Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Announcements => Other Announcements => Topic started by: Tycho on August 03, 2009, 01:19:23 AM
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Where exactly is the line between "difficult and challenging" and "unbeatable"?
I was having a pretty good run in POWDER 111 today and met my demise in what I would call a "perfect storm" by the CPU. It's not an isolated incident, either. I would chalk it up to just having bad luck, but jeez, I must have broken more mirrors in NetHack than I remember, to get this kind of bad luck. So many times now I have fled down a darkened corridor from a mob of very angry kobolds/what have you only to trip over a much deadlier monster that quickly deals a killing blow. It's uncanny.
Also, water elementals and cockatrices are quite possibly the two biggest menaces in the game, because of certain EXTREMELY deadly special attacks they have (strangle and petrify, respectively) that a player has NO defense against unless he has had the good fortune of acquiring certain items, or in the case of the cockatrice, has accumulated sufficient items to counter the attack. To constantly keep up one's defenses to the task at hand one FREQUENTLY has to quite literally juggle protective baubles of various natures, removing a counter-petrification one to wear a no-breathing one, and again to wear a poison warding one. And this is assuming you have had the good fortune to find these critical items.
And so I started thinking to myself... at what point does difficulty turn into absurdity?
Don't get me wrong, POWDER 111 is great. I waste lots of time on it on a daily basis. But something seems fishy... after having ascended with two roles in NetHack and having been brutalized by IVAN, I would like to think I know what the difference between challenging and absurd is in a roguelike.
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I won legally both in IVAN and POWDER 111 (at least with a warrior), and NetHack is apparently also beatable. So, none of them is unbeatable.
Probably you just have not yet discovered the strategy to avoid strangulation/petrification.
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What I'd consider "perfect difficulty" is if someone who is new to the game has a 0% chance to beat it and someone who has mastered the game has a 100% chance to beat it.
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What I'd consider "perfect difficulty" is if someone who is new to the game has a 0% chance to beat it and someone who has mastered the game has a 100% chance to beat it.
Set that to 15% for someone who has mastered the game and I agree. An early item of key resistance, spell book, OOD monster, wand, vault, or named mob should have a large impact on the game.
Luck should play a large factor, but mostly in the first 5-7 levels.
Also I think the game should set up high risk high reward situations with the item game.
This is what makes crawl so good in my opinion.
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If you've mastered the game and can't beat it to 100% it just means the whole game's point is to have luck. There's not even a point in bothering with a game like that. Might as well just throw a dice and say I win if it's a 6, similar enjoyment.
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Lots of people find Backgammon and Bridge enjoying, although both games are based on randomness. In Backgammon, you can always lose if your opponent is lucky, but you aim for a strategy which gives you the most probability to win (at least I think so, I am not an expert on backgammon; but I've heard it is interesting from the strategic point of view). In Bridge, you have to make your bidding system be able to tell the partner as much information about your (random) cards as possible (for hands which do happen in practice, no reason for a rule "say 7 clubs if you have 13 clubs"), and your play to maximize the probability of victory.
I think Roguelikes are based on randomness and should also be like that. Being able to win consistently is a good thing, but it's better to make the game interesting (by using randomness) than to make sure that every game is winnable. 15% is OK if the chance is taken into account in an early phase of the game (I don't want to waste a day on a game which I could not win because it was one of the 85%... and in fact waste 5 days until I get into this 15%). But take care that there are no situations when the game is unwinnable for some obvious reason (for example if the dungeon might be unconnected or an essential item might not exist at all).
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If it was all luck, a bad player would win 15% of the time as well. In a good roguelike only someone who has mastered the game ever wins and a 15% win rate is godly.
Infact, if winning is assured as long as you understand the game mechanics. What's the point of playing besides just experiencing the game once? Just read some online spoilers and you win.
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With mastering I meant being able to perfectly play the game, not only understanding all of its mechanics.
