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Other Announcements / Re: [POLL] What are your biggest possible turn-offs in a roguelike?

« on: April 18, 2013, 09:01:46 PM »

Is "4 direction shooting in an 8 direction game" what Morgoth meant by "orthogonal only shooting. Doesn’t make sense."? I interpreted that as a complaint about being unable to shoot in arbitrary directions (as you can in DoomRL).

You interpreted it correctly.

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Other Announcements / Re: What are the biggest possible turn-off in a roguelike?

« on: April 17, 2013, 03:02:26 PM »

I don't like those at all.  "Learn by doing" systems almost universally require metagaming.  I understand that learning by leveling isn't realistic.  But learning through practice means you do the exact same thing as you would in a more traditional system, except you also need to waste your time grinding out useless low level abilities until they become useful.

Like, if you're a swordguy and you want to be a spearguy, you need to get a spear, and go fight harmless enemies (because your low spear skill will get you killed against dangerous enemies) and you need to sit there doing this repetitive task until your spear skill is high enough to use for real.  It doesn't add any depth or strategy or anything, it just means more busywork.

I'm not trying to call you out or anything.  I just think that what some people consider to be flaws are actually legitimate design decisions with solid reasons behind them.  I think a back and forth discussion on that kind of thing is more valuable than "well I sure do hate ASCII" or whatever.

Ideally, fighting with a sword would train both the specific sword skill and the general fighting skill or strength; so if you spend half the game fighting with a sword you will do OK with a spear, but even better with a sword. But that’s not the example I gave; my problem is with games that let you choose what you want to train, even if the skill is completely unrelated to what the character is actually doing.

I think it does add depth and strategy. I use different strategies on Frozen Depths depending on what skills I want to train. Having learn-by-doing doesn’t force me to grind, it forces me to plan far ahead.

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Other Announcements / Re: What are the biggest possible turn-off in a roguelike?

« on: April 14, 2013, 08:50:55 PM »

1 - being able to choose skills when you gain a level. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. You can’t spend a day swinging maces at goblins and become professional at climbing. ADOM suffers heavily from this.

2 - complete lack of a story. I want to know who I am and what I’m doing. The more story the better, as long as the gameplay doesn’t suffer too much from it. This is the best feature of ADOM.

1 - orthogonal only shooting. Doesn’t make sense.

2 - no ASCII display.

1 - lack of a concise list of commands. ADOM and Angband suffer from this (or maybe I couldn’t find the list.) Frozen Depths has a nice list that can be accessed with a command.

3 - numpad commands and inability to change. It’s hard to use numpad on my laptop 

2 - non-persistent dungeons.

2 - changing terminal size changes size of levels when they are generated. WTF ADOM!

1 - futuristic theme. I prefer mediaeval fantasy.

3 - combat only. There must be ways other than combat to obtain items, like the deep smiths in Frozen Depths.

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Classic Roguelikes / Re: Does everybody read NetHack spoilers?

« on: June 11, 2010, 01:56:53 AM »

Yes. Huge mistake. Not making the same mistake on ADOM.