News You Can Bruise for 2007 October 16 (entry 0)

(7) Tue Oct 16 2007 21:53 More Roguelike Notes: The meta-adventure continues as I consider more of Zack's complaints about Nethack.

• Identification is too hard. Well, there are lots of tricks here, and it's not too hard if you know them. Basic price ID and the wand trick will get you a long way. BUT, that's a feature of Nethack and doesn't have to be a feature of any given Roguelike. *Angband and Diablo have identify scrolls for sale in the town. But those games also have very strict inventory limits, so you have to constantly identify and ditch items. They also have a huge number of unique artifacts, so there are many more things to identify than in Nethack.

  I've found that identification is very difficult in ADOM, because the Nethack tricks don't work and identify scrolls are much rarer. Also you can't name classes of items.

  If you want to make identification easier, you can add more tricks or add more sources of identification. You can balance this by adding more things that need to be identified. This ties in well with Zack's desire to see more equipment and more artifacts.

• It's easy to optimize your kit. *Angband negates this by 1) having an enormous number of monster attacks that you need to defend against, and 2) giving you lots of randomly generated equipment. If you're lucky you can optimize your kit, but there is no immunity in *Angband, so you still have to carry around resistance potions to deal with the Older Than Dirt Red Wyrm who can breathe for 400 points of fire damage every turn (this is one of the things I hate about *Angband actually).

  However you get rid of this problem, it's going to be by creating more aspects of equipment. Either there will be no way to get all these aspects at once, there will be so many ways to get partial coverage it will be difficult to figure out the best one, or some of the aspects will be negative (permacurses, vulnerabilties). It helps if you limit (ADOM) or remove (*Angband) permanent intrinsics. That way the player has to rely more on their equipment and less on something they ate.

• Artifacts are boring. They are, in fact. I think this is another result of Nethack's flatness and written-in-C-ness. It's easy to add another weapon to the artifact table but difficult to give it custom behavior. And often the custom behavior doesn't make the artifact better than a normal enchanted weapon. The vorpal sword is kind of cool but it's not worth lugging around.

  ADOM has more useful artifacts than Nethack, even though there's no custom behavior. *Angband has random artifacts that are cool, and Zangband(?) has a whole subgenre of usually-useless artifacts that can be triggered for some effect every N turns and have fun Knapsack Problem-esque names. Diablo II has super-cool customizable artifacts. I like Zack's idea of artifacts (or just random objects) gaining more power as you complete quests, but that's going to be a whole lot of side quests most of which won't be triggered in a given game. Sounds kind of MMORPGish.

  Magicbane, Mjolnir, and Stormbringer are the only Nethack artifacts that feel like artifacts, like powerful magics barely under your control. That said, most roguelikes don't give artifacts any special behavior at all. You could go a long way just by programming that big table of artifact effects from the 1st edition AD&D DMG.

• Starting equipment quality has too much variance. True, but if you're going to introduce variance into the game (important for replayability at different challenge levels), the beginning is the place to do it.

  In this context Zack brings up the complaint, common to pseudo-RPG genres, that although saving the world is supposedly your job, nobody lifts a finger to help you. I actually wrote What Fools These Mortals to explain this, and the "Guide to the Mazes of Menace" tries to accomplish the same by downplaying the implications of the game intro dump.

  In a game design context, this occurs in Nethack for two reasons. First, Nethack comes from Rogue, and in Rogue you are "some punk kid with no particular skills and no holy mission" -- a rogue, if you will. Second, if you started the game with good equipment, the first part of the game would be too easy. It'd have to be made harder. Then you'd be back where you started. Maybe kick in a couple food rations for classes that start with no food, but I think Nethack gives you a wide variety of challenges here and it's a reasonable design decision.

Comments:

Posted by Zack at Wed Oct 17 2007 03:29

Regarding the equipment optimization, my problem is not so much that it's easy to get good gear in Nethack, as that there's pretty much one set of gear that's the best you can have. Pre-3.4, if I remember correctly, it was grey dragon scale mail, shield of reflection, oilskins, speed boots, ring of slow digestion, ring of teleport control, and an artifact weapon. You might reasonably pick different helms or gauntlets, and I suspect some players would quibble with my ring choices, but these are second-order. They did improve this a bit in 3.4.0 - silver dragon scale is now a viable option if you have some other source of MR, and that frees up the shield hand for #twoweapon mode; also, robes can be really really nice if you have decent Int but aren't a spellcaster class. But it is still very, very limited.

I don't have time right now to get good at ADOM so I read some spoilers for it instead - it looks like, as you say, the space there is rather more open. I kinda like the Nethack intrinsic hunt, though; it has some fun early-game consequences. Eating molds, for instance, hurts you but can be a lifesaver if you get a useful resistance out of it.

"Powerful magics barely under your control" is a great way to describe what artifacts ought to be like and often aren't. (Worst offender I've ever seen in this regard is some entry in the Might and Magic series, whose artifacts were different from ordinary magic items only in having incredibly elaborate names and costing more in shops.) (I do have to give that game cleverness points for having an 100% generic fantasy setting except for the crashed alien starship, from which you could get laser rifles if you were prepared to fight your way past a horde of homicidal security robots ... and while these were devastatingly effective weapons, it was impossible to get any training in their use. You had to figure them out yourself. ...Which then turned out to be a rather annoying waste of time, but I did say cleverness points, not good design points.)

Posted by Leonard at Wed Oct 17 2007 08:55

I was trying to address the "one set of gear" problem. Nethack has that problem because there are more equipment slots than intrinsics you can only get from equipment. To make the choices harder you need to add more IYCOGFE.

Posted by Leonard at Wed Oct 17 2007 10:22

Or, have some items give bonuses that reward certain styles of gameplay or are useful in certain parts of the game.

Posted by Zack at Wed Oct 17 2007 13:16

It comes down to overall strategy in the end. It's clearly desirable, in a roguelike, to have many different overall strategies all of which can win the game; some of them being more of a challenge than others. Nethack does this with character class and conduct rather than with equipment; it sounds like *angband and ADOM put more of it on the equipment. Diversity in all contexts where the game requires the player to make choices is going to be more fun...

Posted by Leonard at Wed Oct 17 2007 14:49

Judging from the huge number of spinoffs and the existence of an AI player I'd guess Angband is a good example.

Posted by Zack at Thu Oct 18 2007 00:29

I forget what's wrong with the licensing, but none of the *Angbands actually qualify as free software, despite being source-available. It's probably some nitpicky thing like no for-profit distribution.