There's really no point in playing a game that might be impossible to win to begin with because of bad luck. Whether bad luck creates too strong monsters or bad luck doesn't connect a floor at all doesn't really matter, it's impossible either way.
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Difficulty is a funny topic. I personally don't think a game is ever too easy or too hard. To me, instead its all about the implementation of difficulty. A game can be challenging and brutal as hell and still have that "right" feel about them.
For difficulty to be well implemented it needs to increase from start to finish in a steady way. Even more important, it must not fluctuate between different levels of difficulty for no reason. Most games have that down pretty well. Frustration mostly occurs when the difficulty suddenly spikes or fluctuates. Humans are mostly creatures of habit and those fluctuations tear them right out of their comfort zone. Some might argue that this is a good thing. In general I agree.
In terms of difficulty however I don't think it is. Sudden spikes frequently turn into insurmountable obstacles with no possible way to prevent one distinct outcome: Death of your character. Frustration is born from the feeling of having been treated unfairly. Frustration in return leads to diminishing interest in a game and further more lowers the fun in playing it.
There's another nasty side to difficulty-spikes and that is the fall back onto normal difficulty levels. You've beaten the tough guy and suddenly the game shifts back into its normal gear. Killing the lesser mobs turns into tedious boredom. You already know you can take on much stronger enemies so why does the game toss you back into the newbie pit? It's like someone allowed you to drive in a real fricking tank and after you had a lot of fun with it, he shoves you back into kindergarden to play with boring Toys. Yawn. A good hands on example would be Siegfried in crawl. For those that never played it (what? seriously?): Siegfried is a more or less random boss that appears quite early in the dungeon.
He's a real monster. He's generally far too strong for you to take on and his strength is just so completely out of balance that even if you've progressed several levels further down and turn back to knock him out, you still have a pretty good chance of ending up dead. Still, if you get a couple of lucky items and have a strong character, it is actually possible to take him down the moment he shows up. And once you have killed him, you instantly know that your character is strong enough to survive the next 10 levels of the dungeon without even breaking a sweat. Yawn.
Challenging games are good, it's no problem if it becomes nigh unbeatable at the end, as long as the difficulty progression is steady.
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Um, that's Sigmund, not Siegfried... strange that you misspell the name of such a frustrating guy :)
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There are a lot of different types of difficulty, and I think that in a discussion like this it's important to distinguish between them.
I consider a game more difficult as the more perfect my play needs to be in order to win. Another way to put it would be to say that a game is more difficult as the number and size of mistakes I can make before losing decreases, the game can be seen as more difficult.
I consider a game cheap if I can lose due to factors completely out of my control. Since roguelikes are as random as they are a "perfect storm," as Tycho put it, will inevitably come up from time to time.
My preference on randomness is that the game never presents the player with an unwinnable situation, but it should present them with interesting and difficult situations, requiring them to constantly adapt and change their plans to survive.
Then there's the subject of spoilers. In Nethack in particular, there are a lot of ways you can die off that you would have no way of knowing about, but once you know about them, you can avoid that death in the future. Is this a challenge or is it just being cheap? I'm torn because I don't like dying to a circumstantial thing that I could never have known about, but on the other hand I do like experimentation and discovery.
I would say that Mage Guild is a good example of a game that has difficulty, but is fair, and IVAN is a good example of a game that is both difficult and unfair.
I have to disagree with AmnEn's assessment on difficulty curves. In a more traditional game where a player can save and pick up from the same spot when they die, gradually increasing difficulty is generally viewed as good design.
Roguelikes aren't that way though. They're designed to be replayed a lot. Especially the beginning. It seems tedious if the start is too easy for you, but the middle game is at about your skill level, so every time you want to take another shot at that mid-game boss you have to slog through an hour of content that you know is too easy for you.
One way of handling it that I like is by rewarding the player not just for completing a section of the game, but for how well they completed that section of the game.
