I want more hitpoints

[Nick]

I hope this point doesn't get lost in the rest of this thread. Angband is unlike most games that I've played in that it seems to teach new players terrible habits. I had the exact same experience, playing in what I now realise was a ridiculous manner for years until I read Eddie's posts. Players who find their way here get plenty of good advice, which they may or may not choose to take, but what happens to those who don't? Fixing this problem, if people agree that it is a problem, is probably hard, but here's a relatively easy change that could be made: Introduce a town unique like FA's Complainer, but instead of random bug reports have him (or her, or it) dispense snippets of useful, but not obvious, advice.

That's already basically in V - the shopkeepers give hints (from the hints.txt file).

[the Invisible Stalker]

That's already basically in V - the shopkeepers give hints (from the hints.txt file).

That's good. It's been quite a while since I played V.

[Bostock]

If you'll pardon my laziness (not downloading 4.1 to check it out), have the hints been updated in 4.1? The hints in 4.0.5 contain some stuff that is irrelevant or not very relevant or misleading in that version.

[Derakon]

let me make you a V example.

i'm DL33 and i melee an orc .. or something. Uruk, halforc, something that dies in 2 rounds at most. the key here, is that i have meleed a million of these things.

i hit it, my hp goes down. i hit it again, my hp goes has fallen from 250 to 100. my reaction is "wth ?". i take 1 more step in an empty room, dead.

some invisible dragon killed me.

So what did you learn from this encounter?

[Gwarl]

I think Angband's early game is far too easy. I made it to DL27 on literally my first attempt (completely unspoiled). So much power creep has made the first 10-20 levels pretty much just a matter of finding the stairs down.

Potions of cure light wounds cost 20 gold. Scrolls of phase door cost 15. There are infinite amounts of both readily available from the start. There's nothing on the first few floors that can't be beaten with these two consumables alone.

[Pete Mack]

@Sky: Diving, at least at a modest rate, is not a "1337 skill." It is much, much easier than you seem to think. You mentioned at one point killing cutpurses for EXP. The trouble with this is cutpurses give terrible EXP. If you were killing a pack of wolves instead, you'd already be DL 9. The trick about killing wolves is you can't afford to kill all the orcs between you and the wolves, unless you get lucky with a wand of light. So don't try to kill them until you get reliable lighting bolt. It's not elite. It's a technique that can be learned fairly easily.

[Bostock]

Lightning bolt... or crossbow bolts.

[Sky]

jesus derakon, talking with you is like hitting my head against a brick wall.

So what did you learn from this encounter?

nothing.

which is the point of my entire post, and thread, which you conveniently decided to edit so that it suits your purpose, while ignore how i proceeded to explain the reasoning behind it.

Angband requires counterintuitive playing. As such, it doesn't take off, while everyone and their dog knows Dwarf Fortress, Pixel Dungeon, FTL, Darkest Dungeon, or even Dark Souls.

New players, even those who try hard, will simply not come to the realization that a ring of see invisible is a better choice than a OBVIOUSLY MASSIVE INCREASE IN DAMAGE. They will not think "i have learned that status variants such as rPois and pConf are more important than damage output" but rather they will think "the game killed me this is a stupid game".

We no longer live in the 90s. people no longer like to nerd out to games demanding a complex understanding of hidden rules, but rather they want to play the game and make it up as they go along, which is the reason why games like Unreal Tournament have failed and games like Halo and CoD are multimillion dollar franchises.
And you genuinely advise that "the only way to play V is through a series of obscure rules which no sane player will discover on their own unless they band their head against the wall until it bleeds .. or join the forums and get the spoilers from us, and even then it's not guaranteed".

In game design, you will always have to choose between depth and playability. Agband sure has a ton of depth, but very, very little playability. There is no moment where you can say oh, im way over my DL minimum, i'll just kill these orcs, because you will lose invariably to one of the thousand variables which are impossible to learn in a short .. reasonable amount of gametime.

Pixel Dungeon is even harder than Angband. You get 1 food, and earn 1 food per level, SOMETIMES 2. Food is your hp, AND YOUR FOOD. You will simply starve unless you dive.

But, when you have a sword that does 12 damage, and you find a sword that does 16 damage, you can say "oh good, now i do 4 more damage".
In Angband, the same would result in the player coming to the forums and everyone telling them "idiot, everyone knows the 12 damage sword is SO MUCH BETTER than the 16 damage one, and you would know too if you have observed a small line of text that appeared when you killed the 74th mob of a specific type under some particular light conditions".




there's plenty of people here on these forums. have them all take 1 friend and make them play V without help. Set a number of new players they can have. Then count at what DL they died.

