Stealth and monster sleep

[Nick]

This sounds a bit like change for the sake of change. Is there a list of issues and desiderata on this somewhere?

I have had in mind (and have mentioned occasionally) the stealth mechanic as one for possible changes. On looking more closely, I actually quite like the current system.

One of the things I am trying to do, though, is make the game's mechanics more simple and intuitive where possible. There are many pieces of code which were aimed at optimisation which is no longer needed, or which use clever programming tricks at the expense of clarity, or both. I now understand the stealth system quite well, but it took some effort to get my head around it. So in this particular case I am aiming to modify the code in such a way that the gameplay is very similar, but the effects of changes in stealth are more transparent both to players and to those reading the code.

[Derakon]

I applaud this thinking, and will note that I'm pretty sure that before I made a forum post dissecting the stealth code, I'm pretty sure that only maybe one or two people on the forums had a clue how stealth actually worked. You shouldn't have to go dig up old forums posts just to understand core gameplay mechanics. And ideally, core gameplay mechanics should be explainable in only a couple of sentences.

[Pete Mack]

@Nick--
Thanks for this explanation. Very helpful to have rationales for changes like this written down somewhere. One question: will perfect stealth still be possible? It's fun to have such a different kind of zero-fail possible. I Recall a character (kobold rogue) tiptoeing through a room with Huang, Kronos, and another high monster sleeping like babies. It's fun to choose fights that way.

[Nick]

One question: will perfect stealth still be possible? It's fun to have such a different kind of zero-fail possible. I Recall a character (kobold rogue) tiptoeing through a room with Huang, Kronos, and another high monster sleeping like babies. It's fun to choose fights that way.

I'll be aiming to keep the full range from pretty much everything wakes up before you get to it to pretty much nothing does.

[Pete Mack]

Perfect stealth is different: nothing ever wakes up. Only ' ever vigilant' monsters will attack you by their initiative (of course, actual fighting will eventually waken monsters.)

I would prefer as well that sound attacks to waken monsters too, based on attack HP and distance from source. Shards too, and possibly lightning.

[Nick]

Perfect stealth is different: nothing ever wakes up. Only ' ever vigilant' monsters will attack you by their initiative (of course, actual fighting will eventually waken monsters.)

Perfect stealth is 30, although within 3 or 4 points of that effectively nothing wakes up. It is hard to reach, though; the maximum innate stealth is a CL50 Hobbit Rogue with 12, so you would need a lot of stealth bonuses.

I would prefer as well that sound attacks to waken monsters too, based on attack HP and distance from source. Shards too, and possibly lightning.

This is certainly a possibility, although I thin starting simple is a good idea. there's also the question of whether a monster tracking by sound should head for the player, or just the loudest noise.

[Patashu]

If you go with 'head towards the noise that they heard', Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has an implementation of this that you can use for inspiration.

[Pete Mack]

@Nick--
Perfect stealth is actually 28. player_state->noise < 2*2*2 is equivalent to player_state->noise = 1.

So there's a 1/1024 chance every 10 ticks of a monster's sleep being decremented at this level. That means Huan will sleep for an average of ~700 turns when the player is right beside him. If the player further away, he'll sleep for an average of up to 10,000 turns.

[Estie]

Stealth could be made more realisic in various ways, but the thing is that as it is, it is very good: it plays a role in some stages of the game for some characters, and it feels like real stealth in the sense that you get to act and the environment doesnt. As opposed, for example, to the way stealth is handled in tome4: it is more realistic there because light radius will ruin your stealth, but as a consequence you end up bumbling about in the dark which is the opposite of what the advantage of real stealth is. You do get a combat bonus when attacking while hiden, so stealth is not useless: but it would more accurately be named song of battle or something - its just a combat buff as trade off for reduced perception.

I am so happy with vanilla stealth that I would be scared to make any changes. If at all, I could see the focus shifted away from items more towards classes/races, to make it more predictable whether youll end up with a stealthy way of playing or not. But even that might not be a good idea.

[Derakon]

I'd be interested in seeing what it's like to have more active things that the player can do to control their stealth. Not so much "some actions are noisier than others", but more like "there are items you can use to temporarily get better stealth". A mushroom that makes you transparent, for example, or a status effect that makes a specific targeted monster less likely to wake up.

[t4nk]

If you go with 'head towards the noise that they heard', Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has an implementation of this that you can use for inspiration.

More like an inspiration for not doing it? In DCSS it just promotes luring monsters one by one. Even crawl developers (e.g., dpeg, Lasty) think it's a bad thing.

[Nick]

Thanks for the very helpful discussion. I'm going to go with absolutely no change to stealth for now.

The one change that I think might be worth considering is the fact that it's straight line distance to the player that determines how much a monster wakes up, rather than "sound distance". In this situation:

############
#          #
#          #
# @      o #
########## #
########## #
  T        #
############

the troll would currently be waking up more than twice as fast as the orc, which seems like the wrong way round to me.

[Patashu]

More like an inspiration for not doing it? In DCSS it just promotes luring monsters one by one. Even crawl developers (e.g., dpeg, Lasty) think it's a bad thing.

As a DCSS veteran I agree with your viewpoint

Being able to so easily and safely fight monsters one by one is a weak point for DCSS. It's been proposed at various times to add 'pack coherency' where packs of enemies tend to move together, and if one of them hears a noise they all check it out together, but it's never been implemented, I'm not sure if for philosophical, balance or technical reasons.

[Pete Mack]

@Nick--That's a really minor issue. You could treat LOS monsters differently. That's easy, and makes sense. The spell effects sounds makes more sense to me. An alarm trap wakes monsters up, but a Great Wyrm of Law doesn't. It has the benefit of adding a negative side effect to the sound ball stunning spell. (Ice storm should make noise too.)