So How do You Play Variants?

[Poop Loops]

Angband is easy to understand. It's like the original Rogue, Nethack, and Dungeon Crawl. The mission is simple: go down and kill stuff until you hit rock bottom (literally). Congrats! You win!

I tried ZAngband and UnAngband recently and got confused. I just didn't get what the whole purpose was. I've read LotR and The Hobbit, but I wasn't sure how the game adapted the stories.

Anybody have a list somewhere briefly explaining the point behind each variant? Or maybe we could just compile one here?

[Narvius]

Well, I think they are here to provide something not that easy to understand. ToME is similar.

[Bandobras]

For each dungeon, if you are not at the bottom and it's not too difficult for you, kill stuff and descend, otherwise change dungeon. When no more dungeons remain, you win or you are stuck.

[andrewdoull]

For each dungeon, if you are not at the bottom and it's not too difficult for you, kill stuff and descend, otherwise change dungeon. When no more dungeons remain, you win or you are stuck.

Couldn't have said it better myself. I should rename Unangband to n>1band

Andrew

[Nick]

Anybody have a list somewhere briefly explaining the point behind each variant? Or maybe we could just compile one here?

This has typically been left up to the variant maintainer to deal with; the typical places to find this sort of information are the variant website and the in-game help systems. These certainly vary in helpfulness between variants; Steamband, for example, has excellent help both in-game and on its site.

The variant pages (from the link above) have a small amount of information; maybe adding a bit to those would be a good idea. I do also quite like the idea of a single list with an explanation of each variant; there are various collections around, but they are typically outdated (bablos, thangorodrim, fragment) or incomplete (roguebasin).

Actually, I think a dedicated short summary page on roguebasin might be best.