Ascii Dreams poll

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I am trying another simple solution currently, using stairs just costs a lot of food in my variant (with some other changes to make food mechanics interesting).

Ok! That makes perfect sense if you assume travel between "interesting" levels takes a lot of time.

I've recently removed the food clock from the development version of Fay altogether, and made torches more interesting and scarce. It will be nice to see your version.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

What kills most characters is the player playing not risky enough which results in deaths from boredom and inattention. Therefore the 'real' optimal way to play is be too risky...

I think many people just get bored eventually and move on to other games, because they just don't realize what's the proper way to play Angband. There must be better answers.

And let's imagine a veteran player who usually plays risky. Then, with one character, he finds some very cool stuff and realizes that he *really* doesn't want to lose this character. He decides he is willing to accept days of boredom if that's the way to keep this character alive. Is this good game design?

If you want to go the whole way, the real fix for the problem is not having character levels. But I don't think that game is Angband.

Well, limiting dungeon levels is easier and it works... (I'm not proposing it for Vanilla.)

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I was actually not planning to start advertising my views about the problems of infinite dungeons. I really just misunderstood what Andrew meant with "you can either balance the whole dungeon or individual battles", and got a bit carried away.

I'm happy that the dev team is considering adapting a better scoring system. In my mind this goes a long way in aligning "fun" with "optimal".

In addition to that, I'm proposing that Angband's playing philosophy should be stated very clearly to beginners!

Tell them that diving fast is fun, that you are not supposed to kill all monsters, and that stealth and avoidance is a viable strategy. People who come from other games just don't get these ideas, and may easily come to the conclusion that Angband is a boring game.

I don't think it's wise to advertise too much that "this game can be played in many ways" when clearly some of the ways are much more fun than others.

I've been playing Angband a long time. For a long, long time I didn't have a clue that Angband was designed for this stealth/avoidance playing style. I've always considered switching dungeon levels in a tight spot "cheating" because it is so, so easy. I've always played with disconnected stairs (coming from Moria), but even then. I thought this was a "bug" in the game and avoided it. Maybe that's the reason why I've never won.

I wish somebody had told me right from the beginning how this game was supposed to be played.

[chris]

I've always considered switching dungeon levels in a tight spot "cheating" because it is so, so easy.

Unless monsters could chase you down the stairs!

[Magnate]

Unless monsters could chase you down the stairs!

Crawl does that, and IMO it is the single mechanic which makes Crawl harder than Angband. Much, much harder. I don't actually like the mechanic (persistent levels or no) - it basically means that if you wake up/aggro a too-tough monster, you are pretty screwed. Much much less forgiving of mistakes. (Note also that teleport is much harder to acquire in Crawl.)

I don't think it's unbalanced in Angband, providing that tele isn't too common. Lots of the most hair-raising survival stories are about running for stairs when your last means of tele got burned up.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I guess the thing I most dislike about stairs is this:

As a newbie, everybody eventually learns that repeatably going up and down the stairs is a good method for keeping you safe. So good that it must be unethical somehow! And then everybody has to make his own rules regarding "how much do I want to cheat with the stairs".

I'd much rather let the game designer do this job for me.

I think I went overboard with my own "rules" and missed some enjoyment -- I never realized you should be using stairs to actively search for deep monsters that you can kill. (Do you guys play like that?)

[nppangband]

How about playing with the connected stairs option turned off? That should be a good way for the player to address this.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

How about playing with the connected stairs option turned off? That should be a good way for the player to address this.

I do, of course. That option is one part of that "choose your own ethics" thing. I went further than that and always tried to clear even the hardest of levels because I had learned to associate stairs with cheating. And then died a lot, of course.

There are other similar features that cannot be turned off by an option, like town scumming.

That's the one thing I like most in my own variant: no fuzzy ethics. No forbidden tricks.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I want to end with a positive note. To me, Angband is great -- and beats all other roguelikes I've tried -- because it is so competitive. Man versus computer at its purest.

No hidden rules like in those other roguelikes. Pure sweet tactical hack'n'slash and resource management with no pretentions for being an "adventure" or "puzzle-solving" game.

