angband-tr 0.1 released

[10v24]

Angband-tr is a patch of Vanilla where the player incurs sorrow for killing monsters, but also has the ability to permanently terrify monsters rather than kill them.

The source code and more information are available here: 10v24.net/ang

I playtested it enough that I can say that it's difficult in the early levels and gets easier for a while. I'm not the best / most motivated player, so the furthest I got was clevel 14. So I don't know how the later game goes. I would be impressed if anyone beat the game. But it's interesting to play just in the lower levels too.

I might make a version 0.2 at some point. Also I'm interested in applying 0.1 to the new Vanilla that's in the works once it becomes stable.

Thanks to Pete Mack for a suggestion about killing mushrooms. I made it so that they only give a token amount of sorrow (that way you can get rid of shrieker mushroom patches).

[jupiter999]

Terrify them for experience?

[10v24]

The way it is currently, you get no experience for terrifying, but you do get experience for walking around the dungeon (you're practicing spells in your head, getting stamina from all the exercise, probably... uh... doing weapons forms, etc), but significantly more when you have monsters in your line of sight, so that interesting scenarios like running away or fighting are rewarded. You don't get any experience for resting (even though theoretically you could be practicing spells in your head, etc, that whole time). Spending time on deeper levels yields more experience. So you can read a ? of deep descent and just try to survive and get rewarded with a couple clevels.

You still get experience for killing monsters, the full amount, which now that I think about it could be reduced for realism's sake. Gameplay-wise, I think it's fine.

It's a poignant gameplay decision, to kill for experience. A warrior can kill Grip at 50' and instantly advance to level 4 or 5. If you don't accidentally kill anyone else after that before you process all your sorrow, you're good, but otherwise you will probably lose the game.

[wobbly]

Have you considered reducing sorrow rates on a couple of races? Seems a little odd for a half-troll warrior getting upset about violence. I'll give the thing a go when I get some free time.

[10v24]

From a gameplay perspective, I didn't want to give the player any way to reduce the penalty. It's not something they can manage easily to make not a problem, but just have to deal with. Some mitigating factors: you can use your racial advantages to avoid killing monsters. Half-trolls can use CON to take damage without fighting, for instance. Also, the higher a monster's base XP, the less sorrow it causes, so as you go deeper, it's less dangerous to kill. (The idea being that dragons and balrogs are less "innocent" than fruit bats and yeeks. Somewhere in the monster list this probably seems weird, but I didn't want to get into that in order to keep the patch simple.)

From a thematic perspective (which... I'm just now making up because I didn't think this far ahead):

Half-trolls and half-orcs grow up in human society, bastard children, spat on, neglected, etc, for their "intrinsic" evil. Some half-trolls and half-orcs rejoin their ancestors as servants of Morgoth, but those are not the ones who heed the call to go to that little town on top of that big iron prison... Half-trolls and half-orcs identify with monsters, since they are monsters themselves, but are not on the side of evil.