I'll choose Angband as my counterexample. In Angband you can replay any dungeon level as many times as you want, getting money, equipment, potions, and experience until you're satisfied and move on. Anything that doesn't kill your character you can fix with time, and the only things that really matter are that your character is alive, and that they and their equipment are up to date.
I'm going to use Mage Guild again as a contrast. In Mage Guild you cannot replay old content, and so it's important to balance the preservation of your early game resources with your character's survival. Do well and you'll be stocked with a good supply of potions and abilities for the late game, but if you come across difficulties, you may have to learn a weaker spell for the short term or use a valuable potion early that will make things more challenging later on. That way the beginning can still be fairly easy to survive, but almost as important as survival is surviving while expending as few of your resources as possible.
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With mastering I meant being able to perfectly play the game, not only understanding all of its mechanics.
There's really no point in playing a game that might be impossible to win to begin with because of bad luck. Whether bad luck creates too strong monsters or bad luck doesn't connect a floor at all doesn't really matter, it's impossible either way.
I think maybe we are talking about two different things in discussing luck. I see risk as luck. To me a roguelike intentionally hides information from the player through item identification and FoV, adds a dice roll to combat, and randomly generates gear/enemies to create risk.
Now if luck means there is a 50/50 chance the game will give you enough resources to win or that the levels will be connected or the enemies you are faced with are beatable, then yes this is poor design. However, risk is created by providing situations where success cannot be determined given the knowledge provided to a player.
For example, say you enter combat with an enemy and another joins the fray from outside your FoV. A smart player may weigh his odds and determine fleeing is the best option. He might use a teleport scroll and randomly find himself in another area. This isn't without risk however, as he might find himself in a worse situation and die.
If you always have perfect knowledge of the game and the outcome of each action, such as in chess, than yes a good player should always win. However, I think withholding the game state leads to more interesting play, say as in poker.
You have no way of knowing if the next blow will hit, you only know the odds. You don't know if retreating into the next room will leave you in a worse situation or not, only the odds. You have no idea whether that un-id potion will benefit you or hurt you, only the odds.
As the game progresses and the player accumulates resources and develops their character, they should have more control over the game and find themselves less forced to play the odds.
But ideally there cannot be perfect play, as perfect play requires perfect knowledge of the game state. To achieve perfect play you'd need to know the state of the RNG. If you could achieve perfect play then winning should be 100% assured. Perfect play would require counting the cards, barring that you are left playing the hand you are dealt.
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I suppose we play out of different reasons then. What I like about roguelikes is that they are skill-based in contrast to RPGs which are mainly 'grinding' based.
For me the only purpose of the randomness is to create replayability.
Clearability based on luck is just bad design. I understand that it makes sense in a game like poker, a game where a player plays against another player and is only short. But in a videogame where one round can take several hours an unclearable game is just wrong.
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I suppose we play out of different reasons then. What I like about roguelikes is that they are skill-based in contrast to RPGs which are mainly 'grinding' based.
For me the only purpose of the randomness is to create replayability.
Clearability based on luck is just bad design. I understand that it makes sense in a game like poker, a game where a player plays against another player and is only short. But in a videogame where one round can take several hours an unclearable game is just wrong.
I think it depends on your definition of skill and whether you want players to make high risk/reward decisions or to solve puzzles. Nethack and Crawl seem like the two extremes on that.
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I personally don't believe in developing games that the player can't win. To me, the player should never lose. If the player dies, he might quit, and then he might never play my game again. Also, I don't like playing games I can't win.
However, I highly respect that others like to develop games that kill the player quite frequently. There's nothing wrong with developing a game this way, I just wouldn't do it personally. Nethack IMO would be far better if the player died significantly less, but I still love Nethack. It's a matter of style, some games and developers like killing the player a lot, others don't. Nothing wrong with either approach, but I like the latter.
I really believe every time you kill the player, there's a chance he never plays your game again..
