In a recent thread Nick mentioned that he things angband should focus more on tactics and avoid strategic gameplay. I only partially agree, so I'd like to write down my thoughts.
First a definition for those not familiar with the jargon. When we talk about tactics we talk about decisions in the immediate encounter. Do I attack or do I cast a spell? What buff should I use? Is there more advantageous terrain that I can fight in? Should I retreat/escape? The consequences for these decisions are immediate.
Strategic thinking is more long term. Do I buy the potion of strength or save my gold? Do I try to kill this unique at the expense of some consumables, or should I just avoid it? Which armor should I keep? These decisions have effects that play out over the long term. If you buy the potion you might not have enough money for the wand of teleport other that shows up on your next trip, and so on.
Sometimes the line between strategic and tactical gameplay is blurred. In the heat of the battle you need to decide whether to use your !healing potion or if !CCW is enough. If you use the healing, you might not have it for the next battle. But if you only use !CCW, you might need to use a lot of them, and you might even die.
All roguelikes have tactical gameplay. In some way, it's really the bread and butter of the genre. However, there's a lot more variety in the strategic gameplay. Typically, roguelikes include strategic gameplay in 3 separate axes.
1) character development: choosing what skills and abilities your character will get
2) Equipment/inventory management: deciding what equipment to keep and what to leave behind. I also throw in the use of gold here.
3) Consumables management: deciding when to use powerful items with limited uses. This is the one that tends to bleed over with tactical gameplay the most.
The tricky part about strategic gameplay elements in roguelikes is that the games tend to be long, and you don't want a player to be blithely playing along until they reach a point where they suddenly realize that the decision they made 20 hours ago has caused the game to be unwinnable. Such is the pitfall of strategic gameplay.
Angband pretty much has nothing with regard to character development after the character selection screen. You don't really "build" a character in angband. The inventory management is also not too difficult unless you're playing ironman games. It excels the most with consumables management, and this is where the most interesting long term decisions tend to lie in Angband.
I'd like to compare some other games approaches to this. The other roguelikes I'm most familiar with are Tome v4 (Tales of Maj'Eyal), DCSS and Sil. So I'll use those.
Tome v4 is probably the most pathological of them all. It completely eliminates consumables management. Furthermore equipment/inventory management is almost completely unimportant. You can pretty much carry whatever you need, and the permanence of levels means you can always just leave something for later if it turns out you can't carry it. That leaves character development, and it certainly has a ton of that. You probably can spend more time trying to figure out what skills to take in the game than any other strategic decision. Also it means that choosing a bad path is going to doom your character, since winning often requires exploiting some powerful synergies in the skill tree. Tome v4 winds up being a completely different roguelike from others in that there is no bleed over between tactical and strategic decisions. Every battle can be isolated and after it is over everything resets.
DCSS has character development, although it's not anywhere as intricate as Tome's, and is much more forgiving as far as path choice. It completely disregards inventory management, since again, you can always stash things for later. But it does have consumable management. And this is even more pronounced than in Angband, since the number of any consumable is finite (albeit unknown).
Sil includes all three axes of development. A skill tree that is extremely difficult to master (the hardest part of the game for me, tbh). Consumables that are finite as in DCSS, and the inventory difficulties of an ironman angband game. The only compensation is that games of Sil tend to be a lot shorter, so the burn from a bad strategic decision is less painful.
Ok, so where does that leave us in Angband? I think not having a character development skill path is very reasonable. It's probably a good design choice for the game for a couple reasons. It's very new player friendly (the skill tree in Sil is a bit overwhelming, forget about Tome). And this is often where you are most likely to screw yourself early in a way that doesn't become apparent until much much later.
That leaves the other two axes, inventory and consumable management. Personally, I think the latter one should be the main area of strategic thinking in the game. Deciding when and how to use powerful items is key. Part of the design difficulty here comes with figuring out how to give the player these options, and we have a lot of room for improvement.
Inventory management is secondary, but perhaps it shouldn't be wholly abandoned. These are difficult choices and in many cases they may be interesting.
Now here's the major problem. If inventory management is a key feature of the strategic element, then it often reduces both the tactical richness *and* the consumable strategy. The first is easy to understand. If you can't afford to carry the scroll of dispel evil, then you'll never be presented with a decision of whether to use it or not. (for this, pretend that dispel evil is actually a fairly useful scroll.) The decision is forced, because you don't have the scroll. On the other hand, if you eliminate inventory management altogether, you are left with situations where you very well might always have the perfect answer for any situation. That's not good either.
The solutions I envision tend to have an inventory management problem that allows more diversity but less bulk. So you might be limited in how many !CCW you can carry, but you can carry a whole host of other types of potions. In my ideal game this also involves removing these consumables from the town altogether, since having a town that supplies an infinite amount of !CCW or arrows means that they're going to crowd out any other weaker but sometimes more situationally powerful options. I'm not sure what this looks like, but it probably involves setting up scenarios of interesting choices, and then figuring out how to produce an inventory problem where those scenarios present themselves.
Here are some examples:
5 !CCW or 1 !healing (assume you currently have 5 !CCW and 1 !healing already)
5? Phase door or 2? teleportation (assume you have 3 !Phase and a staff of teleportation with 3 charges)
1! restore life levels or 2! resist heat and cold (assume you cannot get !rll from town and you have no other source of temp rfire/rcold)
1 rod of TO vs 1 wand of TO with 7 charges (assume you have neither)
etc.
Personally, I think the game would be richer if these choices were presented to the player.
