Party based roguelikes?

[Therem Harth]

As in "dungeon crawl with more than one player character", not "booze and loud music and inebriated singing yeeks." Are there any?

Asking because I'm discovering that party logistics are one of the more interesting things about old RPGs. Controlling a few specialist characters instead of one ubercharacter would, I think, make a game like Angband more entertaining.

(I'll also admit I'm hoping for a preexisting code base to mess around with, and look at for examples of how to implement a party system.)

[Estie]

I would love that, too. My approach would be tomenet base, change features to enable party roles (tank/healer/dps/cc/whatever), remove friendly fire.
Realtime as turnbased gets awkward with more than 2 players.

For partying to be worthwhile, the synergy needs to be substantial, otherwise people will rather use solo play and trick killing (like pillardance). As a rule of thumb, nothing that can be killed headon by one character should yield noticable XP. Of course, things like healing potions and phasedoor scrolls need to be removed or at least severely restricted.
You also want health/mana bars of all party members displayed.

Other things that come to mind:

Maybe have staircases free of monsters so party can set up before fighting; stairtraps are unfair when people have varying connection speeds.

The minimum role spread would be tank/healer/dps, other jobs possible but not necessary to create enough synergy. MMOs typically have restricted party size to enable balancing of encounters.

Some kind of aggro mechanism is needed to enable tank/dps roles to function.

A possible job would be "puller" (the name in everquest, other games have similar roles but different names for it), that is a class that gets the attention of (few) monsters and leads them to the party to fight. Assuming monsters start out sleeping, waking up 1 monster (by getting close with bad stealth or shooting some ammo at it) might result in it waking up everything in a radius ("alarm shout"). Puller gets abilities to wake up only one or a few.

Crowd control is another possible job, maybe a spellcaster who casts sleep monster in various forms (single target, ball or LoS).

Hurt monsters run away; if they are made to wake up everything they get close to while on the run, preventing running gives rise to yet another job. Slow spell or burst damage come to mind.

To enable fluent play, it needs a fast way of targeting things. Probably using mouse for that would be best.

[Therem Harth]

I don't mean multiplayer. I mean single player, turn based, managing a party of characters. Like Avernum, or maybe the Final Fantasy games (dunno, never played those).

Friendly fire would IMO be a good thing tactically.

[Estie]

Hmmm that would also be interesting. I would suggest copying Dragon Age as state of the art interface, with things like party inventory.
The closest thing existing is a summoner in ToME2 ? Its a party where the AI controls the summons, but you have a (cumbersome) menu to adjust their behaviour.
Yes Im also all for friendly fire in a single player situation.

[Derakon]

Ha, I was going to suggest you go look at the Exile series as a (now free) example of party-based dungeon crawling, albeit a rather old and somewhat clunky one. More generally, tactical RPGs make a good potential "template" to use for designing a game around party-based RPG combat.

You'll almost certainly need some convenient way to "explode" the party into individual members and then "compress" it back into a party for when you aren't fighting -- if you have to do your dungeon exploration by manually moving every single party member, then your players will revolt in short order.

[clouded]

Look up tangband if you want to see how to make this idea completely unplayable.

[Nick]

Antoine (author of Quickband, Ironband and minimal Angband) had a roguelike called IIRC Quest before he started *band programming - I never played it, so know nothing more.

I thought of the possibility of adding multiple players like this to FAangband at one point, but then I thought of a lot of things that never happened.

[Therem Harth]

I've been a longtime fan of the Exile games. Personally I think they're less clunky than the Avernum ones. Unfortunately they don't work on modern OSes.

Blades of Exile is now under the GPL as it happens, but its code base is horrifying. I'd wanted to do some work on that, but it's all very platform-specific and I had no idea where to start.

(There's also a cross-platform version that was in the works, but it uses an obscure and very minimal graphical toolkit, right now still only works on Mac platforms that I can't afford, and its development is also halted.)

Anyway this is all speculative, as between work and sleep I have little time these days.

(Also have I mentioned I'm still terrible at programming?)

[fizzix]

I'm not aware of any good party roguelikes. In general roguelikes produce enough commands for a single player, nevermind 4-5.

I think the best method might be something akin to the old school Eye of the Beholder games, or the modern incarnation, Legend of Grimrock. These aren't roguelikes by any stretch, they're first person, have set storylines, and are not turn based. However, there's no good reason that I see why the engine couldn't be used to create something roguelike-like.

Tales of Maj'Eyal has the option of playing an alchemist class where you have a golem and can switch control from the character to the golem. But I found this mechanic to be very cumbersome.

