New stat drain model rocks

[Derakon]

I think the idea is that you learn which enemies can drain you, and then you do your best to avoid them. Landing in a room with a bunch of Time Hounds is lousy luck though. Ideally you'd have telepathy so you wouldn't have to use a turn to detect them. NPP-derived variants try to always start the player in a little cul-de-sac so there can't be lots of enemies in LOS right at the start; Vanilla should probably steal that feature.

The way I handled experience drain in Pyrel (which I have, alas, been too busy to work on lately) was to have it temprarily drain entire character levels, and it'd stack. So getting hit once usually wasn't a big deal, but getting hit ten times would be a big problem -- which would go away on its own after a bit. Something similar could probably be done with stat drains too: make them bigger (percentile?) drains, but only temporary. I do tend to agree that permanently "damaging" a character is pretty lame.

As for house size, if it weren't so intractably tied up with the size of stores, I'm pretty sure it'd have been made gigantic awhile ago. Practically nobody thinks that the current house size is important for any kind of gameplay reason, and there are a lot of players who want to be able to hoard more loot.

[jrodman]

Draining LOTS of stats quite seriously but having the status expire seems like a lot more fun. Trying to survive crazy stat drain scenarios sounds exciting.

One of the problems with angband negative statuses is the prepared player can so readily just leave. I wonder if there's space for something more evil like the rare short-term teleport prevention. I suppose teleport-to is along those lines, but it's quite expectable once you know the game, while the unusual combination of one creature which can momentarily block teleportation with another creature that offers some other unwanted threat might be good.

Of course I'm kind of far off topic here.

I think there should be some other pattern of recovery for drain still, or it shouldn't be so common (and then so pointless once properly equipped).

[takkaria]

I think there should be some other pattern of recovery for drain still, or it shouldn't be so common (and then so pointless once properly equipped).

I take your criticism. If you can think of something better I'd be interested in hearing it. I think the current situation is still better than people just recalling, buying/scumming for potions, and going back to the dungeon but I'm open to other suggestions.

[Derakon]

Well, I made my suggestion.

[jrodman]

I take your criticism. If you can think of something better I'd be interested in hearing it. I think the current situation is still better than people just recalling, buying/scumming for potions, and going back to the dungeon but I'm open to other suggestions.

The xp drain scenario is still essentially that; go to town wait for restore life levels to appear. I think it's actually superior to the current situation where you can end up having progression rewound, which means proper play may just be to play treading water at a much earlier point in the dungeon.

I think the options are:

* The problem is made temporary in some way. Probably with a trade of being more severe.
* Additional items of recovery are introduced that are more readily acquirable, or current sources become more common.
* Some independent method of recovery is introduced that is not item based.
* Limit the possible reductions by stat drain. Eg loss of more than say 2 points in a single round is exceedingly rare.

----
Limiting might be the change that most fits your existing choices. For example stat drain could apply a temporary effect to the player, perhaps lasting around one normal turn, where further drain in this time window has no effect.

That would make time hounds a lot less scary, but yet they still can worsen your character for hours so there's a certain fear there.

This makes it fairly unlikely that you end up with a character missing 8 points in every category, which is when you just have to leave and wait for it to go away.

----

Because I think the real problem is the boringness of waiting for it to go away, I am more interested in play mechanics that keep the player engaged in the problem.

For example, what if exercising a stat had a chance to give some recovery?

Say performing strenuous activity over some period might occasionally restore 0.1 point of strength. Perhaps spellcasting might do the same for intelligence.

To get this right you'd probably want to do some kind of tricky filter for like "you can only get this benefit in combat" so the right thing to do isn't necessarily to stand in the corner in town and do stuff until the drain is gone.

This kind of mechanic would make the post-drain scenario more interesting, enjoying the return of your power, rather than more boring.

[DaviddesJ]

I take your criticism. If you can think of something better I'd be interested in hearing it. I think the current situation is still better than people just recalling, buying/scumming for potions, and going back to the dungeon but I'm open to other suggestions.

I think the whole idea of Angband has always been that you can get out of pretty much any problem by going back to town. I don't see why people want to change that. If you *have* to go back to town over and over and over again, every five minutes, that sucks after a while. But taking away the option altogether is worse. I never found stat drain annoying enough in any of my previous games that I was visiting town over and over and over again just to deal with it. So what's the problem to be fixed?

[Elsairon]

I think the whole idea of Angband has always been that you can get out of pretty much any problem by going back to town. I don't see why people want to change that. If you *have* to go back to town over and over and over again, every five minutes, that sucks after a while. But taking away the option altogether is worse. I never found stat drain annoying enough in any of my previous games that I was visiting town over and over and over again just to deal with it. So what's the problem to be fixed?

