[Announce] PosChengband 7.0.0 Released

[HugoVirtuoso]

I will be dropping clouded's contributions from the next version.

Does this mean you're going to say goodbye to the awesome Lite Town you implemented?

[clouded]

This is pretty funny. I have some changes I've never really mentioned like removing ambushes and dungeon guardians but I haven't changed anything with staves of healing. By the way, for years I have broadcasted my poschengband games on termcast.org and an irc channel of people have watched me play, there are several people here more reputable than a scumlord like me who can prove my innocence.

Edit: Out of curiosity I went into devices.c and changed EFFECT_HEAL_CURING to a level 1 effect. What this seems to do is cause all DL1 staves to be cure wounds, and seemingly no DL80 staves to be healing. Pretty bad deal, why would I want to do that? Also, in the character sheet these level 1 healing staves aren't even listed as "Cure Wounds" in the item tallies. This display bug is present all the way back to 4.0.0 for me because that is when this item tracker was added to dumps. It also shows up on the one poschengband-r game I won, which I didn't modify at all.

[debo]

You are explicitly telling me to not play your game, I will comply with your request

I don't think we all need to start piling on chris because he showed one moment of human frailty after spending two straight years cranking out a variant that is arguably more popular than Vanilla (sorry Nick.)

I also think clouded has contributed a ton of stuff not just to poscheng, but many other variants as well. I've also learned a lot by watching him on said termcasts, although he probably still thinks I'm a total scrub. Yes, his online persona is a bit edgelordy sometimes but I'm very happy to have him around. I have also personally maintained changes in my own variant branches before, and I never felt the need to announce them every time. The oook ladder isn't a sacred place. Hell, I wasn't even that picky about that sort of thing when I was running the comps.

I'll note that people rarely had much of a leg to stand on when they argued about what they wanted in Sil, because it was such a huge departure (was not seen to have a heritage) and half clearly expressed what the design philosophy was up-front.

Porschengband is very clearly a hengband descendant with way cooler stuff added, and indeed most of the early versions of poscheng added a lot of zany things (possessors, rings, etc.) I would have described hengband as "super batshit crazy", and since poscheng appeared to be amplifying that in the first few releases, that's the philosophy I ascribed to it. Maybe it's time to make it clear somewhere central what poscheng's core intended flavor really is?

Anyhow, I think the idea of cutting all the options that are obscuring intent is a good one. At worst, someone will fork from 6.x or elli and go in a different direction, and maybe people will really get a chance to see if the direction poscheng is taking will work out. I do have my doubts about pitching a variant that discourages diving to the angband community, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

[Nivim]

[...]

This sounds like one of those things that should have been in private messages instead in the thread, but then debo's post might not have been quite as good or comprehensive— tradeoffs.

To corroborate, I'm one of those people that watched clouded's termcast enough to say; the reason clouded was annoyed with device changes was because he was already annoyed with the vanilla (6.*) level of hassle some characters had getting devices online.

So am I, for that matter, but I also think it's appropriate that brawn characters need +Md to use powerful tools they didn't train for; I'd probably just smooth out the device changes instead of getting rid of them... or make it so +Md can be found more reliably, since it usually means sacrificing [M with amulet slots or sacrificing +slaying/brands with glove slots, regardless. (Also now Free Action, I guess.)

Current theory for the display bug is that it has something to do with compiler differences or files leftover from previous versions that didn't update correctly.

[1] "Super batshit crazy" was never my design intent. Quite the exact opposite, actually. I guess I really need to write something up on my goals and views. If people knew more about my intentions, they'd be less puzzled by changes. Also, they would understand that what they want to play might not be what I want to build. That's OK. I really think there is opportunity for forking this variant and doing something more crowd pleasing. I would actually encourage this.

Ah, yeah— you see— stuff like Sexy Android Berserker or "you can play as the One Ring! Not someone wearing it, but the Ring itself!" is kinda how a lot of people got introduced to the game, followed by getting hooked on how there's such a great variety of choices that if one interesting character dies you can immediately start on a new one with radically different mechanics and balance.

There's overpowered things like Psion, mid-power things like Diggermaster, or low-power things like Hexmage or (non-U-discounting) Warlock, and they all have completely different playstyles and perspectives on the game, thus collectively making most other variants look bland and over-balanced by comparison.

