Halls of Mist is coming soon

[Mikko Lehtinen]

It seems like it should be undesirable for this to happen more than occasionally (although randomly getting something which is hard to escape is fine).

Perhaps I'm being overly critical of my creation. Now that I think about it, in my last extensive playtesting gauntlet, after every single death I always blamed my own stupidity.

In the last published version of Fay dying because of bad luck was much more common. The levels are now somewhat larger, there's more empty rooms with no monsters (making teleporting safer), and there are many more tricks you can try. For example, many terrain features can be helpful in escaping.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Oh, there's a town? So it's not completely ironman? Interesting...

Yes. Only rogues can sell items, though. Even rogues can only sell expensive items.

[buzzkill]

Re: summoning and cloning / farming

I had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to your proposed fix to summoning and to a lesser extent cloning. I wasn't quite sure why at first, but after thinking about for a while I think I've nailed it down, as well as a possible solution.

The problem I has with the summoning fix is that unduly punishes people, much like myself, that are simply trying, albeit ineffectively, to kill off the summoner.

If you consider only the most intuitive solution, population control (and I realize you took a slightly different approach), the way I see it, there are two obvious paths and they both rely on knowing or trying to predict the players intent.

If the game designer believes the player is going to try to farm, then the obvious fix is to cease cloning/summoning. Problem solved. If the game thinks that the player is trying just to survive, which I believe was the original intent, then the obvious fix is to continue standard cloning/summoning practices. They problem lies in knowing the players intent. So lets just make intent irrelevant.

Here's my proposal. Every time a monster is conjured (summoned or cloned) or killed, the chance of the next monster being conjured changes, for the better or for the worse. Once a trend is established, (dictated by the way the numbers are manipulated) the trend will continue to generally move in the same direction until conjuring ceases entirely or becomes completely overwhelming.

The actual code I had in mind went like this. Assume that there is a z% (z=50 initially) of something being conjured on any give turn. This means that the hard values for conjuring will be doubled, then have to "save vs. z%". z% remains unchanged, until something is conjured (or something conjured is killed, but that can't happen initially). At this point z% changes, either increasing or decreasing by x%, let's use x=5 as an example. One can then fine tune the results by altering x.

The battle begins. The summoner summons. z changes to either 45% or 55%. Coin flip, z=55%, making him even more likely to summon in the future. The player is clueless as to the direction of the change. Player kills the conjured. The value of z changes again. This time it has a z% (55) of increasing again and only a 100-z (45) chance of decreasing. Repeat every time a summoner or conjured is killed or a fresh monster is conjured. Depending of the value of x, this will produce either a quickly or slowly developing trend.

I don't know how well it work work in actuality, but the important bit is that it would cycle to a close eventually. The only safe bet the player has, as I believe the original intent was, is to kill the summoner and conjured as quickly as possible. That's the only real control the player has over the situation, and it's what makes it work IMO, in theory at least. It's unpredictable, and unable to be steered by player actions. Even if the player does detect or guess the trend early on, there's nothing he can do to alter it.

[ekolis]

So essentially, every summoner is either a "spammer" who summons more and more frequently, or a "slacker" who summons less and less frequently, but the status itself is nondeterministic and impossible for the player to detect reliably until some time has passed and a trend has been established? I like it...

[Scatha]

BTW, I think I like Phantasmal. But I'm not sure whether illusionary flavour fits my world. Some of Mist's most iconic summoners are different kind of Hags. They summon faeries, for example bogles and redcaps. Opinions on this?

I don't have a good enough feeling for the background of the world to say whether Phantasmal is a good fit. Less evocative but descriptively accurate would be "Summoned".

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I just realized that phantasmal monsters being shaped out of the mysterious blue mist are perfect. They help me build the myth of the place.

I also want to have a wand of exorcism or some such that erases a line of phantasmal monsters. No save or anything, they are just gone.

Buzzkill, Ear just told me that your solution would not stop him from farming. Nice try, though!

[ekolis]

Buzzkill, Ear just told me that your solution would not stop him from farming. Nice try, though!

What if you didn't cap the summon rate at twice the normal rate, but instead let it increase without bound, so eventually you'll wind up with an enemy summoning 10 fire dragons per turn or something?

[saarn]

how about having a chance for a summoner to draw the attention of a great demon that then eats him? Would naturally cap the amount of monsters summoned and might be fun flavor.

