What are your thoughts on level and item grinding in roguelikes?
Most rpg games allow the player as much liberty with this as they like, but since roguelikes are heavily designed around providing a challenge, a lot of them provide limiting factors.
The original rogue did it with food. Spending too much time hanging around the same level killing monsters would eventually result in starvation. Adom does it with corruption over time.
Angband and its variants tend to put no limitations in place, meaning that if the player knows what levels they need specific resistances at, and basic tactics for dealing with the more troublesome enemies, the game essentially boils down to a patience test for the player. Is this desirable? Is it better to have a way for less proficient players to be able to get through the game, at the expense of losing some of the challenge?
Some games, like Mage Guild and DDRogue from the last 7drl competition avoid the issue by tying progression to finding specific, non-respawning items in specific levels of the dungeon, and others may similarly tie it to going down levels in the dungeon or otherwise progressing with the main story.
I, personally am planning on giving fewer experience points per kill as the player's level gets closer to that of their enemies, and no experience at all for enemies whose levels are beneath the player's. For items, I'm going to make it so the items used by spawned enemies are of lower quality than those carried by unique enemies and the items spawned when the level is first generated.
So again, what are your thoughts on this facet of roguelike design? Is it the developers responsibility to make sure the player doesn't take the longer, easier path through the game? What are effective and ineffective ways of going about doing this? Ultimately, what makes the game more fun?
