One stat to rule them all

[MITZE]

Would just like to cast a vote for having movement speed, shooting speed, attack speed and casting speed all as distinct things and heck, maybe no 'total speed' at all.

You, uh, probably don't actually want this. Hellband has exactly this AFAICT, and it does not lend itself to smooth, understandable, or intuitive mechanics.

[wobbly]

I'm not a fan of a full split like is in Cth & hell. I would like to see terror & sprinting mushrooms moved across to move speed.

[tangar]

Considering stats.. My favorite was (and is) CHArisma It's a pity it was removed from V and exist now only in some variants.

So half-troll face is equal to elven beauty in shops now It was fun to had it as a part of game balance between races (PWMA doesn't have it, Mang and TomeNET has).

[archolewa]

I do not like increasing game complexitiy. Neither do i like dividing global game speed into different speeds, which are action dependant.

What is that good for?

It's good for the same thing having a ton of different damage types and resistances is good for. It makes equipment trade-offs richer, and ensures that one stat is not All Powerful. A lot of the interesting equipment trade-offs you have to think about in Angband revolve around which resistances you want, and which you're willing to sacrifice. Imagine how much more boring the equipment game would be if you had only one resistance stat that resisted all elemental damage.

Instead of asking: "Is losing shard resistance worth an extra couple of points of strength?"

You'd be asking "Is losing ALL resistance to EVERY elemental type worth an extra couple of points of strength?"

The first one is worth thinking about. The second, not so much.

New players should sit down, create a character and start playing ... keep things easy.

Splitting up the the speed stat doesn't change this. Speed isn't really a thing you have to worry about for at least the first 10, maybe even 20 dungeon levels, and it's not like it factors into character creation or anything.

It does make the character status screen more intimidating I'll grant you that. And Angband's character status *is* pretty intimidating already when you first see it. But I'm not sure having thirty-five rows instead of thirty is going to make it any more intimidating to new players.

[archolewa]

You, uh, probably don't actually want this. Hellband has exactly this AFAICT, and it does not lend itself to smooth, understandable, or intuitive mechanics.

I'll agree that making enemies harder to reason about is a pretty serious concern. The biggest roadblock I run into with TOME4 is that enemies are incredibly hard to reason about, especially rares and bosses (you know, the ones that are actually dangerous). I love the relative simplicity of Angband's monsters in comparison. Though I haven't played Hellband, so I don't know what it is about the split speeds that make the mechanics hard to reason through.

[Vorczar]

I found a ring with Movement Speed +3 (and other good stats).

You say it makes energy for movement cost divide by n+1.

Spell effects last longer?
Food consumption is slower?
Word of Recall takes longer to activate?
Rods and Activated items take longer to recharge?

No affect on combat?
No affects on number of moves relative to enemy moves?

IF that's how it works, I'm not sure the positives outweigh the negatives.

[Derakon]

Any turn that you spend moving passes much faster, but turns you spend doing anything other than movement still take the full length of time, yes. The big advantages are a) moving fast means less time for enemies to wake up on the level (it's a de facto stealth boost), and b) you can just walk to reposition yourself during combat, rather than use something like Phase Door that might land you somewhere undesirable.

[emulord]

One roguelike that has split time work well is DoomRL.
Moving, firing, reloading, and item use all have different time constraints.

Noobs will die attempting to reload a gun that takes 2 seconds
Semi-noobs die when using a medkit taking 1 second when every other action takes 0.5 seconds since they have speed perks.

After those 2 deaths, you learned the system and its all fine.

Part of the issue is +n speed being obscure to how fast something actually is. Showing energy costs somewhere would help.

So long as extra blows, extra shots, extra movement steps, and extra spellcasts all use the same system I feel like it could be intuitive and give an additional dimension to speed/power.

To avoid melee tedium with 1blow=1keypress maybe use Full Attacks when above HP warn limit?

[Therem Harth]

Having a current/total action points meter seems like a good solution? But I kind of like metagames around allocating action points, so IDK.

[Derakon]

Action point based games usually let you take multiple actions per turn, e.g. movement is 1 point, attacking is 4, casting a spell is 5, you get 7 points. Are you proposing doing that in Angband? It feels like it'd be a big change, like, I'd probably want to make sure that I enter rooms with as many action points as possible. Or am I misunderstanding the proposal?

[Nick]

I think action points would be quite a move away from how it works now. Currently at a player's turn most actions use 100 energy, but having a bonus to shots or moves divides that 100 by (1 + bonus) for those actions. So rather than having a given number of action points to use which determines what actions you can take this turn, you can use any valid number of action points and that determines how long it is until your next turn.

One thing that I have thought about implementing is a turn queue which shows what the order of action for the player and currently visible monsters is. This is straightforward if the player is always using 100 energy; if there's the potential for using less, you would need to be able to display more than one possible order.

[Therem Harth]

Action point based games usually let you take multiple actions per turn, e.g. movement is 1 point, attacking is 4, casting a spell is 5, you get 7 points. Are you proposing doing that in Angband? It feels like it'd be a big change, like, I'd probably want to make sure that I enter rooms with as many action points as possible. Or am I misunderstanding the proposal?

Yeah you're misunderstanding, or more like I wasn't clear. I meant a good solution in turn-based games in general, not necessarily a good one for V. And yeah I was taking different AP costs for different things as implicitly part of this.

Would be good variant fodder though IMO,