Angband Philosophy III: Theme, Races and Monsters

[the Invisible Stalker]

Late to the party, but here are some thoughts:

What is the purpose of races? I can think of several, current or potential, and each one suggests a different approach, so it would be good to be clear on what we want to accomplish. Here's a list of the ones I can think of:

- Flavour, for people for whom this is a role-playing game or who just like flavour. There's no real need for it to have any game play effects at all, just like sex. It's important though that the options fit the theme of the game. I tend to ignore flavour, but I understand how important it is for other people.

- Difficulty levels, for people who like challenges, or like to avoid them. From this point of view it doesn't much matter what the races are called, as long as some are better than others. Maiar seem to be intended mostly as an easy difficulty level, for example, and largely succeed at that. This approach would treat race balancing measures, like experience penalties, as a bug rather than a feature.

- Variety, especially for people who have already figured out how to win. Here it's mostly a matter of the more races/classes, and the more they differ, the better.

- Class specialisation. This is probably the main use of races at the moment, but I don't see the point of this from a design point of view. If everyone who plays a class is going to play it as a particular race then you can fold the race bonuses into the class ones and save everyone a keystroke when rolling a new character.

- Actual racism. See Steamband. Not something which appeals to me, but I guess there's a market for that sort of thing.

- Strategic choices. I'm excluding those choices involved already in the choice of class, since I've talked about those under class specialisation. So I'm not talking about different races being better at melee/ranged/spells/sneaking/etc, because those choice primarily determine class and then race is an afterthought. But there are other strategic choices to be made when creating a character. There can be, for example, a trade-off between early game, mid-game and end game. One of the things I liked in playing artifactless thralls in FA was trying to get the early game/end game balance right in the choice of race and class. Without very good stealth the early game is not survivable, but the combinations with the best stealth simply can't get enough hitpoints to survive the final fight without artifacts.

I'm not arguing for any of these points of view, and am only arguing against one of them. I'm just trying to list them. I've probably forgotten some too.

[wobbly]

One thing to do with monsters: increase the rarity of the C family. Currently, it's not Angband, but Wolfband.

It's not the Cs themselves. Everything is a wolf-friend, including the weakest giants. So:

friends:100:2d7:wolves could be:
friends:50:2d7:wolves
or
friends:100:1d7:wolves
or
friends:100:1d7:wolves
friends:50:1d7:wolves
etc.

There's a few that could usually be small packs but occasionally generate a large pack like:
friends:100:1d4:earth hound
friends:50:1d4:earth hound
friends:10:2d7:earth hound

That can still get to 22 hounds but it's 1/4*1/2*1/4*1/10*1/7*1/7 chance & it's going to average at around 3-5.

[wobbly]

Ok I have an idea how I'm doing trolls, not tested yet, but I'll share it here. Speed progression is parabolic. Fast little trolls -> Slow big trolls -> Fast troll leaders. Tag them with move_body. So the fast little guys rush forward, then the big guys push through (hopefully). Priests for caster, Ettins (the most giant-kin) are boulder throwers. Priests & chieftans get shriek_kin if I can work that out. Biggest trolls have a melee stun.

[wobbly]

Looked at orcs. Will put my thoughts here again. At 1st they look hard to buff because buffing an orc makes it a troll. However I do notice they only fire 1 in 9, so I'll be trying an archer progression for orcs. Next is getting them behaving right, so need to play with group_ai till I understand it. Are orcs a group? Or are black orcs? I'm going to try orcs: group ai. Wargs not group ai. Orc leaders not group ai & see if that does what I want.

[bio_hazard]

I think a weak tunneling orc could be interesting.

[Derakon]

It'd be nice if there was something between "monster cannot cope with walls at all" and "monster moves through walls as if they were nothing", where it takes multiple turns to move through walls. It'd make the pathfinding logic more complicated, though, since you'd want the monster to bore through walls unless there was a faster route through open space. That kind of thing is easily handled by A* pathfinding, but not by the heat maps that Angband uses.

[bio_hazard]

This is not at all what you are describing, but you could have a digger that moves slowly and completely at random unless in sight of @ (or afraid of @).

