Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Development => Design => Topic started by: Hi on January 09, 2014, 03:40:42 AM
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Player resistances are good because they make items and monster danger multi dimensional (how dangerous a monster is depends on what resistances you have). But a runic item can achieve the same thing while also changing the tactics you use.
In some cases, like corrosion resistance, they can even make the game less interesting because they remove the tactical meaning of corrosive monsters.
In games where the right set of resistances is practically required for ascending characters, resistances are no longer interesting because it is not having a resistance that makes one interesting..
But all of this is irrelevant if they make the game more fun, so I'd like to hear from people with more experience. Are they fun?
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Well I guess they can cause certain monsters to become trivial, not dangerous at all, but RPG style gamers are used to this. Pretty much any sort of progression system is going to have the character outlevel certain monsters.
What game are you talking about? Each game does it so differently.
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In Angband, resistance to acid, lightning, fire, and cold don't provide immunity to the side effects of that kind of damage - instakill monsters like wyrms will be reduced to merely extremely dangerous, and the risk of having spellbooks burned will still exist and cause problems. Resistances to other effects like blindness or shards provide immunity from effects, but still permit some damage.
This means that the tactical interest of elemental effects is preserved in the more interesting cases, and can be circumvented in the more deadly cases (spellcasters need total resistance to blindness to fight some monsters). This means some effects suffer this loss of interest because gameplay-wise there's no other choice. However, most effects remain dangerous or problematic throughout the game. Some (time, gravity) don't even have resistances available, and are feared by all characters.
Aside from racial resistances like dwarves being resistant to blindness, there are no permanent resistances in the game. With almost all resistances provided by equipment, it is very common to be faced with tradeoffs that pit two "essential" resistances/abilities against each other. The old and outdated Angband Newbie Guide would hold that you should wait until you have all the required abilities before venturing to certain depths (with the implication that you should eg. grind for poison resistance items before touching the last 60% of the dungeon).
The alternative is to keep descending and classify monsters as fightable or not depending on one's abilities. apart from eliminating the grind, the presence of monsters that mustn't be awake in the same room provides tactical interest by cutting off sections of the dungeon (at least for non-stealthy characters), making teleport unusable, and reducing the escape options. The result is to make monster detection, telepathy, magic mapping, treasure detection, and large highly-connected levels critical for success (at least for players who don't want to grind).
I find this method of play, where most resistances can be sacrificed if I have the ability to avoid dangerous monsters, a lot more enjoyable than the traditional alternative, which as you say is based on removing interesting aspects of play as the game progresses. Even with that playstyle, the effect isn't game-breaking because of permadeath. In cases where the early game is the most interesting part (because all gameplay elements are in effect), permadeath allows a player to experience more of the early game than they would in a "normal" CRPG.
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Different monsters presenting a greater or lesser threat based on your resistances is a great way to make every playthrough a bit more unique. It's also a nice method of letting the player suddenly improve their defense by a large amount without jacking up their HP and ruining the game's difficulty.
With that said, I think Angband-style resistances do more harm than good because of how they reward grinding and how they drastically effect the player's survivability based on lucky drops. I think that through clever design it should be possible to keep the good parts of resistances without most of the problems.
Like, if you gave the player the ability to acquire one permanent resistance of their choice at some point in the game, that could a long way towards mitigating bad luck without introducing too many new problems. You could also make single-resistance items fairly common, so the player is likely to have access to every resistance, but not all at once, and they need to choose which enemies they want to have an advantage against and which they'll be fighting with a penalty. That'd only work if equipment switching was non-trivial, but there are plenty of methods of accomplishing that. There's also the option where increasing a resistance lowers one or more other resistances. There are tons of different approaches you could take.
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With that said, I think Angband-style resistances do more harm than good because of how they reward grinding and how they drastically effect the player's survivability based on lucky drops. I think that through clever design it should be possible to keep the good parts of resistances without most of the problems.