Then there's Possessor; one of the reasons Hugo played so many Possessors is because Poschengband has the best Possessors out of the few games that even have them— they offer plenty of variety each game, they aren't broken, buggy, or unfinished, they're strong, and they have plenty of silly little details that another variant would just... simplify away.

I would not be surprised if most players (were all of them to read your post) failed to reconcile your perspective and their brightest memories of playing.

You might not have intended the game to be so, but your work was successful enough that it took on some life of its own.

[spoiler]I could have guessed your original intentions, myself, but failed to; I thought 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x represented a slow but novel shift in your design philosophy rather than you attempting to return to your original goals.[/spoiler]

[PowerWyrm]

Porschengband

Now I know what I want in the next version: cars!

[debo]

LOL

(and some characters to make the 10 character minimum)

Ha. I double-checked my post for autocorrects but missed that one, and I'm sort of glad I did.

[wobbly]

Forum dramas & discussions about adding porsches to the game aside: Thanks for taking the time to explain some of the game design philosophy & as always for a new version.

I've played a bit more & apart from a few bugs: mentioned up-thread, also see no-phase screenshot & the device bug screenshots.
& some balance issues: Summoning being the main one.
I've been enjoying most of the changes.

Feedback:

Free Action changes: Agree in principle, as I find binary mechanics dull. In practice? Haven't noticed a major difference other then gear decisions being a little trickier. Sometimes I'll be paralyzed for small amounts of time, I'm yet to have a "that was close" or "that got me moment".

See Invisible/Telepathy Changes: Again in principle agree. In practice? It's been more of a hassle/annoyance than a gain

Summons: Seem out of control. I already mentioned Utgard-Loke. I'll add Gachapin & Scylla. I'll also add that crypt creeps for me have become instant teleport. Not dangerous, not interesting, just see crypt creep=teleport.

Poison: Seems an improvement. However the only character I've fought great venom wyrms with was a phase spider, so unsure how the balance is late game for anything else.

Turn loss for empty devices??: Why was this reverted? What does it achieve other then me constantly checking invenory menu for charges? Seems an added UI hassle, breaks immersion for me, slows down an otherwise smoth flowing combat.

Minor quibble about statues: Why do they now stack? Were people really hauling them back to sell? Dropped a fancy statue in my museum & it suddenly changed, must of secretly been a mimic.

[Antoine]

I have never played poscheng but I think it is the best *band and I always read about it.

I came here to say that I hope chris and clouded are soon reconciled. I suspect that if all the facts were clear, they would find they had a lot of common ground.

A.

[wobbly]

I've broken my comments up in to 3? posts for easier readability. Also spoilered my virtue rant. Hope you don't mind my verbosity. At times it's unclear if you even get around to reading comments. Shrug. Your variant & your time. do what you want, I guess.

In the future, I probably will remove a bunch of options. Consider this fair warning or, better yet, an inventation to step up now while there is still time. For example, vaults may be getting a *huge* adjustment sometime very soon. If you like the current vaults, better act fast! I only ask that any new fork not be posted under the Poschengband ladder, as it would confuse me.

I play mostly default options with partial randarts.

Easy Id: Id games don't bother me. *Id games don't bother me. Have played games with no id, find them less aesthetically pleasing. I think the changes to ego & id a few versions back were good. Just going to point out that what you're saying about "next time you play" assumes people use the same save. I don't. On the other hand I already know what egos have what & it's pretty irrelevant to me.

Easy Lore: Tried it on a magic-eater. Disliked being able to check every monster for it's resistance holes. Went back to playing with it off.

Virtues: Ambivalent about this. Play with it on. Mostly ignore them unless I'm a caster or a summoner. Are super annoying for nature casters, see virtue rant later on.

All this said I recognize I'm in the minority. I talk & read the comments of people who HATE id games WITH A PASSION. No amount of making the id game cleverer or sexier is going to change that. They'll feel like something that annoyed them is being forced on them, because to be blunt you are talking about literally doing just that.

Virtue Rant
[spoiler] I've been playing on-line on angband.live & talking to people who are new to the game. The most common question I see comes when someone uses an un-ided item & becomes "less knowledgable". You can almost sense the paranoia of a player who is learning the game & "done something wrong" & "lost something" that'll matter latter on but they have no idea what happened & why it matters or where it'll come back to bite them.

