Make Angband Harder !

[Sky]

You know when i'm always asking to make the game easier, right?
Well, there is something thats always bothered me, specifically about stealth: monsters don't wake up.

Ok, ok, bear with me. Stealth, sure. Great thing. I'm Findoriel of the great House of Fingolfin. I leave no tracks on fresh snow and break no twigs in the forest.
But .. the dumbass orcs i've just woken up, right next to a sleeping dragon ...

Why is it that only @ makes noise?

[Huqhox]

That's a great point and would add extra peril when tiptoeing around a room with sleeping monsters... wake up a noisy one and risk them all waking up.

All it would take is a noise rating for each monster and then some test to see if they wake up any sleeping monsters in range.

It's also bugged me how you can have a group of sleeping ogres and pick them off one at a time, have a nice noisy fight right next to the others while they snore away oblivious... a monster being woken up by being attacked really ought to wake up any other monsters around.

[epatton]

That's a great point and would add extra peril when tiptoeing around a room with sleeping monsters... wake up a noisy one and risk them all waking up.

All it would take is a noise rating for each monster and then some test to see if they wake up any sleeping monsters in range.

It's also bugged me how you can have a group of sleeping ogres and pick them off one at a time, have a nice noisy fight right next to the others while they snore away oblivious... a monster being woken up by being attacked really ought to wake up any other monsters around.

I seem to recal in D&D that thieves had a 'backstabbing' attack they could perform if they could surprise their opponents. Has that ever been considered for Angband? It could be a unique attack for rogues to tiptoe through a sleeping pack of monsters, attacking each in turn without waking the whole bunch up. Other character classes could attempt the same kind of attack, but with presumably higher failure rates (not as backstabby, I guess).

[Philip]

Various variants have rules for this. Poschengband has the whole Ninja mechanic, O Assassins are much better in combat against sleeping enemies and have very quiet fighting, Rogues have some bonuses as well. Sil has both monsters waking each other up and attack-from-stealth abilities, making for interesting situations.

As far as I can tell, V has nothing of the sort, with the possible exception of noise from combat being affected by stealth.

[wobbly]

Sil does this well because Sil takes the time to modify a whole lot of other nuts & bolts that stick out. I mostly agree that V-stealth is a little weird, I just think if you are going to change it you need to take the time to rework stealth to maintain the balance.

[Sky]

IHas that ever been considered for Angband?

that's not in the game now, but i also feel that the first blow on a sleeping monster should do more damage. Nothing ridiculous like 4x, but say, max damage on the dice roll.

[dreembeard]

that's not in the game now, but i also feel that the first blow on a sleeping monster should do more damage. Nothing ridiculous like 4x, but say, max damage on the dice roll.

I agree. And you should also have a much lower chance to miss.

And it can also be used as a cheap way to implement something like backstabbing: When you attack a sleeping monster, it is treated as a stealthy attack: there will be no additional noise. But when you melee a monster that is awake, you make (a lot of) additional noise, so that sleepers in LoS are likely to wake up. That should not be too hard to implement in V.

[jonadab]

Brogue has something like this, though of course it isn't role-based (because Brogue doesn't have roles).