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Heh yeah that's how I play my JRPGs. If I die once I quit the game and move on to the next unless the game is really fun. Someone once called my playing style the "absolute perma death". Though honestly I don't think this applies to roguelikes very well as you can usually only learn from mistakes in them and then get better by repeating over and over. It just gets ridiculous when you learned a lot on your last trip and then die on the second floor just because you were not lucky.
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Quoting a song I found on the Internet:
Your fingers may move with blinding speed
there may be no game you can't beat
but can't you see that noone can defeat
the man who throws the Tetris piece
some popular games are designed to be unwinnable :) If a roguelike has an unreachable or almost unreachable (that is, except in case of extreme luck) ending, it is not a very good design, but if the game just gets harder and harder, like Tetris, that could be acceptable. Although players would want some sense of "achievement of victory". (Maybe beating the global highscore could be an achievement? But then the game would have to constantly present the player with new challenges, which are based on skill, not on luck or grinding.)
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I don't like difficult games, especially the way roguelikes are difficult. The difficulty should have some kind of logic in it. Besides I have really started to think that hack-n-slash (killing thousands of monsters) is boring. That's why I'm turning Kaduria into gardening simulator. I also liked fishing in Zelda, so I think there is going to be fishing.
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Yawn, boring.
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Yawn, boring.
Gardening and fishing? No way! I have always liked the way you can do something ordinary (in contrast to epic hero stuff) in games.
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You notice a dandelion.
You pick the dandelion.
The dandelion dies.
A tiny ant comes into view.
The tiny ant crawls onto you. (x3)
You cut back the rose bush.
Your (+3, +1) Gloves of Gardening resist.
Now wielding an irredescent fishing rod.
It sticks to your hands!
Identified the (-5, -4) Fishing Rod of the Ancients.
Really drink from the pool? (Y/n)
A brown frog appears.
The brown frog hits you.
Ouch! That really hurt!
You die...
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Heh yeah that's how I play my JRPGs. If I die once I quit the game and move on to the next unless the game is really fun. Someone once called my playing style the "absolute perma death". Though honestly I don't think this applies to roguelikes very well as you can usually only learn from mistakes in them and then get better by repeating over and over. It just gets ridiculous when you learned a lot on your last trip and then die on the second floor just because you were not lucky.
I'm the opposite of that. There are way too many games out there of every genre that I can clear in one shot without dying.
I'm always disappointed by games that can't manage to kill me. The newest DS Castlevania, for example, was a nice surprise because it killed me off quite a few times, and I had to actually play carefully against some of the bosses to beat them. That doesn't happen most of the time.
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I think it is acceptable, nay mandatory, for RLs to kill you quite quickly the first time. But ideally, even the most inept player should see something interesting before he dies. Getting some sense of beginning (talking to some people, getting a quest, travelling in an overworld, whatever), and then being killed by a frog after two minutes, is better than just seeing a little @ move around when you press the keys, and suddenly getting a message that "a stone block fell and crushed your head."
When it comes to mid- and end-game difficulty/low winnability I think RLs are generally very hard, and I wouldn't mind some more lenient ones. Imagine a RL where an intermediate player could get a lucky win. Getting killed by random stuff is IMHO part of what makes the genre great, so I think a 100% winnable RL is an absurd notion. My taste says there should be situations where you just die to bad luck, but also ones where you slap your head afterwards, or better yet -- heave a proud sight of relief after a narrow escape, where you had to rely on your wits and your luck, and prevailed!
Then there's this argument that random content ensures replayability. But that should also mean that the game is just as fun after you won it. It demands that you implement an endgame that is random and fluid just like the midgame, instead of one that revolves around (getting certain powers to face) certain, fixed levels/bosses/obstacles. But if you have 5 locations, 5 overlords, and 5 fatal weaknesses to kill the overlord, you can get 5^3 variations on the final showdown ;)
Computer games in general are often about clearing levels to unlock content. In some RLs, it can feel a bit cheap and needy, like the game is trying to get me hooked with promises of cool content deeper down in the dungeon, but allowing me very slow progress. Compare to board games, for example, where you get an overview of the entire game after a few sessions, but it stays enjoyable because the pieces of rules/content continue to come together in new, astonishing patterns.