Nature Casters. Maintaining true neutral is super annoying. I know enough quirks to game it & it is gaming it. Feels artificial. Get hungry so many times to be good-er. Be a glutton so many times to be evil-er.
The nature virtue itself? Anything with the animal tag is natural. Hounds. Hydras. God-damn Nether hounds are natural.
[/spoiler]

[wobbly]

Final comment/rant(for now )

For example, I like Hugo ... he's rather entertaining! But I wouldn't say he is playing the game using the style for which it is designed. And if you think you can develop a variant without a target playstyle in mind, then you are "super batshit crazy" The most important decisions you make as a variant maintainer, imo, involve resource allocation and different playstyles need vastly different approaches. I assume a controlled descent approach, using ability to defeat uniques near their level as the controlling principle. I do not like "if you are getting you butt whooped on DL40, go deeper" as a playstyle, though it admittedly works much ... *much* better. And this is for *design*, not play. Play anyway you like. If I say a certain style is scummy, that is not a moral judgement and does not reflect in any way on the player or what they accomplish while playing. But don't expect design to change for any playstyle that differs from the intent. To repeat, you can and should play anyway you like. But it is impossible to vary the game design to suit all playstyles. Also, I feel it is OK for a VM to discourage certain actions such as stair skimming or what not. These tend to be things that I have all too much first hand experience with, having been a very "scummy" player myself. But they usually exploit some code weakness that is unnatural or unrealistic. For me, when I stopped doing these sorts of things, the game improved. My win/loss ratio, if I cared about it, certainly went down. My games became longer ... but more fun. I'm trying to do you a favor here

Ok, I get this & don't. Let's talk 2 different characters. 2 different gamestyles.

I play a big bad bruiser (Half-Giant Warrior?). Fight things. Get stronger. Fight bigger things. Get stronger etc. Works within the design philosophy.

I play a small sneaky guy with teleport games (say a Shrewd Sprite Sorcery Rogue). My whole stick is avoiding fights. My fun comes from playing where things are super dangerous. Where I have to concentrate & constantly detect because everything is dangerous. My fun does not come from fighting/killing a thousand things my own size because the game has enforced a brick wall on progression of which sections of the game I have access to.

[Pete Mack]

So right. Some characters absolutely have to dive, because otherwise the tedium of picking off puny monsters is extreme. Anyone who was paying attention to the forums when Eddy posted "Tales of the Bold" will understand this, even if they don't agree. Compared to "Adventures of the Novice Mage" (paraphrased earlier thread title), it's night and day. More fun, more interesting, more educational, and less likely to lead to YASD due to inattention after dozens of hours.

Final comment/rant(for now )



Ok, I get this & don't. Let's talk 2 different characters. 2 different gamestyles.

I play a big bad bruiser (Half-Giant Warrior?). Fight things. Get stronger. Fight bigger things. Get stronger etc. Works within the design philosophy.

I play a small sneaky guy with teleport games (say a Shrewd Sprite Sorcery Rogue). My whole stick is avoiding fights. My fun comes from playing where things are super dangerous. Where I have to concentrate & constantly detect because everything is dangerous. My fun does not come from fighting/killing a thousand things my own size because the game has enforced a brick wall on progression of which sections of the game I have access to.

[Nivim]

Virtue Rant[spoiler] I've been playing on-line on angband.live & talking to people who are new to the game. The most common question I see comes when someone uses an un-ided item & becomes "less knowledgable". You can almost sense the paranoia of a player who is learning the game & "done something wrong" & "lost something" that'll matter latter on but they have no idea what happened & why it matters or where it'll come back to bite them.

Nature Casters. Maintaining true neutral is super annoying. I know enough quirks to game it & it is gaming it. Feels artificial. Get hungry so many times to be good-er. Be a glutton so many times to be evil-er.
The nature virtue itself? Anything with the animal tag is natural. Hounds. Hydras. God-damn Nether hounds are natural.[/spoiler]

I was expecting people to take debo's warning to heart and avoid talking about any sharp edges of chris' post, but for this topic at least, I'm willing to add my work to the pile.
On Virtues and Verbosity:
[spoiler]

For example, I think the virtue system *must* be on all the time. It has subtle design effects on the gameplay and a few not so subtle effects that really, really *ought* to be experienced. First-hand ... not source dived and spoiled. Hengband was a game that was still surprising me after 6 years of heavy play. There was still stuff I didn't know. I'm trying for the same sort of experience, the same sort of design.

