessarily argue with a different ratio for kills vs learning.

I nerfed hounds a bit in my own way, so it's fair to say that I'm not entirely on board with 3.0, but I'm less on board with 3.1+.

I will state that the numbers of *summoned* hounds in 3.0 are absurd. I'm not entirely insane.

[Derakon]

At least Ethereal Hounds swarm you, which makes them a much more interesting enemy to deal with. I wouldn't mind huge packs of Ethereal Hounds so much; they'd be a good match to the huge packs of Dreads that sometimes show up.

The other hound types are mostly just an introduction to what the different elements do; beyond that, once you know how to handle one hound type, you can use the same tactics on the other types.