I think I would find very sympathetic, a roguelike that let me win after a hundred games, but that I might still pick up to play, because losing is almost just as enjoyable as winning.
As always,
Minotauros
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You notice a dandelion.
You pick the dandelion.
The dandelion dies.
A tiny ant comes into view.
The tiny ant crawls onto you. (x3)
You cut back the rose bush.
Your (+3, +1) Gloves of Gardening resist.
Now wielding an irredescent fishing rod.
It sticks to your hands!
Identified the (-5, -4) Fishing Rod of the Ancients.
Really drink from the pool? (Y/n)
A brown frog appears.
The brown frog hits you.
Ouch! That really hurt!
You die...
This is an awesome idea, first.
Also, I've been considering a type of roguelike in which death doesn't affect the contents of a special "bank account". This would make death not really death, while maintaining a certain element of risk. Also, has anyone ever implemented MMORPG like death in roguelikes? There are many different ways in the MMORPG industry of dealing with player death, and any of them could easily be applied to roguelikes...
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FATE and the upcoming Torchlight have options for the "MMORPG Penalty style" deaths I believe. Torchlight even lets you choose from a range of options at the time...
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This is an awesome idea, first.
It was just a joke aimed at Krice's remark about gardening and fishing, of course. But I can see his point. I often enjoy mundane or trivial tasks in RLs, too. Like herb gardening in ADOM or collecting slime molds in Angband. The way Dwarf Fortress allows you to shape your surroundings or do random things for their own sake is an excellent example.
Also, I've been considering a type of roguelike in which death doesn't affect the contents of a special "bank account". This would make death not really death, while maintaining a certain element of risk. Also, has anyone ever implemented MMORPG like death in roguelikes? There are many different ways in the MMORPG industry of dealing with player death, and any of them could easily be applied to roguelikes...
I once thought of your 'bank account' suggestion as having a starting village, much like the one in Angband. Every player character's corpse is buried in the village's graveyard, which serves as a score list. All items from the dead character's inventory can be bought from the village shop from that point on. Or the player could choose to play the child of the deceased character, who inherits some their late parent's possessions at the start of the game. I don't know if it would work in practice, but I like the idea.
MMORPG death as in WoW-style death doesn't appeal to me at all. If a game treats you fairly, death is usually the ultimate consequence of taking too much risk. If the game allows you to prevent death by developing your playing skills, I think permadeath increases the excitement of escaping from threatening situations. Permadeath makes me care for the character I'm playing, much more than if I'm given the opportunity to return to a previously saved game or a checkpoint.
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You notice a dandelion.
[...]
You die...
This is an awesome idea, first.
Yes, I loved this as well. "Gloves of Gardening" :D
Also, I've been considering a type of roguelike in which death doesn't affect the contents of a special "bank account".
How do you mean, exactly? That you could "deposit" equipment and gold for later characters, or something like that? Shiren has a system with storage rooms, that lets you prepare starting gear for upcoming games, which I thought worked quite well.
I've also lately toyed with the idea of having an overworld that is persistent between games, where you can build up resources on a longer term. It could be interesting if you let your characters do "community work", like opening a trade route to the neighboring village, or having a shrine built in the town square. There might be a system for retiring characters, turning them into helpful NPCs. You'd sometimes get the strategic choice of retiring a character or not. Retirement would surely give an advantage to upcoming characters, but if you could survive just one more dive, the gain would be even greater. Your long-term goal would be to clear the main quest of a certain world, not necessarily here and now, but rather within a certain amount of games (after maybe a dozen games, that world is abandoned, and a new one created).
It's a system that it's easy to dream about, but it would be quite hard to implement well. I'm not going near it, myself, at least not for the time being.
As always,
Minotauros
EDIT: The idea with a persistant overworld is nicked from Shockfrost (http://www.roguetemple.com/forums/index.php?topic=483.0), of course.