Also, the Thin White Duke is the boss??? That is awesome. Is there a sort of Labyrinth theme?

[buzzkill]

Buzzkill, Ear just told me that your solution would not stop him from farming. Nice try, though!

Well no, it wouldn't stop him cold but it would definately stop him, at least 1/2 of the time. The choise to farm more wouldn't be his, despite his expertise. He'd be able to do a little farming if he chose to, it's every Angbander's right after all, after which the farming would end or he would be overrun. Maybe there would have to be some mechanic to allow summoning/breeding at more than 2x the normal rate, that is when z exceeds 100 (or haste everything when z exceeds 100).

[jujuben]

Depending on whether speed is discreet or continuous, hasting could work very nicely independent of this kind of random mechanic. Each summoned kill from a source could very slightly increment the speed of the next batch summoned. The reward (xp and drop) per kill should not change as they presumably would with increasingly powerful summon types, the danger would increase as scummy behavior increases, and those who simply choose to stick out a tedious but winnable fight rather than abandon a section of a level would not be punished with no/tiny rewards for their effort.

Unless every class has good crowd control skills available, I really dislike the idea of no reward at all for summons. I've abandoned many levels because of out of control breeders/summoners, and in a variant with a hard limit on levels visited, that can be a pretty serious hit to take.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Unless every class has good crowd control skills available, I really dislike the idea of no reward at all for summons. I've abandoned many levels because of out of control breeders/summoners, and in a variant with a hard limit on levels visited, that can be a pretty serious hit to take.

Would it be more fun if phantasmal monsters (with no loot) would randomly dissolve sometimes? Let's say a 10 % chance every monster turn.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I had a little conversion with Ear. We both think that Scrolls of Summoning and Circles of Summoning are fun and unproblematic. The risk/reward ratio is just about perfect. Either using them (I'm not calling it abusing) or not is a player choice.

Summoners are the only open question. I'm not worried about any other farming or scumming behavior.

The current rule is awkward but I think the game works better with it than without any rule. At the moment farming remains an option for the player but the ever-increasing possibility for ever-increasingly OOD monsters makes it risky. The rule doesn't really affect the "normal" kind of playing much -- at least it has not affected my own playtesting games so far -- and only starts to kick in after seven summons or so.

The rewards for killing OOD monsters are already lower in Halls of Mist than in Angband.

1) In Mist your own level does not affect how much experience you get from a monster. (The original calculation made XP penalties from race and class mostly meaningless and diving too easy.)

2) A lower percentage of loot comes from monster drops, mostly because I've introduced bookshelves, closets, weapon racks, and finding torches and mushrooms from wilderness rooms.

In the future versions the summoner rule will probably change to something more intuitive. Keep suggestions coming!

[Scatha]

Unless every class has good crowd control skills available, I really dislike the idea of no reward at all for summons. I've abandoned many levels because of out of control breeders/summoners, and in a variant with a hard limit on levels visited, that can be a pretty serious hit to take.

Would that be solved by increasing the reward for the summoners?

I suppose that that's really thinking of the summoned monsters as weapons of the summoner rather than enemies in their own right. But that seems good flavour to me. It fits well with the chance for the summons to dissolve back into the mist (though 10% each turn sounds pretty high), in terms of making them feel more ephemeral, meaning that the summoner is the one you really need to take down, and stopping them from taking over the level.

[Scatha]

1) In Mist your own level does not affect how much experience you get from a monster. (The original calculation made XP penalties from race and class mostly meaningless and diving too easy.)

I pointed this out in another thread, but the original dividing experience gained by character level is essentially equivalent to just stretching the experience needed for each level. That kind of stretching can be a useful balancing tool, of course, because it determines how much variance there will be in the power level of characters at a given depth between those who have gone slowly and those who have gone quickly. (The way the experience system works in Sil we don't have an easy way to do this stretching, and the control over that variance instead comes from the fixed sources of experience and diminishing returns for monsters of the same type.)

[getter77]

Wow. The timing is perfect indeed. Thanks!

Excellent----best bet is to sign yourself up on that page to help establish the hopeful count of participants, even though there always end up being releases that don't think to sign up beforehand and then just get added afterwards, as well as a proper Roguebasin page for the release feed when the times comes.