You like statistics, right? Let's see what portion of the game content remains unexplored to an average angband player.

I already did mine. the guy died in town.

[Derakon]

jesus derakon, talking with you is like hitting my head against a brick wall.

I could say the same thing about you. I appreciate your perspective, but you're expecting the game to do a lot more for you than it does or should (in my opinion) do. Angband expects you to experiment, fail, observe, learn, and demonstrate mastery. Every death should be a learning opportunity; if nothing could be learned, then that is a flaw in the design.

However, learning requires effort on the part of the player, too, which is why I asked you what you learned. Here are the lessons you should have learned from that encounter:

1) Watch your health. You had three turns between when you started the fight and when you died. The game has a low hitpoint warning that should have alerted you that something was going on.

2) Watch the message log. You should have seen messages like "It hits you." in addition to the messages from fighting the orc.

3) Learn to run away. If you're taking damage that quickly, you should not be where you are.

4) Relatedly, learn to have escape items in your inventory, and learn to use them. You must be prepared for things to go badly before they go badly.

You're a new player, and as such bring a valuable perspective to this community. However, that does not make your perspective inherently right -- at least, not all the time.

I will say that you've reminded me of a cool feature I've seen a couple of modern roguelikes implement -- a post-mortem that gives canned advice to the player. I'll go ahead and make a new thread in Development for that.

[Gwarl]

jesus derakon, talking with you is like hitting my head against a brick wall.

When everyone else is telling you the sky is blue, but you keep insisting it's green, it's possible that you're the one who's colourblind.

nothing.

Then you only have yourself to blame for making the same mistake again.

Angband requires counterintuitive playing. As such, it doesn't take off, while everyone and their dog knows Dwarf Fortress, Pixel Dungeon, FTL, Darkest Dungeon, or even Dark Souls.

Angband has been going strong for over 25 years. Sure, it's not a huge buzz, but there are a steady trickle of players, who come and go, and it's not going anywhere. Where's Diablo on your list? Most of these games will be a flash in the pan compared to Angband. (Dwarf fortress isn't going anywhere either, but I'm not convinced people actually play it so much as mention it because they're hipsters).

New players, even those who try hard, will simply not come to the realization that a ring of see invisible is a better choice than a OBVIOUSLY MASSIVE INCREASE IN DAMAGE. They will not think "i have learned that status variants such as rPois and pConf are more important than damage output" but rather they will think "the game killed me this is a stupid game".

A ring of see invisible isn't a better choice. It's useful in situations in which you need to see the invisible. You only need one method of seeing invisible - potions work for example. Carry those and you can ignore the ring. There's nothing at all counterintuitive about this. I'd go so far as to say it makes perfect sense.

We no longer live in the 90s. people no longer like to nerd out to games demanding a complex understanding of hidden rules, but rather they want to play the game and make it up as they go along, which is the reason why games like Unreal Tournament have failed and games like Halo and CoD are multimillion dollar franchises.
And you genuinely advise that "the only way to play V is through a series of obscure rules which no sane player will discover on their own unless they band their head against the wall until it bleeds .. or join the forums and get the spoilers from us, and even then it's not guaranteed".

We like to nerd out to games demanding a complex understanding of (actually very comprehensively explained and well detailed) rules. We like this game a lot more than we like CoD. Trying to turn angband into CoD wouldn't get us CoD players and even if it did why would we want that? Certainly not worth sacrificing the game we enjoy to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I would prefer braindead mainstream gaming getting a little more punishing and difficult, rather than the few games we have that are punishing and difficult getting toned down.

In game design, you will always have to choose between depth and playability. Agband sure has a ton of depth, but very, very little playability. There is no moment where you can say oh, im way over my DL minimum, i'll just kill these orcs, because you will lose invariably to one of the thousand variables which are impossible to learn in a short .. reasonable amount of gametime.

I honestly have no idea what you're saying here

But, when you have a sword that does 12 damage, and you find a sword that does 16 damage, you can say "oh good, now i do 4 more damage".
In Angband, the same would result in the player coming to the forums and everyone telling them "idiot, everyone knows the 12 damage sword is SO MUCH BETTER than the 16 damage one, and you would know too if you have observed a small line of text that appeared when you killed the 74th mob of a specific type under some particular light conditions".

No, 16 damage is still better than 12 damage in angband. The problem with angband IMO is that it has a habit of giving you a 100 damage dagger right away allowing you to basically skip the first 20 floors.

there's plenty of people here on these forums. have them all take 1 friend and make them play V without help. Set a number of new players they can have. Then count at what DL they died.

You like statistics, right? Let's see what portion of the game content remains unexplored to an average angband player.

