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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: glorg

« on: February 17, 2011, 11:05:29 PM »

All we know that it's not necessary to meet all the criteria as some of the canonical Roguelikes don't.

Perhaps the Berlin Interpretation is wrong. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Which "canonical" Roguelikes break the criteria?

ADOM and to a lesser extent Nethack have infractions against the "randomly generated content" rule (plot and quests, Sokoban), ADOM's overworld and Angband and Crawl's shops violate the non-modal rule, IIRC ADOM violates the "hack 'n' slash" rule with monster-vs-monster combat, and at least Angband violates the player-is-a-monster rule as monsters don't have inventory or equipment or gain levels. I'm not sure any of them lets monsters gain levels through killing, actually.. maybe it makes things too hard for summoner PCs (and would be pointless in a game without summoner PCs or monster-on-monster combat).  That's clearly fewer violations than glorg, so I'm sure it's possible to draw the roguelike/non-roguelike line between glorg and the canonical RLs, I just want to see people explicitly making the argument I'm curious what people's threshold is before they consider something non-roguelike

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: glorg

« on: February 17, 2011, 08:47:46 PM »

Perhaps unlike the Catholic church, our ideals are determined more by majority and seniority than any centralized power, but, unless I'm reading the community wrong, the Berlin Interpretation is widely accepted.

The forum administrator tolerates games that aren't really Roguelikes by our own definition simply because he is a nice guy and doesn't want to drive anyone away.

The definition can tell you which games are more Roguelike than others (well, it's a little blurry even there) but it doesn't tell you the cutoff point for really being a Roguelike or not. All we know that it's not necessary to meet all the criteria as some of the canonical Roguelikes don't. Glorg is clearly a stretch, but it does meet some of the Berlin Interpretation's criteria (about 1/3 of the high value factors and half the low value, by my reckoning) so shouldn't it be up for debate?