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How do you mean, exactly? That you could "deposit" equipment and gold for later characters, or something like that? Shiren has a system with storage rooms, that lets you prepare starting gear for upcoming games, which I thought worked quite well.
You'd be able to deposit items, equipment and gold (Perhaps for a fee...) that would be permanent between games. You could also limit the size that the bank holds, and so on. The bank doesn't even need to be a bank, it could be a house that you drop stuff in whose contents are held between games. Then, you'd have to lug a treasure chest all the way back home if you wanted to store a lot.
Another idea would be to save a temporary savefile inbetween each dungeon floor. Then when the player dies, he gets kicked back one save file. Anything in the bank account may or may not be reversed as well, depending on how hard you want to be on the player for dying. Kind of like a forced Prince of Persia: Sands of Time time reversal effect.
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IIRC there was a bank in some version of Larn (together with IRS, you had to play tax before you could claim your savings with a new character).
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I'm kind of rewinding the conversation a bit here, going back to the issue of 'random deaths' rather than saving your loot in banks.
The issue of random deaths is why I like *band games so much more than other roguelikes. Crawl's character system is fantastic and I loved playing around with Crawl, but my deaths in that game more often than not are unavoidable, pure luck. Sometimes you just don't get that spell/item/weapon that you need to survive situation X, and you get thrust into situation X regardless with no way out. Sigmund, enough said. I feel similarly about Nethack, and any other persistent game.
In Angband, provided I get past the first few levels and get a bit of money, luck starts to play less and less of a role. Yes it's quite random still, but I've never had a mid to high level character die and be able to honestly say that the luck of the die screwed me over completely. I can always trace it back to my own mistakes: I should have used Detect Monsters/Traps more often. Or I should've known to flee after seeing (Insert powerful boss here) and knowing I don't have enough potions of HEAL. Or I should've known to chug some heals after that last boss fight, just in case I got teleported into a vault. Or I should've known not to go too deep in the dungeon without certain resistances and immunities.
The ease of being able to retreat to the town level to recoup and reconsider your packing list turns the game into a tactical one where it's all about carefully planning what you need to bring into the dungeon and weighing whether each battle is worth risking your life, or retreating. Such liberty is not available in games where food is finite and you can only keep pushing in one direction, deeper and deeper into the dungeon.
I can see the good sides to those games as well, don't get me wrong. But I like the feeling that my fate is almost completely in my hands, and get frustrated by knowing my character's entire fate relies on getting really, really, really lucky. As somebody elsewhere said it's about the equivalent of throwing dice at the wall and picking a number.
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Well this seems to be all about personal preference.
In my opinion, I love the ultra-realistic games. Realistic as in the sense that the game pretends like it isn't a game. It just presents a world to you, and if you die in it.. TOO BAD!
It's the same as in real-life..all deaths are not "fair".
The only non-roguelike I can compare to roguelikes is for example The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, where you lots of times could encounter monsters/groups of bandits that were way too hard for you. Then you can: 1) Rush in over and over anyway, and complain that the game is too difficult since you keep dying. 2) Realize that this is an encounter you are not ready for yet and run away.
Some here seems to think that when you have completely "mastered" a roguelike, this should equal winning everytime/not possibly dying.. But in reality, it gives you big advantages as for building a powerful character that is strong enough to be ABLE to win, and knowledge that should give you a big advantage when it comes to knowing when to turn around and run away..
"Mastering a RL should be = 100% win chance" is perhaps the stupidest statement I've ever seen on a RL-forum. RLs are all about presenting a "brand new" world with everyplay, so in essence, even if you have won in this RL before and "mastered" it, perhaps the RL generated a world you couldn't master this time.
The way I see it: Deaths are the player's faulth, not the world. The world is an unbiased entity that consists of many factors that are predictable and can be controlled, but also some "random" events. This is what the player have to deal with. This is the challenge. Your fate is in YOUR hands.