The problem is that some find the way drain currently works annoying enough that they do not enjoy playing as it is. Others don't mind so much.

I recall scumming for restores before, and it was tedious, but I still enjoyed the game mostly by falling back on ranged weapons instead of spell/melee depending on what stat was drained into un-usability. (I'm referring to *band in general not this specific version)

[DaviddesJ]

The problem is that some find the way drain currently works annoying enough that they do not enjoy playing as it is.

You mean the new version, right? I can certainly see that, it sounds annoying. My question was, what was the problem with just leaving it the way it was. Everyone seemed basically fine with it before.

[Derakon]

My question was, what was the problem with just leaving it the way it was. Everyone seemed basically fine with it before.

You're missing the silent majority of people who like the change.

More seriously, anytime the optimal playstyle is to townscum for stat restoration, we have a problem. That problem could potentially have been fixed by making stat-restore potions be guaranteed to be in stock, but the devteam has had a general goal of making the player less reliant on the town for awhile now. Shopping is boring; exploring the dungeon is fun. That's not to say that the town is going away or anything like that, just that the devs would rather that players find what they need rather than buy it.

Of course that breaks down for the old stat restore system. The new one rather elegantly deals with that problem, while also giving new players a non-punishing introduction to the existence of stat drain. The only problem it has, really, is that in the mid- and late-game you can get badly drained and be stuck for awhile, due to the lack of Mushrooms of Vigor / corresponding stat potions.

[DaviddesJ]

The only problem it has, really, is that in the mid- and late-game you can get badly drained and be stuck for awhile, due to the lack of Mushrooms of Vigor / corresponding stat potions.

Is that a problem? I thought that was the whole motivation for this new system, to create that threat. Which then gives players a reason to go scum for mushrooms on level 3, which is even more boring than scumming in town. Which is why I don't understand what's good about it.

If the idea is actually supposed to be to just scatter the whole world with so many sources of restore stats that they are abundant whenever you need them, that would be ok with me, but it seems like almost the opposite of the actual change, as I understand it.

[Derakon]

The current system works fantastically, so long as you have a limited supply of restorables, but never fewer than you actually need. The reason this works well is that the player is encouraged to treat stat drainers with respect (and to highly value items that sustain their stats), but the player also is not punished for failure by having to scum for restoration items.

As soon as they run out of their hoard of restoration items, though, the new stat-drain system breaks down, because then they are stuck and the most optimal play is to scum low levels for mushrooms, as you say.

I want to say again that in my experience I haven't gotten stuck like that yet; there's always been slightly more mushrooms of Vigor than I've actually needed. I'm not trying to downplay other peoples' bad experiences, just provide another datapoint.

[DaviddesJ]

The current system works fantastically, so long as you have a limited supply of restorables, but never fewer than you actually need. The reason this works well is that the player is encouraged to treat stat drainers with respect (and to highly value items that sustain their stats), but the player also is not punished for failure by having to scum for restoration items.

I think the old system worked just as well. There were enough potions lying around, for the most part, so, just like you're describing in the new system, the great majority of the time I could just press on and find what I need. If I ever really needed to, sure, I could go back to town and "scum" for restore potions, but it's not really a common problem, about as uncommon as "scumming" for mushrooms in the new system.

[Derakon]

The difference being that in the old system, many players always returned to town when they got drained, no matter how badly, because it would be playing suboptimally to proceed with less-than-maximum stats. Now they have to balance pressing on with drained stats vs. using up a consumable that isn't readily replaced. This allows stat drain to have an impact on gameplay beyond "give up and return to town".

[DaviddesJ]

The difference being that in the old system, many players always returned to town when they got drained, no matter how badly, because it would be playing suboptimally to proceed with less-than-maximum stats.

If the new version of "playing optimally" means hanging out on level 3 until you accumulate a lot of Mushrooms of Vigor, that seems worse, not better. You can tweak the settings so that you never need to go back to look for Mushrooms, but then, you can also tweak the settings in the old model so that you never need to go back to town. In fact, you don't need to tweak it, I hardly ever did have to return to town for that. If people feel like they have to return to town every time their stats go down to 18/94 from 18/96 so that they can get it back, shrug. It's making the game more fun for them, or they wouldn't do it.

[Derakon]

It's making the game more fun for them, or they wouldn't do it.

This logic is faulty for the same reason that argument we had about no-selling being optional ("If you don't like selling things, just don't take them back to town") is faulty. People -- lots of people -- will play the game in horribly boring and un-fun ways if they perceive those ways to be the optimal way to play the game. Making certain that the optimal way to play the game is also a fun way to play the game is something like 95% of balancing singleplayer games.