Only because I see the potential for an even greater game in this aspect have I been so obsessive about the minor flaws. And basically that's also why I made FayAngband: I'm trying to enhance the one aspect in Angband that I like the most.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Mentioning from earlier posts about levels and monster threat level, some rpg's mainly NWN uses monster to character level scaling, so no matter the dungeon level the monsters generated depend on character level. This is interesting but possibly problamatic in itself, but you could in a since use this algorithim for each dungeon level, and take 1 unique weakest to strongest and place them on each dungeon level, a goal somewhat to complete that level and then go down to the next, then if a character gains levels and then tries to go back up a few DL's then they are still faced with the same amount of danger as monsters are generated and scaled by character level, and there is no sense of "overpowered for the dungeon level." This however would be hard to balance but is an interesting idea.

[ekolis]

I don't know about everyone else, but "enemy strength depends on player level" just rubs me the wrong way - first off, what's the point of leveling up your character if enemies power up as well? (Heck, I've heard of characters in Elder Scrolls games becoming practically unplayable because the player put all his skill points in crafting, smithing, diplomacy, etc. and now he can't wander outside of town without getting slaughtered by lv. 35 goblins!) And secondly, it just seems arbitrary - why should enemies level up just because the player did? Now I know that in some games (especially Zelda and Metroid games) where there's a lot of backtracking, midway through the game you'll revisit an old area and HOLY CRAP there are lots tougher monsters there that last time! But you might notice they're actually DIFFERENT monsters, not just "elite mooks" with arbitrarily inflated stats.

[Derakon]

I have never encountered a game with monster level scaling where I thought the game was improved for it. The problem with scaling monsters to the player is that the player never feels that they're making progress. They need to have things to compare themselves to, which means monsters that were stronger than them but are now weaker then them.

In the context of Angband, your first Ancient Dragon kill is a notable accomplishment. But later on you're taking them down in one or two rounds like it's no big deal. That's a good indication that the player has gotten stronger, and it's a big part of the motivation to play the game. Angband is, after all, basically about accumulating enough power to kill a god. Not much point in that if by the time you have all that power, so do the small kobolds you were fighting in the first dungeon level.

[Malak Darkhunter]

I have never encountered a game with monster level scaling where I thought the game was improved for it. The problem with scaling monsters to the player is that the player never feels that they're making progress. They need to have things to compare themselves to, which means monsters that were stronger than them but are now weaker then them.

In the context of Angband, your first Ancient Dragon kill is a notable accomplishment. But later on you're taking them down in one or two rounds like it's no big deal. That's a good indication that the player has gotten stronger, and it's a big part of the motivation to play the game. Angband is, after all, basically about accumulating enough power to kill a god. Not much point in that if by the time you have all that power, so do the small kobolds you were fighting in the first dungeon level.

I don't mean it that way really, what I mean is if you think about it, the farther you go down the tougher the monsters are, more powerful incarnations of previous versions you have fought, you can take that principal and apply it to character level, sort of like how you usually fight large brown snakes on level 1, but lo and behold once your character has replayed dungeon level 1 continously you all of a sudden find a mettaclic green centipeed or something out of depth, it is taking normaly out of depth monsters and placing them on DL's that the player is on based on CL. Not specifically about making level 50 kobolds appear. I mean same monsters, same power but the player finding no relief in gaining levels and scumming on "Safe Levels".

[buzzkill]

I don't mean it that way really, what I mean is if you think about it, the farther you go down the tougher the monsters are, more powerful incarnations of previous versions you have fought, you can take that principal and apply it to character level, sort of like how you usually fight large brown snakes on level 1, but lo and behold once your character has replayed dungeon level 1 continously you all of a sudden find a mettaclic green centipeed or something out of depth, it is taking normaly out of depth monsters and placing them on DL's that the player is on based on CL. Not specifically about making level 50 kobolds appear. I mean same monsters, same power but the player finding no relief in gaining levels and scumming on "Safe Levels".

To modify this just a bit. Make the OoD check dependent upon character level. At CL1 almost nothing out of depth will appear. At CL50, anything can happen, and usually will. Ancient Dragons on DL1, no problem (we can presume that Morgoth becomes more aware of the PC as he gains power and actively sends minions after him). Most of the game will function largely as it does now, with moderate leveled characters
facing moderately OoD enemies a moderate amount of the time. I particularly like idea this because for a large part of the game it's a rather small change to the status-quo.

To go further, if there was a way to track how often a player flees from in depth monsters (or doesn't), that could be used to modify generation or, going off on a tangent here, we could approach this problem from the side by altering the frequency of spawns and/or the number of enemies that would normally appear in a group or alone, maybe even overpopulate the dungeon to begin with. However first we need to accurately determine if the player is adequately overpowered. Maybe track average % of max HP turn-by-turn and/or near death expierences (within 10% of death).

[Malak Darkhunter]

Yup nailed it!