Reading Silmarillion

[Bowman]

Radagast isn't just "good", he is pacifist. As such he would get as far out of Angband as he could get. Good violent chars I understand in angband, but not someone who is clearly against all sorts of violence.

Oh, is this something that comes up from one of those other side story sets? The only thing about Radagast in my version of The Silmarillion was that he gave some animal friends to Saruman. If he is explicitly a pacifist, then yeah, it doesn't make sense for him to be in Angband.

Not that it makes terribly much sense to have Kronos or jabberwocks or death molds, either, but you know what I mean

I get that you can have varying degrees of slaughterism with any @, but is there really a way to play @ as being unambiguously good? Every creature in Angband is capable of hurting any other, and that's even kind of acknowledged by the description for horned reapers, so it's not just a gameplay simplification. Anything less than unambiguously good, and it can be explained by the whole "internal strife among good people" thing that Morgoth was promoting. I'm not trying to be dismissive of getting annoyed about fighting other Valar, but it doesn't seem too farfetched to me.

[Derakon]

I get that you can have varying degrees of slaughterism with any @, but is there really a way to play @ as being unambiguously good?

Angband's settings and mechanics are too simplistic to really allow for any moral gradations. The ultimate goal of the game is to kill something, and you can only get stronger by killing things or by drinking potions. Theoretically you might be able to get strong enough solely through Potions of Experience and sneaking around the dungeon stealing items to get the power needed to win, but realistically practically nobody plays that way.

More plausibly, let's say you play the "self-defense" game: only kill things that attack you first. Is that really the kind of action a good person would take? Let's say you're an American in WWII and you drive a tank into Germany, but you only shoot people after they've shot at you first -- you're still the aggressor, you're not acting in self-defense because your mere presence is provocation.

Put another way, in order to have a properly "good" protagonist, you need to have scenarios that can realistically allow a good person to succeed. In order to have a proper morality system, you need to give the player the opportunity to choose between good and evil, and that choice needs to be a hard choice (not merely stuff like "kill these guys, but apologize afterwards" vs. "kill these guys, while calling them names").

Put another way, go play Undertale.

[Bowman]

Yeah, that's the point I was doing a horrible job of making. The game doesn't really let you express any morality for @, so reading any morality into the game's treatment of @ is a bit of a reach.

[AnonymousHero]

The game doesn't really let you express any morality for @, ...

Other than wholesale slaughter, you mean?

[Rowan]

Though simplistic in terms of actual roleplay and having few moral decisions to make, Angband is still a roleplaying game. Something as simple as putting a gang of street-urchins to sleep or just running away, in stead of blasting them off the face of the earth or bashing their brains in, qualifies as a "good" act in terms of what Angband allows the player to do.

In a lot of small, subtle ways, I do believe there's enough wiggle-room to play good. I am probably in the minority going to the trouble of playing good, but those players do exist, and I certainly am not the only one who complains about good enemies appearing in Angband.

[krazyhades]

I'm not sure I agree that Angband is a roleplaying game in its game mechanics, despite the player having a character that progresses. The argument against it being an RPG is that it's a tactics game that focuses exclusively on risk/reward evaluation, resource management, and tactical combat. There is no explicit in-game recognition of player behavior and non-combat/strategy choices.

Can it be used to roleplay? Of course. But so can most any game, e.g. Monopoly or chess. There's definitely some argument as you say in favor of it being an RPG (e.g. the "story" behind the character's progression, or choices like collecting slime molds or not hurting sleeping monsters) but Vanilla at least has no recognition of this sort of thing (some variants for example use a virtue system, and I'm sure there are other more roleplay mechanics out there in the *bands).

So yes, it's a bit mixed and as you say some players can (and most probably have at least once) knowingly made sub-optimal decisions for roleplay reasons, but they aren't really supported by the game itself in a meaningful way.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to start an argument, as I see both sides of things. I'm just bored with the actual work I'm doing....

[Derakon]

I'm not sure I agree that Angband is a roleplaying game in its game mechanics, despite the player having a character that progresses.

"Having a character that progresses" is basically what "roleplaying elements" means in videogame terminology these days. It has nothing whatsoever to do with actual roleplay and everything to do with having little numbers that get bigger over the course of the game.

By that metric, Angband is a roleplaying game. By any reasonable metric it isn't, but unfortunately reasonable metrics aren't in use here.

[krazyhades]

"Having a character that progresses" is basically what "roleplaying elements" means in videogame terminology these days. It has nothing whatsoever to do with actual roleplay and everything to do with having little numbers that get bigger over the course of the game.

By that metric, Angband is a roleplaying game. By any reasonable metric it isn't, but unfortunately reasonable metrics aren't in use here.

Yeah I get that, as I hope I made clear in my post. But since it doesn't even have, for example, dialog of any sort (c.f. say, the Diablo games), even if linear, I'm reluctant to categorize it as an RPG for the reasons I lay out above.

But I also don't use "roguelike" for games that don't play like Rogue, so I get that I'm in the minority compared with the general population on these points.

[Bowman]

Angband has dialog when someone points at you and says "DIE!" before cackling evilly about traps

On a slightly more serious note, I can definitely understand projecting some sort of personality into the game and being annoyed when things don't fit it,but at the same time, I like having the ainur enemies. It's certainly possible to replace them with something else having the same numbers, but if that's done at the cost of losing the pomp and presense of, say, Osse herald of Ulmo because he's now just Luxaphel the demoniac angel, are we really better off for it? Perhaps, perhaps not. Stylishness is obviously a subjective thing, but on the scale of "make this thing more interesting" to "I must burn this couch because this thing is so awesome", I think the current ainur are nearer to the top end than slimes or jellies, so I'd rather see those tweaked to be cool first.

Yeash, that was a lot of words to say a whole lot of nothing