I just described how Angband makes grinding unnecessary for a careful player, how the effect of random drops on player survivability is minimised by the use of detection, and how the problems described in the OP are avoided in the majority of cases. I'd appreciate it if you'd give your claims a bit more justification.
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What game are you talking about? Each game does it so differently.
mostly as implemented in Crawl and Angband
Resistances can make the game more interesting, as Quendus lucidly explained.
But what I mean by less tactically interesting is that that when you get an item with cold resistance cold based attacks do less damage and your classification of fightable or not changes (good). But if you get armor of mutuality (http://brogue.wikia.com/wiki/Armor_of_Mutuality) not only does your classification of fightable or not change (groups become more fightable, individuals are unchanged), but the player changes from fighting monsters in corridors to preferring to fight in doorways. So I wonder if we can keep all the interesting consequences of resistances while also having them effect playstyle in that kind of way.
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Apart from the obvious sense of getting more powerful the only fun that crudely implemented resistances add to the game is an extra desiderata for inventory management. Even then it largely seems to be a fairly simple set of rules you can apply to make the decision it's just made more difficult by the size of inventories and the number of equipment slots.
Ultimately the interesting decisions are those that force some form of trade-off. Larger inventories, more equipment slots and lots of randomly generated floor trash work against it.
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Different monsters presenting a greater or lesser threat based on your resistances is a great way to make every playthrough a bit more unique.
Not if everyone grinds or shops around for the same resistance set every game. But this is a problem of resistances becoming too easy to get.
I think a good resistance system is one in which the resistance reduces the damage by 50%. Several layers of resistance could give further 50% reductions, never eliminating the damage but making it fairly small with enough dedication to resistance building. But with limited item slots it means sacrificing some resistances for others. A big issue with the likes of ADOM and Angband is that there are so many item slots and so many resistance items - building up universal resistance is too easy.
Actual damage immunity should be incredibly rare and considered very special, and potentially come with tactical trade-offs.
Another issue is that damage flavour systems in general are a bit boring. I like it when fire is more than just a flavour of damage, but has burning affects or similar. Ice damage could affect movement in the nearby terrain for instance, shock damage could make metal weapons less effective for a few rounds, and so on. Gaining "resistance" could be more about finding workarounds to the physical effects of a damage type instead of just being a HP buffer.
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I just described how Angband makes grinding unnecessary for a careful player, how the effect of random drops on player survivability is minimised by the use of detection, and how the problems described in the OP are avoided in the majority of cases. I'd appreciate it if you'd give your claims a bit more justification.
Sure it's possible to sneak around, carefully avoiding any breathers whose attacks you don't resist, but it's much safer to farm until you have what you need. Angband's resistance system isn't about tradeoffs or difficult decisions. It's about getting lucky drops from the RNG.
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No, actually the longer you spend in the dungeon the more likely you are to meet an out-of-depth drolem or unique, spawn in or teleport into a room of gravity hounds, or make a bad decision and get killed. The only way to get the tools necessary to win is to go below level 60 where useful gear becomes common. Any time before that is just courting death for no gain.
Darren - building "universal resistance" is next to impossible in Angband, no matter what one might find. Even conservative players regularly have to forgo some minor resistances when they decide they're ready for Morgoth, and even a full complement of resistances won't reduce the danger of big breathers - the weird ones have side-effects removed and retain their damage potential, and the basic ones retain the side-effects and have damage reduced from "instakill" to "two or three turn kill".
Actual damage immunity should be incredibly rare and considered very special
It already is! There are only a few unique items providing damage immunity, and even if one found items that grant all four immunities it would be pointless to wear more than one or two because they don't provide various crucial abilities (speed in particular). In fact immunities are more useful for eliminating the risk of losing spellbooks or consumables. Fire immunity in particular is nice for characters rhat cast spells from books.
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In other words, Angband randomly instakills you for no reason other than bad luck. Wow, what a great game.