[Antoine]

Antoine (author of Quickband, Ironband and minimal Angband) had a roguelike called IIRC Quest before he started *band programming - I never played it, so know nothing more.

Yep thanks Nick,

It was a proof-of-concept game called Guild. You had a party of characters, you controlled one at any given time, the rest moved round using their AI and you could give them commands which they would at least think about obeying.

You can download Windows binaries here:

http://www.roguetemple.com/guild/

and let me know if you want the source.

A.

[Nick]

It was a proof-of-concept game called Guild.

Guild! I knew quest sounded wrong.

[Mark]

In other not-roguelikes for reference, the SSI Goldbox series could be good to look at. You explored the (ultimately) 2D tilebased environments as one unit, but combat comprised of up to half a dozen player-controller characters, taking turns.

[Bandobras]

Yay, Antoine, Guild feels so innovative *and* complete at the same time. Also, many aspects of your game are strikingly similar as in my experimental party roguelike(s). I just released new versions of LambdaHack (fantasy, Nethack-like UI, this repo also holds the actual engine):

https://github.com/LambdaHack/LambdaHack/releases/tag/v0.4.100.0

and Allure of the Stars (sci-fi, Angband-like UI):

https://github.com/AllureOfTheStars/Allure/releases/tag/v0.4.100.0

I prefer when the non-leader party members stay still (and only retaliate in melee). This is mind-bogglingly tiresome for somebody that doesn't run all the time, but walks step by step. I see in Guild you let all party members walk, but you don't enable running (or not prominently enough for me to spot). This is exactly the choice of the author of Space Privateers, yet another game based on the same engine (his game is not yet updated to the v0.4.100.0 engine version, and I don't think he has Windows binaries yet):

https://github.com/tuturto/space-privateers

OTOH, I see that what bogs me down most in Guild, at least at the start of the gameplay and without practice (just stumbled on it) is equipment management. I wonder if it's as cumbersome in Allure and LambdaHack. I tried to set up sane defaults and automatize most item management, but then there is a lot of items and large inventories and defaults can backfire if you go against them.

Any feedback is sincerely welcome. The games are in development and especially party management and team combat require a lot more thought (e.g., now it's possible to make a tank character via shield items, but other actors can't lob missiles over the tank, so it's actually usually better to try to surround an enemy, or establish a frontline against many enemies and then specialization is not beneficial).

[Derakon]

It occurs to me that Bionic Dues might technically qualify as a party-based roguelike. You only have one character "out" at a time, though, and switching between characters costs a turn.

Bionic Dues is also not free, and while interesting, it definitely has flaws -- chiefly that each party member has waaaaay too many equipment slots, which, combined with a Diablo-style approach to loot, makes selecting equipment a rather onerous process. I mean, I enjoyed my playthrough of it. I just don't feel much impetus to play it again.

[mrrstark]

Yay, Antoine, Guild feels so innovative *and* complete at the same time. Also, many aspects of your game are strikingly similar as in my experimental party roguelike(s). I just released new versions of LambdaHack (fantasy, Nethack-like UI, this repo also holds the actual engine):

https://github.com/LambdaHack/LambdaHack/releases/tag/v0.4.100.0

and Allure of the Stars (sci-fi, Angband-like UI):

https://github.com/AllureOfTheStars/Allure/releases/tag/v0.4.100.0

I prefer when the non-leader party members stay still (and only retaliate in melee). This is mind-bogglingly tiresome for somebody that doesn't run all the time, but walks step by step. I see in Guild you let all party members walk, but you don't enable running (or not prominently enough for me to spot). This is exactly the choice of the author of Space Privateers, yet another game based on the same engine (his game is not yet updated to the v0.4.100.0 engine version, and I don't think he has Windows binaries yet):

https://github.com/tuturto/space-privateers

OTOH, I see that what bogs me down most in Guild, at least at the start of the gameplay and without practice (just stumbled on it) is equipment management. I wonder if it's as cumbersome in Allure and LambdaHack. I tried to set up sane defaults and automatize most item management, but then there is a lot of items and large inventories and defaults can backfire if you go against them.

Any feedback is sincerely welcome. The games are in development and especially party management and team combat require a lot more thought (e.g., now it's possible to make a tank character via shield items, but other actors can't lob missiles over the tank, so it's actually usually better to try to surround an enemy, or establish a frontline against many enemies and then specialization is not beneficial).

I tried running both of them, Win7, 64-bit. And I get an immediate system error "... can't start because libatk-1.0-0.dll is missing"

Where do I get that?