[FA] A few ideas, comments from a 1st time player

[Derakon]

"Build" in Angband is, ultimately, exactly just your race/class selection. This dictates your final stat maximums (barring equipment modifiers), and gives you various innate abilities and/or penalties. Otherwise deciding what to use is strictly an optimization game and is basically similar regardless of what kind of character you're playing. Mages may not care much about finding weapons with good damage output, and warriors may not care as much about getting their CON up (due to their innately high HP), but that's about the limit of the kind of differences in decision-making that your "build" creates.

[taptap]

Unlike investing XP in Sil, after you pick your class there is no reason to limit yourself in what you use and don't use.

I would say in Sil you are literally unlimited in your choices - e.g. there are no race/class specific abilities. So are you trying to say in Angband I don't have choices at all and even the mage needs the best sword available to whack monsters?

[LostTemplar]

You have choices, a lot of interesting and challenging choices, but choices are "what to do ?" mainly, also "what stuff to carry and what to drop ?", not "how to spend exp pool ?".

As for mage you can whack monsters or not, it is a choice (as well as for warrior http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=10421 example of ironman warrior, who never used any weapon), and depending on what you choose the best sword will be different.

Well, different classes are different, really, like different games, way more different then Sil builds, but for a given class ingame there are no build choices aside form specialty.

[Derakon]

I would say in Sil you are literally unlimited in your choices - e.g. there are no race/class specific abilities. So are you trying to say in Angband I don't have choices at all and even the mage needs the best sword available to whack monsters?

It's more that every mage has access to the same spells and will use them in the same way -- and yes, will probably have similar ideas as to what constitutes the "best" sword even though they probably won't spend much time hitting monsters with it and thus don't need it.

That's not to say that there aren't decisions. For one thing, you practically never will find the best gear, so you have to make decisions between the many suboptimal options you have. And there's plenty of decisionmaking in combat.

[Philip]

I would say more that you are absolutely free to use whatever you want, as long as your class can use it. That means you will end up using the best thing you find, or whatever you like. In Sil you are unlimited in your choices, but once you spend 40000 XP, you can't really respec. You can move from a heavy weapon character to a twoweapon character, but not to bows. Once you've picked your race and house, and gone down to about 400 feet, you're going to keep going. In Angband, you pick you race and class, and have absolutely no choice on how to invest your XP, it's done for you.

[taptap]

In Sil you are unlimited in your choices, but once you spend 40000 XP, you can't really respec.

Isn't that the point of choices - that they are not reversible? (So in FAAngband this means race, class, specialties?)

P.S. It is odd how this turns to comparing Sil to Angband, just because I won Sil a few times, but am new to Angband.

[Philip]

Well, Sil is the closest to Angband you know, and a lot of things carry over a bit.
In FAAngband you make your choices early and then you only have specialties, which are only present in O/FA anyway. In Sil your choices are made throughout the game, but prior investment makes a difference to what you choose.

The only choices in Angband post character generation, excluding certain things in variants, are gear.