There's games like The King of Dragon Pass that do this really well, and games like Dwarf Fortress that do it decently well, but the reason the first does it well is because it shows you the results of the subtle things quite obviously (with art!) and is already a reading-comprehension game with writing that implies those subtle things, and then the second does it well because of the spoilers and the community that helps guide people through the subtle details of those spoilers in ways that are entertaining instead of confusing... and that's the key, you see.

New players talking about the virtue system regularly mention how it would be a lot better if it weren't so opaque: "what do virtues even do?", "should I try not to lose nature virtue?", "it should be documented better", "it could be more transparent", "Without the spoilers, it's all esoteric"... They look at the "You brute!" message and they have no idea why its happening, how to stop it, what it does, or even if they care about it. They are confused, and the answers to their questions generally boil down to "don't worry, the virtue system doesn't really matter, you can ignore it, it doesn't make much sense, and trying to control it would be a huge hassle".^

Then, for examples of people enjoying the virtue system, you have stuff like "virtues are funny just for the firs ttime i opened the virtues info page and found out that i was Bitter Enemy of Compassion", "learning stuff, makes you less knowledgable. It's vey Zen", and I remember someone being entertained by 'selling empty bottles gives you nature virtue' once, but I can't find a quote for it.

All in all, virtues are currently one of those things you experiment with a little or read the code, then turn off once their jokes grow old.


Trying to fix that is an entirely different issue; it's already too spammy for most players, kinda ruining the 'subtle' part, and if you were to try and make it more subtle, they wouldn't even be as entertained with it as they are, since they might not ever notice the system or its effects unless they were very thorough, and they might never figure out how it works.

Using it (in a game design sense) successfully probably involves making sure the player can trust that the system will make sense, that it wont screw them over, and that each thing it does is reasonably possible to figure out. Then, you need to show them early on— in their introduction to the game— that they even need to be giving this trust, and that it won't be misplaced. Something like "Each character will have a set of Virtues that interact with the world around them; higher virtue marks that character as an ally of all things that hold the same virtue." Which neatly implies things like how creatures can be friendly based on virtue and how chaos/random items work better with higher chance virtue...

...but runs the problem that it doesn't quite match how spellcasting penalties work right now, or with how compassion = 'heal monster wand is better', and if you wanted to implement it, you would still need to fix things like Nature or Honor virtue, so that player decisions can actually have a proportionate effect on the virtue.

There's also the arguable bonuses; like Chance virtue's effect on Polymorph is good for some purposes but not for others, so a player might feel betrayed that they increased their Chance only to discover it made their odds worse at their goal.

^(Kinda like the "crazy" disconnect, there are players [myself included] that thought some parts of Poschengband were intentionally confusing; pieces not intended to add anything to the gameplay but instead to leave someone playing or reading the code befuddled into speechlessness at least once, or, at the very least, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.)[/spoiler]

That was longer than expected, and I don't think I managed to say my point explicitly. I hope you can figure it out anyway, chris, but if you don't want to bother, I wouldn't be upset.

[AnonymousHero]

I have never played poscheng but I think it is the best *band and I always read about it.

Wat? I mean, I can understand being interested, but "the best band"? Get outta here with your smarmy and transparent flattery!

I came here to say that I hope chris and clouded are soon reconciled. I suspect that if all the facts were clear, they would find they had a lot of common ground.
A.

I honestly find it hard to care about the specifics, but of course one generally hopes for a magnanimous outcome.

(FWIW, I did play PosCheng for a bit up until 4.x-ish? It ended up being a bit too crazy for me. Loved Entroband, though, so... meh?)

@chris: Do whatever the fuck you want... and I actually mean that sincerely. It's your variant, you do you. If people want to fork or whatever, that's their prerogative. I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind dropping clouded's patches (assuming they're good patches), but again... you do you. It's fine.

[Antoine]

> Wat? I mean, I can understand being interested, but "the best band"? Get outta here with your smarmy and transparent flattery!

No I mean it, I think it is better and more true to the Angband heritage than V

A.

[AnonymousHero]

> Wat? I mean, I can understand being interested, but "the best band"? Get outta here with your smarmy and transparent flattery!
No I mean it, I think it is better and more true to the Angband heritage than V
A.

My point was: How can you say that without having played it?

EDIT: And, no, it isn't. It's more true to the Hengband heritage (which derives from Angband, yes, thank you). There's was a huge schism around randomized energy replenishiment. (I happen to like it "up to" Entroband, but Poschengband ended up being too extreme for me.)