This is why Angband's resistance system is bad and part of why Angband itself is bad. Unresisted elemental attacks do too much damage, resistances reduce damage by too much, there's no viable way to deal with elemental attacks other than resistant equipment, and there's not really any way to get that equipment other than to get lucky or do some farming.
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The game you're talking about sounds pretty bad. Pity it isn't Angband.
If your memory extends beyond the previous post, you'll remember that there are no random instakills for a player who makes use of the game's plentiful means of detecting monsters. It's a 1HP stealth subroguelike.
Resisted and unresisted elemental atttacks - as I already said - do just enough damage to produce distinct nontrivial challenges.
Damage reduction on unusual attacks - as I already said - is low or unavailable.
Useful equipment - as I already said - is more likely gained from diving to the second half of the dungeon than from farming or RNG worship.
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So what you're saying is that hanging out on floor 59 for a little while is outright courting death, but going deeper is perfectly safe. No need for equipment or resists, just cast detect monsters every now and again and you're golden. Also, Angband never randomly instakills the player, but it does like to spawn you in the middle of gravity hound packs and drop OOD drolems right on top of you.
This is what passes as logical to Angband fans.
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So what you're saying is that hanging out on floor 59 for a little while is outright courting death, but going deeper is perfectly safe.
I simplified "The danger of death is always nonzero and the risk-reward ratio for a capable player increases monotically with depth, becoming optimal at level 99, and endgame-level rewards only start to show up around level 60-80, making the equipment found in earlier levels inessential to the objective" to something shorter, because I figured that with your selective reading it wouldn't be worth writing out in full.
No need for equipment or resists, just cast detect monsters every now and again and you're golden. Also, Angband never randomly instakills the player
That's right. I send mages into the dungeon naked with books, light, food, and a few scrolls and potions from the shop. By level 40 it's very rare not to have found resistance to base elements and at least two of paralysis, confusion, and blindness, and be well set up to go the rest of the way.
but it does like to spawn you in the middle of gravity hound packs and drop OOD drolems right on top of you.
I'd explain exactly why gravity hounds in the entrance room are instadeath to players who don't detect and survivable but suboptimal for everyone else, but given your habit of ignoring anything that doesn't correlate with your prejudice I'm not sure it would be worth taking the time to type.
In the case of drolems the same applies, except that I've already described all the contributing mechanics so you should be able to piece it together.
I find your deliberate misinterpretations of my words every bit as illogical as you do, but I don't try to pass them off as representing my position.
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Player resistances are good because they make items and monster danger multi dimensional (how dangerous a monster is depends on what resistances you have). But a runic item can achieve the same thing while also changing the tactics you use.
In some cases, like corrosion resistance, they can even make the game less interesting because they remove the tactical meaning of corrosive monsters.
In games where the right set of resistances is practically required for ascending characters, resistances are no longer interesting because it is not having a resistance that makes one interesting..
But all of this is irrelevant if they make the game more fun, so I'd like to hear from people with more experience. Are they fun?
Oh, gosh, is nobody going to mention the Tower of Eternal Flames in ADOM? That's the first thing I think about when I think of required resistances. I know that it is actually possible to survive it without complete fire immunity, but I sure find it to be really hard.
I think that you should be able to achieve complete corrosion resistance, but there should be tradeoffs that you make it get it. So, if you were acid immune and your equipment couldn't be corroded away, you couldn't also be fire immune and be safe from having it burned, or something.
The rune system you mentioned is interesting, because you could say that the effects of runes "diluted" each other. So, a really powerful acid resistance rune might give you 100 percent corrosion resistance, but if you added a fire resistance rune you would have 50 percent resistance to acid and 50 percent resistance to fire.
Those numbers may be way to high, but you get the idea.
EDIT:
And apparently, Vanguard already said pretty much the same thing:
"There's also the option where increasing a resistance lowers one or more other resistances"
Sorry.
