News You Can Bruise

Zack wanted me to comment on his Notes Towards a Roguelike, where he talks about his problems with Nethack. Nethack does have serious problems, but some of them are coupled with the things that make Nethack fun, so they can't just be ripped out.

Anonymous commenter on Zack's Livejournal says to take a look at Dwarf Fortress. I definitely think everyone should take a look at Dwarf Fortress, but the roguelike part of DF is pretty lame. Instead I would suggest Zack take a look at ADOM, which has most of Nethack's fun features, few of the aggravations, and not many of the second-order aggravations that come from fixing the first-order aggravations.

Zack's complaints about Nethack:

• The basic mechanics are taken from 1st edition AD&D. That's easy to change if you're writing a new Roguelike. The only place I think this really causes confusion is the weird treatment of armor class and THAC0, and the ancient D&D alignment system. ADOM keeps the lawful-chaotic axis, but has a more fluid model where your alignment fluctuates little by little according to your acts, and where many in-game possibilities depend on your alignment.
• The class system is limiting. I agree. Many modern roguelikes handle advancement with skill points, or a mechanism that lets you assign each of your experience levels to a class. Or look at Omega, most sadly neglected of roguelikes, which lets you join and advance in a few guilds, some of them mutually exclusive.

  I would like to see a roguelike that consistently applies the real-world principle that you get better with practice. You start with an inclination towards solving problems in certain ways, but you only improve the skills you practice.

• The goal is a boring MacGuffin search. Yes, but. A MacGuffin search is what you get when you don't have a plot. Nethack has a page of plot at the beginning, a page at the end, and a bit during the quest, all easily skipped. The only way Nethack branches out is with multiple exits to a level. You can explore the dungeon branches or not: they don't interact with each other or with the main quest. The second-order effect is you stay in a tactical frame of mind from your first move to your last.

  ADOM is a roguelike with a plot. You have to talk to people to get quests. There are multiple endings. Pretty basic stuff, but it changes the gameplay. The world feels a lot less static. There are a couple things about the game world that actually happen over game time.

  Nethack also has no character definition. The memorable characters in Nethack are mainly memorable for inscrutability: the Oracle, Izchak, Rodney. Characters in ADOM have approximately the depth of console RPG characters: there's the old gladiator, the girl who lost her dog, the baby dragon. Console RPG depth is not very deep, but it feels more like a real world and less like a game.

  What's the downside? Because ADOM is a roguelike, you die a lot. When you die in a console RPG you go back to your last save, but every time you die in ADOM you have to restart this moderately complex plot, make a bunch of decisions about which plot levers you want to try and pull this time, which characters you want to put into which states. This problem gets worse as the plot gets richer. Nethack sidesteps the whole thing by having no plot and no character definition.

  Is there a solution? @Play did a few columns on a Japanese rogulike called Torneko No Daibouken (tr. "Torneko's Huge-Ass Adventure"). Read about its architecture as a Nethack player and it will seem very weird but it's a nice synthesis of Roguelike death and CRPG continuity. There's a CRPG metagame where you talk to people and build up your magic items business, and a Roguelike game where you steal magic items from the dungeon. When you play the Roguelike you start at level 1, and the Roguelike continues until you leave the dungeon. Then you play the CRPG for a while. Eventually you can take a couple of useful items into the dungeon with you to make it easier.

  In Torneko No Daibouken you have no real agency in the CRPG portion. But you could put most of the plot into the CRPG, and make your plot decisions persistent over a series of games. I'm still thinking this out.

• The middle game is very tedious. Definitely. No one has so far hired me as a niche-game-themed motivational speaker, but if that ever happens one of the connections I'll make is that mazes in Roguelikes are like mazes in text adventures. They were funny once (in Rogue/Colossal Cave) and now they should not be used.

  The solution is to have more special levels that are not all aggravating in the same way. ADOM has a huge variety of levels: different environments connected by a world map, and a large dungeon that contains many special levels. SLASHEM has more special levels than Nethack, but not enough. CRPG 'levels' are almost always different from each other, both in terms of window dressing and in terms of monsters. I'm seriously reevaluating CRPGs after playing Earthbound. The only ones I'd played before were a pretty old crop: Dragon Warrior, Ultima, and the original Final Fantasy.

  The other part of the tedium is schlepping items around the dungeon. This is not hard to fix with different mechanics: making it possible to carry huge amounts (there's a spell for this in ADOM), or making it unneccesary or impossible to carry lots of stuff (*Angband, Diablo).

More later as I need to go to sleep.

Update: The promised "more".

Despite my earlier promises to myself that I'd stop playing Nethack after ascending, I got hooked earlier this month on the alt.org Nethack server, which yields up many interesting bones files. I started trying to ascend a tourist (to my mind the lamest Nethack class), and this morning I succeeded, achieving #1490 on the alt.org high score board. Since the various conducts have never really appealed to me, hopefully this is the end of Nethack addiction.

Who would send me a Nethack T-shirt to congratulate me on my first ascension?

He's Seth David Schoen!