I have more to write on this, but my lunch break is over and I have work meetings to go to.
First a definition for those not familiar with the jargon. When we talk about tactics we talk about decisions in the immediate encounter. Do I attack or do I cast a spell? What buff should I use? Is there more advantageous terrain that I can fight in? Should I retreat/escape? The consequences for these decisions are immediate.
Strategic thinking is more long term. Do I buy the potion of strength or save my gold? Do I try to kill this unique at the expense of some consumables, or should I just avoid it? Which armor should I keep? These decisions have effects that play out over the long term. If you buy the potion you might not have enough money for the wand of teleport other that shows up on your next trip, and so on.
Sometimes the line between strategic and tactical gameplay is blurred. In the heat of the battle you need to decide whether to use your !healing potion or if !CCW is enough. If you use the healing, you might not have it for the next battle. But if you only use !CCW, you might need to use a lot of them, and you might even die.
All roguelikes have tactical gameplay. In some way, it's really the bread and butter of the genre. However, there's a lot more variety in the strategic gameplay. Typically, roguelikes include strategic gameplay in 3 separate axes.
1) character development: choosing what skills and abilities your character will get
2) Equipment/inventory management: deciding what equipment to keep and what to leave behind. I also throw in the use of gold here.
3) Consumables management: deciding when to use powerful items with limited uses. This is the one that tends to bleed over with tactical gameplay the most.
The tricky part about strategic gameplay elements in roguelikes is that the games tend to be long, and you don't want a player to be blithely playing along until they reach a point where they suddenly realize that the decision they made 20 hours ago has caused the game to be unwinnable. Such is the pitfall of strategic gameplay.
Angband pretty much has nothing with regard to character development after the character selection screen. You don't really "build" a character in angband. The inventory management is also not too difficult unless you're playing ironman games. It excels the most with consumables management, and this is where the most interesting long term decisions tend to lie in Angband.
I'd like to compare some other games approaches to this. The other roguelikes I'm most familiar with are Tome v4 (Tales of Maj'Eyal), DCSS and Sil. So I'll use those.
Tome v4 is probably the most pathological of them all. It completely eliminates consumables management. Furthermore equipment/inventory management is almost completely unimportant. You can pretty much carry whatever you need, and the permanence of levels means you can always just leave something for later if it turns out you can't carry it. That leaves character development, and it certainly has a ton of that. You probably can spend more time trying to figure out what skills to take in the game than any other strategic decision. Also it means that choosing a bad path is going to doom your character, since winning often requires exploiting some powerful synergies in the skill tree. Tome v4 winds up being a completely different roguelike from others in that there is no bleed over between tactical and strategic decisions. Every battle can be isolated and after it is over everything resets.
DCSS has character development, although it's not anywhere as intricate as Tome's, and is much more forgiving as far as path choice. It completely disregards inventory management, since again, you can always stash things for later. But it does have consumable management. And this is even more pronounced than in Angband, since the number of any consumable is finite (albeit unknown).
Sil includes all three axes of development. A skill tree that is extremely difficult to master (the hardest part of the game for me, tbh). Consumables that are finite as in DCSS, and the inventory difficulties of an ironman angband game. The only compensation is that games of Sil tend to be a lot shorter, so the burn from a bad strategic decision is less painful.
Ok, so where does that leave us in Angband? I think not having a character development skill path is very reasonable. It's probably a good design choice for the game for a couple reasons. It's very new player friendly (the skill tree in Sil is a bit overwhelming, forget about Tome). And this is often where you are most likely to screw yourself early in a way that doesn't become apparent until much much later.
That leaves the other two axes, inventory and consumable management. Personally, I think the latter one should be the main area of strategic thinking in the game. Deciding when and how to use powerful items is key. Part of the design difficulty here comes with figuring out how to give the player these options, and we have a lot of room for improvement.
Inventory management is secondary, but perhaps it shouldn't be wholly abandoned. These are difficult choices and in many cases they may be interesting.
Now here's the major problem. If inventory management is a key feature of the strategic element, then it often reduces both the tactical richness *and* the consumable strategy. The first is easy to understand. If you can't afford to carry the scroll of dispel evil, then you'll never be presented with a decision of whether to use it or not. (for this, pretend that dispel evil is actually a fairly useful scroll.) The decision is forced, because you don't have the scroll. On the other hand, if you eliminate inventory management altogether, you are left with situations where you very well might always have the perfect answer for any situation. That's not good either.
The solutions I envision tend to have an inventory management problem that allows more diversity but less bulk. So you might be limited in how many !CCW you can carry, but you can carry a whole host of other types of potions. In my ideal game this also involves removing these consumables from the town altogether, since having a town that supplies an infinite amount of !CCW or arrows means that they're going to crowd out any other weaker but sometimes more situationally powerful options. I'm not sure what this looks like, but it probably involves setting up scenarios of interesting choices, and then figuring out how to produce an inventory problem where those scenarios present themselves.
Here are some examples:
5 !CCW or 1 !healing (assume you currently have 5 !CCW and 1 !healing already)
5? Phase door or 2? teleportation (assume you have 3 !Phase and a staff of teleportation with 3 charges)
1! restore life levels or 2! resist heat and cold (assume you cannot get !rll from town and you have no other source of temp rfire/rcold)
1 rod of TO vs 1 wand of TO with 7 charges (assume you have neither)
etc.
Personally, I think the game would be richer if these choices were presented to the player.
I have more to write on this, but my lunch break is over and I have work meetings to go to.
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