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Runics are something brogue has (http://brogue.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Runic)
They are not really things like fire resistance. They are things like 'when you are attacked, share the damage with all adjacent enemies." or "sometimes friendly temporary clones of you enemy appear when you get hit.". Each runic is new toy that you have to adjust your tactics to fit. Even the runic that makes you immune to gasses has more effect than just meaning you can ignore traps, it means it is beneficial to seek traps and trigger them so that the monsters will be gasses while you attack them.
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It's also absolutely possible to beat Brogue without any of them. They're nice effects that allow for different tactics without making your success excessively dependent on the item generator. That's the way it should be.
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It's also absolutely possible to beat Brogue without any of them. They're nice effects that allow for different tactics without making your success excessively dependent on the item generator. That's the way it should be.
Just out of curiosity, what about luck in other aspects of play? Isn't success in most roguelikes heavily luck dependent? I mean, "hardcore" players (not me) seem to like the idea that you can lose a new character to a fireball trap. Isn't it pretty widely accepted that you are a the mercy of luck in many ways when you play a roguelike?
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I think the ideal roguelike should feature heavy randomness that influences both the player's long and short term decisions but at the same time be deep enough that good tactics and preparation can always overcome bad luck.
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I think the ideal roguelike should feature heavy randomness that influences both the player's long and short term decisions but at the same time be deep enough that good tactics and preparation can always overcome bad luck.
That's a good ideal, but I don't think it's possible to reach it without either compromising difficulty or introducing a dependence on spoilers. In my interpretation, Heavy randomness in a difficult game will always make the early stages deadly, and making good tactics and preparation able to overcome that in the early game would necessarily entail either a shallow game or a need for spoilers. Deep mechanics are not good friends with words like "always", especially in a stochastic environment.
I tried to think of a counterexample to this, but all that came to mind was my own game Encircled. It has less than ten spoilers (everything else comes from simple but rather abstract rules, which produce relatively deep positioning tactics that vary in each game), the weapons given to enemies and made available to the player have big effects on tactics (not so much on long-term strategy); it's difficult, but good tactics and a bit of strategy can mostly overcome bad luck (except sometimes the transition to ranged weapons in the midgame).
I think it fails the ideal because there isn't wide variation between games in the set of weapons generated, so similar weapons get generated on similar levels very often. I aim to improve that in future development, but development has been stalled for a while (and if it continues, the first priority will be to make the overly abstract rules more palatable to people who haven't learnt group theory).
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Even if 100% fairness is an unattainable goal, it's good to come as close as you can without ruining your game's good qualities.
Like, if you start the player out with a few get-out-of-jail-free consumables, bad luck in the early game isn't as lethal.
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I think the ideal roguelike should feature heavy randomness that influences both the player's long and short term decisions but at the same time be deep enough that good tactics and preparation can always overcome bad luck.
I think randomness is a bad term for what roguelikes really do. The purpose of the randomness is to introduce the unknown, to make the game spoiler-proof and constantly tense, as you don't know if your plans will always succeed. But this hidden information doesn't need to come in the form of the dice roll - it can be based on complex AI interactions, or limited vision in a procedural environment, or restricted information on item effects. Over-reliance on dice rolls to achieve hidden information can just lead to a frustrating game, or at least a non-tactical one.
Someone mentioned the Tower of Eternal Flames. I think it's a great example of a thematic challenge in a game involving resistances, which can be overcome in a variety of ways. Yes, it's somewhat spoiler-reliant, but it doesn't insta-kill you and there are in-game hints to help you figure out the right ways to do it. And in a replayable game it remains a fresh and interesting challenge. Possibly the best part of all of ADOM.
As much as we love randomisation between games it's still the scripted challenges that we talk about most. Every character ends up a little bit different in their approach, but the central scripted challenge forms a good talking point in communities and a memorable milestone across every game.