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As far as "realism" goes I never understood why in typical dungeon crawls, if you leave the dungeon you get "you left the dungeon alive. Game over."
Realistically if I was an adventurer and I ran into these dungeons, proceeded to get the crap kicked out of me, ran out of food and arrows and broke my sword, I'd go back to town to restock then go right back in. In that sense, Angband (and Incursion, which also features a town level shop) are more logical and realistic.
As far as this...
Deaths are the player's faulth, not the world. The world is an unbiased entity that consists of many factors that are predictable and can be controlled, but also some "random" events. This is what the player have to deal with. This is the challenge. Your fate is in YOUR hands.
I do wish that were true, but in practically every roguelike ever made (even, to a lesser extent, Angband, which has aggressive monsters at the town level) at least a few times I've popped out of character creation, taken a few steps, and "It hits you. It hits you. You die..."
The only non-roguelike I can compare to roguelikes is for example The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, where you lots of times could encounter monsters/groups of bandits that were way too hard for you. Then you can: 1) Rush in over and over anyway, and complain that the game is too difficult since you keep dying. 2) Realize that this is an encounter you are not ready for yet and run away.
I like THIS. If you can't handle the fight, get away and prepare for it properly. That's why I like Angband. In the case of Crawl, if you meet Sigmund early on in the dungeon you're dead. Period. He's faster than you, so you can't just turn and run, and persistent games don't offer the option of fleeing to town and trying a different dungeon level.
Fact is that your fate is more in the hands of the dungeon than anything else in most games: you rely on the game generating enough food/edible corpses, or in Nethack's case an altar so you can make sacrifices for piety and pray for food. And you rely on the game giving you long enough early in the game to achieve your first few powers and magical items before it starts throwing bosses and dragons at you.
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Well what I honestly believe for these well-balanced, popular roguelikes (Crawl, Adom etc.) is that if you died because the game generated something too strong for you, for example Sigmund, and you died with a unidentified scroll in inventory...well that might've been a teleport scroll! Also, why does people specifically complain about Sigmund? I consider myself a 'noob' in Crawl, but I rarely die from him. If I do, my character was level 2 or 3 and I don't really give a damn about that extremely unlucky death.
If roguelikes had save/load function like most other games, noone would be complaining about difficulty. Because even after dying 3 times in the same situation, the fourth time you'll discover something you DIDN'T try yet, and survive/slay your enemy. And this is what I'm getting at. I find it very rare for a decent character to die, and me thinking after: "WHAT?! That was impossible!!" I mean.. perhaps it WAS impossible, because I was stupid enough to walk straight across an open big area, after having used up all my healing-potions earlier on, in an encounter I over-estimated.. And perhaps I forgot about evoking that staff of paralyzis.. I mean, there's almoast -always- a way out. It's just that you only get -one- shot at estimating what it is, then being successful.
I find most my games I do hundreds of correct decitions, then one mistake.. ;) Which ofcourse means it IS difficult to win.
Roguelikes are -DIFFICULT-! If you encounter a roguelike that isn't, it's probably a boring game. I believe this topic didn't start about a debate whether RLs are difficult or not, but someone asking if some games were just -impossible-. I have never won a roguelike ;) But I know they aren't impossible.. and I know that for each 10th play atleast, I've gained more game-experience, and my new characters tend to do slightly (if not remarkably) better. The better you get, the better your characters get, and the more the experience of dying costs..
To say something about how hard ADOM is.. Thomas Biskup said in his interview here at ToR that he never got past level 20 in ADOM himself..! XD
However, it is not impossible! =)
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Once you play 1 million games of crawl you will never die to Sigmund. Nearly every death I have in Crawl nowadays could of been avoided. (with hindsight of couse)
Realistically if I was an adventurer and I ran into these dungeons, proceeded to get the crap kicked out of me, ran out of food and arrows and broke my sword, I'd go back to town to restock then go right back in.
Realistically I would run home to my mother...