[wobbly]

It'd be nice if there was something between "monster cannot cope with walls at all" and "monster moves through walls as if they were nothing", where it takes multiple turns to move through walls. It'd make the pathfinding logic more complicated, though, since you'd want the monster to bore through walls unless there was a faster route through open space. That kind of thing is easily handled by A* pathfinding, but not by the heat maps that Angband uses.

Is it that hard? Just looking the number it's reading is distance & stealth right? It's capable of working out the distance if I'm reading it right. It doesn't it just moves to the next sound level but I don't see anything stopping it from working out how far.

[Derakon]

I guess if you don't need a generalized solution that can handle an arbitrary set of weights, then it'd be a fairly straightforward modification to the heat map approach. Fair enough.

[wobbly]

Yeah so if it doesn't care about terrain or doing any down the corridor then dig trickery. I think what I'm more interested in is simpler. Dig but only if path blocked by other monsters.

[wobbly]

Looking again, it's quite literally distance for pathfinding? The stealth check happens further down?

[wobbly]

I have a theory: If you make everything native to dlvl 10 twice as rare except the wolf then halve the pack size then you'll get less junk monsters and more small packs of wolves surrounding you. Just looking at dlvl 10 there's nothing there I wouldn't be happy to see less off.

[PowerWyrm]

I have a theory: If you make everything native to dlvl 10 twice as rare except the wolf then halve the pack size then you'll get less junk monsters and more small packs of wolves surrounding you. Just looking at dlvl 10 there's nothing there I wouldn't be happy to see less off.

Err.. in my games it feels like I'm battling wolves over and over again at any depth. So maybe not

[Aszazin]

[*]Human, Dunadan: So we have two types of human. Fine. Potentially we could look at having more, or different ones, or reconsidering stat bonuses and abilities.

What I like about the (standard) human race is that is an empty page without experience penalty on it's own. That way the chosen class can evolve more rapidly. I think it would be more interesting to expand on different classes when it comes to the human race. Some more 'technical' class would be nice for instance (good in "craft" (enhancing armor/weapons), manipulating traps, shooting devices, identifying. Intelligent but not able to use the mystical kind of magic only material manipulations.
Such a class would probably be very dwarf-minded too.
Any other kind of class might be nice, although I think vanilla shouldn't have 6 classes of mage, 10 types of warriors, etc. Any possible extra class should be different enough.

[*]Dwarf: Basically fine. Possibly we could have more than one type. My main gripe here is stats. Dwarves are skilled at crafts and clever at designing things, but don't necessarily make the best choices - I would expect plusses to INT and DEX and minus to WIS, and they are currently the opposite of these.

Strong, intelligent and dexterous, but not able to use magic in a decent way. I refer to the 'technical' class I mentioned above, where intelligence is used to manipulate armor, weapons. At start just to-hit , damage and AC, but a weapon can be technically manipulated to be more efficient against orcs/trolls/... (slay), be balanced to obtain extra speed or attacks, be sharpened to cut of limbs of enemies, ...
Someone has to make these things, you know!

[*]Half Elf: Tolkien makes a big deal of the fact that there were only three unions of Elf and Human (Beren/Luthien, Tuor/Idril, Aragorn/Arwen), but that can be written off as only three prominent ones (especially since he implies that the people of Dol Amroth have elven blood). On the other hand, what is this race actually adding, and would it be better to have another type of elf or human? I'm open to be convinced either way.

I like the human race because what I explained above, but I don't like it's complete lack of infravision. That's why I play a half-elf. I like the idea. I don't like the name. It's a human with Elvish blood, but half-elf is indeed more practical as term.

[*]Gnome: Here we have a problem. This is a D&D race with nothing in common with anything in Middle Earth, except in as far as they're derivative of both hobbits and dwarves. Also "gnome" was Tolkien's name for the Noldor for a long time. Need to go.[*]Kobold: Just no.

Yes, gnomes can go.
Kobolds aren't needed either.

However, I actually would like an undead race in the game.

[Pete Mack]

How about Haradrim, since there is a corresponding blackguard class?