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I think randomness is a bad term for what roguelikes really do. The purpose of the randomness is to introduce the unknown, to make the game spoiler-proof and constantly tense, as you don't know if your plans will always succeed. But this hidden information doesn't need to come in the form of the dice roll - it can be based on complex AI interactions, or limited vision in a procedural environment, or restricted information on item effects. Over-reliance on dice rolls to achieve hidden information can just lead to a frustrating game, or at least a non-tactical one.
Agreed.
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You object to to word "random" in a lot of contexts (like map generation) as a lead-in to some important game-design considerations. I tend to agree with them, but not so much with the objection to "random" as a term to describe or motivate game mechanics.
It's just a technical term to describe stochastic systems in general, as well as a common function programming languages use to choose numbers from a uniform distribution. It will still apply to any method of procedural generation or game mechanics with a random component or any kind of hidden or external information.
I think "randomness" is not a bad word at all, and that the main point is that when designing a game one should always put thought into how content is generated, how the result of an action is determined, and how this will interact with the rest of the game, rather than adding a call to random() and forgetting about it. Complaining about a word whenever it's used is just a distraction.
"Randomness" is in fact pretty important to the concept of a roguelike. They're about beating a system that uses randomness to confound strategies based on foreknowledge.
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Right but some roguelike developers and players worship randomness and want it used everywhere regardless of whether it makes sense.
Like, randomized combat is a good thing in small doses. Unpredictability is fun and it can test the player's ability to react to unexpected situations. But when you've got a significant chance to fail casting your spell and a significant chance to miss your target and the spell does something like 1d100 damage you're going to get wildly different results from the same set of actions. The player is no longer fully in control of their own success. That kind of system makes failure feel unfair even when it really was your own fault.
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Randomness is good and wonderful, and I like it when it's used appropriately. My point here is that it can be used for different things - hidden information is one, but variety can be another, and random can be entertaining in its own right. As a term it gets associated with the latter two, but in roguelike design one of its most important uses is the former, and there are other ways to achieve or enhance hidden information.
But yeah, I probably do rant about it too much ;)
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Like, randomized combat is a good thing in small doses. Unpredictability is fun and it can test the player's ability to react to unexpected situations. But when you've got a significant chance to fail casting your spell [...]
I totally agree.
In the latest version of Infra Arcana, I erased a lot of senseless randomization for the reasons you mention. In particular, it used to be that spells had a certain percent chance of success (I tried slightly different approaches to this in many versions) - and damn it was frustrating to use! Now it always works, but drains spirit (mana), feels much more satisfying and tactically interesting.
Another similar issue was the resistance system - there were resistance vs physical effects and resistance vs mental effects, measured in percent. Various traits gave bonuses to these. When something tried to blind you for example, there was a check against your physical resistance - if it was 40%, you had a 40% chance to avoid the effect. It just felt... really random, in bad and confusing way. Even if you had very high resistance (like 80%), you could still be afflicted many times in a row, making you wonder if those traits really did any good at all.
Something like a shuffle bag (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/910215/need-for-predictable-random-generator) could possibly have solved it to some degree. But I chose to rip out the system and change it to something deterministic. This feels more fun to me. If something blinds you, then you're blind - unless you are resistant to blindness, then you're guaranteed to be immune1. It's certainly more tactical and challenging than just rolling the dice and hoping for the best.
1IIRC Nethack uses this system, and have often been criticized for it - but mostly because (some) resistances are too easy to attain.
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You can have the resistance be a level that reduces the duration of the blindness. Someone hits you with a weak blind and you have a strong resist then you reduce it to 0, and there are various grades in between. This gives you something inbetween the chance system and the on/off system.
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You can have the resistance be a level that reduces the duration of the blindness. Someone hits you with a weak blind and you have a strong resist then you reduce it to 0, and there are various grades in between. This gives you something inbetween the chance system and the on/off system.
Yeah that's a lot better than complete immunity or a % chance to resist.
I also really like the way Dark Souls handles resistances. If you're 60% resistant to poison or whatever and something tries to poison you, it'll fill up 40% of your poison meter. If they do it again right after it goes up to 80%. The third attempt will put it past 100% and only then do you actually get poisoned. Your condition meters drain over time so if you win a fight or run away after being partially poisoned you don't suffer any consequence.