I already did mine. the guy died in town.

Actually I remember now.. that DL27 death was my 2nd character, the first one did indeed die to a battle scarred veteran in the town. But I learned from that. My 3rd character got 1-shotted by an ancient green dragon on DL38. Took me a while to learn to handle ancient dragons.

You seem so completely opposed to everything angband is about.. can I ask what does appeal to you about the game?

[Egavactip]

Sky, I was sympathetic to you (as I believe some classes need a hit point floor for the first couple of levels) until your last message. Addressing your last message only, and none of your earlier ones, trotting out other games to throw at Angband is, well, stupid. Angband has lasted for decades--it is not an unsuccessful game. The problem is that you have played some other games and you think that Angband should play like those other games. But the key to understanding Angband is that it is *not* a hack and slash dungeon crawl game. It is a stealth and ninja game in the *guise* of a hack and slash dungeon crawl game. The lesson that repeated play of Angband teaches is that brute force--even for fighter types--cannot win the game for you. You will always need to know when to run away, when to avoid a fight. Sometimes the only way to win an encounter is not to have had it in the first place. Angband is designed this way. Just when you think you have gotten enough gear to be safe and you start getting cocky, the next tier of Angband nasties rises up to meet you and to show you that you have zero reason to be cocky. There are some circumstances even my most powerful characters ever will still simply avoid.

So, yes, contrary to what some other people have said here, super bad luck with hit points can indeed affect you in the early or even mid game (that's when I find it the most problematic). But even though that is the case, it only happens once in a while, not enough to unbalance the game. Most of the time, once you find your Angband groove, you can get by just by getting by. I hope you achieve that level of groovitude and can enjoy the game the way most veterans do.

[Pete Mack]

One reason we recommend diving faster is because losing a character at dl 40 is much less painful if it only took an hour of play to reach it.

Finally, there are user's guides for Angband around, with information that includes things like when FA/SI/rPois become nice to have, and when it becomes a real risk to do without unless you are playing a very careful game. And yes, it's quite possible to use them as swaps, so long as you remember to put them on when you need them. (From your death to an invisible dragon, you may conclude that you need SI almost all the time, except against selected dangerous enemies.)

[kandrc]

everyone and their dog knows Dwarf Fortress, Pixel Dungeon, FTL, Darkest Dungeon, or even Dark Souls.

Dwarf Fortress is the only one of these that I've ever heard of.

We no longer live in the 90s. people no longer like to nerd out to games demanding a complex understanding of hidden rules,

I'll give you that we no longer live in the 90s, but nobody wants nerdy complex games? Says who? In the 80s and 90s, games were hard. Some of us (most of us here) liked it that way, and lament the watering-down of games that was necessary for them to be marketable to the mainstream. Nobody's trying to market Angband. We don't have to coddle. You're welcome to fork the game. You can add potions of 1-up to the temple.

There are a number of interviews of early authors/maintainers available online. I tried (not very hard) to track one down where it talks about what they did when somebody won in the early days; they talked to the winner, found out what he (it was always a "he") did, and modified the game so that it couldn't be won that way again. The game was designed, from the beginning, to be nigh unwinnable. That's good game design!

There's only one invisible dragon in the game, the Ethereal Dragon, native to DL 45. It was 12 levels out-of-depth, which means there was a vault nearby. It's also pretty hard to wake up, which means that you had bad stealth and spent many turns within 20 squares of that vault. And you never detected it. And you woke up a bunch of other baddies before you woke that dragon. If the dragon hadn't been there, one of those other things would have killed you instead. The only reason it was the dragon was that ethereal dragons pass through walls and have speed +10, but it's pretty clear that your tombstone was already engraved.

It's pretty cool that you already had resist confusion at 1650', though.

EDIT: As Pete Mack points out below, there are two invisible dragons. I forgot the Death Drake. Same MO. Same issues. Same damage. But maybe you didn't have resist confusion after all.

[Pete Mack]

Ethereal Dragon or Death Drake. Both are invisible and go through walls ethereal hits to confuse and breathes darkness/light for 350HP. Death Drake breathes nether for 350 and hits for experience drain. The Ethereal dragon in particular is very bad news. Detect evil or higher level detect monsters would have found it. By DL 35, Dreads are native, and you absolutely must either detect them or have SI or ESP. They are lethal otherwise.

I would think that getting drained by G at lower levels would be enough to convince you to use SI by DL 30, unless you are diving very aggressively using stealth, detection, and avoidance.

[Sky]

Im going to go through the objections one by one when im at my pc, instead of my phone, but the argument is not "a good angband player would have thougth of that", but rather how the game messes with casual players.