Another idea I came up with was making resistances delay conditions instead of preventing them. So something casts blind on you and you have 5 points of blindness resistance, nothing happens immediately but you go blind five turns later. If they cast it a second time the duration gets shorter. There should also be a way of treating conditions for both NPCs and the player, something simple like spending X turns doing to clear all upcoming conditions. That way it isn't viable to cast something really nasty and hide until it goes off, and if you win or escape from a fight before your own conditions go off, you don't have to deal with them.
Both of these systems would really powerful conditions to become viable and tactically interesting without being cheap. You could even allow instant death spells to affect the player and every enemy in the game without turning it into a luckfest.
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I also really like the way Dark Souls handles resistances. If you're 60% resistant to poison or whatever and something tries to poison you, it'll fill up 40% of your poison meter. If they do it again right after it goes up to 80%. The third attempt will put it past 100% and only then do you actually get poisoned. Your condition meters drain over time so if you win a fight or run away after being partially poisoned you don't suffer any consequence.
Does the game indicate the current value of the meter in the UI? If not then it's pretty much like randomness to me, just through a hidden variable than RNG.
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Yes. When you get hit by an attack that causes eg. bleeding, a meter appears and shows how close you are to getting the blood loss condition. All of the conditions in DS are really harsh but it doesn't feel cheap because you get that warning and it gives you a chance to prevent the condition from going off.
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I always prefer it when randomness is used to create variety in outcomes beyond simply a you-die/you-don't-die coin flip.
For example; a fire attack that does a random amount of extra damage is not that interesting to me. A fire attack that does a similar amount of damage to normal attacks but has a % chance of burning up a carried scroll or of setting fire to your clothes, forcing you to run to water to put yourself out, is more interesting because it requires the player to adjust their tactics both before and during a fight.
The key thing is that there should be ways of circumventing those unwanted outcomes that don't boil down to 'have a ring of X resistance' - for example avoiding hanging on to valuable scrolls for too long before using them, fighting fire-breathing enemies while standing in water and so on.
For this reason I tend to enjoy fire and corrosion effects (well, not enjoy, but you know what I mean) but find things like poison a bit of a bore, since there's not often a way of dealing with it if you lack the required resistance (although I did put one in Rogue's Eye; eating too much too quickly can cause you to vomit, which helps to purge your body of poison).
The deeper design consideration is whether those systems stay interesting. The first couple of times you fight a corrosive monster in nothing but your boxer shorts can be thrilling. After that though it can become something of a solved problem and if you're just reflexively stripping off like a bored call girl every time you see an Acid Mound then it stops being an interesting situation. This is where I think resistances have a role. They can prevent the player from having to demonstrate over and over again on the same playthrough that they have understood the mechanic (and similarly, can prevent a failure to understand it from being a game-ruiner). It might mean that those monster types become trivial in the short-term, but helps to keep them fresh in the long run. (I also think that 'how you like me now, bitch?'-style catharsis can be valuable in its own right, but only if the monster provided a decent challenge in the first place.)
TLDR version: Don't punish players because the RNG hasn't given them what they need. Punish them because the RNG hasn't given them what they need and they were unable to come up with an alternate solution.
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I always prefer it when randomness is used to create variety in outcomes beyond simply a you-die/you-don't-die coin flip.
Roguelike in general have a problem with consequences in between temporary, easily fixed injuries and permanent death. The genre could use something functionally equivalent to extra lives and bombs in shmups. One idea I like is to start the player with a few consumable items that absolutely will save your life in a crisis no matter what, but that can never be replaced. That way the player can be meaningfully punished for making mistakes without ending the game right then and there.
PrincessRL has an alternate solution - when you run out of health you don't die, but you can't do any more adventuring for the rest of the day, and your time is strictly limited.