Multiplayer in Roguelikes

[Alex E]

I don't think I've ever even seen a multiplayer roguelike. And I don't think I'll see one that connects people online anytime soon.

But if a multiplayer roguelike was made, how would the multiplayer work?
I thought about this, and I just can't figure it out. It could be turn based, but then whenever someone moves their character they can't move until the other player does. So if you're trying to move around it would just be awful. I can imagine a lot of waiting. If not turn based, then real time will work, right? Well, everything is in tiles, so you would have to line up your moves just right to get anything done. Controls would have to be simplified, to allow fast commands in the middle of a fight, possibly with other players.

What's everyone elses opinion on multiplayer in roguelikes? Is it even possible to get multiplayer to "work" well with them?

[kraflab]

Here are two that I have played some time ago:
http://www.daimonin.org/
http://euotopia.com/

The problem as I see it is the one you mentioned, wherein getting the right turn length is impossible.  There are always going to be people that can't keep up and people that find it unbearably slow.

I think that any way you create a pressure to act immediately makes the game not a roguelike.  I can see things working on the small scale, where maybe you have a few people working together.  You also need to make it so the player can decide their action ahead of time in certain cases, for instance clicking on the map and pathing there as their turn approaches.  This can make the wait lessened.

Before I continue though, I strongly suggest you use the search bar on this forum because this topic has already been fairly discussed recently

Edit: There appear to be some topics in the search but I cannot find the one I'm thinking of.  This leads me to believe that perhaps that discussion was on irc.

[Darren Grey]

Twilight (not the sparkly vampires) was a MMO roguelike that worked fairly well, though it had a large, preset overworld that got a bit tiresome after a while.  It used real-time and had a very streamlined interface.

One solution that comes to mind is turn-based but asynchronous - so you can go up to say 10 turns ahead of or behind another player in your party.  It would have issues with people doing actions together they didn't intend (accidentally bolting friends, etc) which would be especially bad with lag, but it would solve the whole moving around slowly problem.

[Holsety]

I've played MAngband with a pal not too long ago, and there's also TomeNET.

S'alright. Basically MAngband works by advancing the game 1 turn ahead every second (maybe a bit less than a second? I never timed it) and having you auto-attack things you're next to. Things get a bit more complicated depending on your character's speed stat, and I'm not TOO familiar with the real mechanics so I won't go too deeply into it.

It all works decently untill you start getting into mortal danger. The game just goes glacial on your ass.
The goal is to give you time to save yourself by making every ingame turn take... 20 seconds or so to advance, but what you really get is this disorienting disconnect between inputs and actions that will drive you absolutely batshit in record time.

As for ranged weaponry, healing-in-a-pinch, and spellcasting, the player just sets up macros.
I'm preeeeetty sure regular ole singleplayer 'bands let you do this too, but I never use it there.
As for multiplayer, it's a lifesaver. Binding all the keypresses for casting that Cure Serious Wounds into a single key is mandatory.

In the end it works pretty well except when someone's near death, but I'm not too big a fan of the 'band playstyle (too grindy). I think it would be a LOT more fun when applied to Rogue/Hack or anything without a "safe place" to return to. (Though that would make it less MMO-y)

Didn't spend too much time with TomeNET, but I read that one slows the realtime turn advancing depending on how deep you are; ie. turns advance slower the deeper you go to compensate for increased lethality of enemies.

Kraflab has a point though. The game being realtime kills the roguelike feel.

[Alex E]

S'alright. Basically MAngband works by advancing the game 1 turn ahead every second (maybe a bit less than a second?

Annoying, pressured combat doesn't sound very enjoyable. I suppose that if you want more than a few people playing, then it needs to be real-time. Waiting for 8 other people to take their turn would be more of a waste of time than fun. I agree with you and kraflab, real-time makes it not feel like a roguelike.

Before I continue though, I strongly suggest you use the search bar on this forum because this topic has already been fairly discussed recently

I actually did do some searching, but I didn't find anything!

One solution that comes to mind is turn-based but asynchronous - so you can go up to say 10 turns ahead of or behind another player in your party.  It would have issues with people doing actions together they didn't intend (accidentally bolting friends, etc) which would be especially bad with lag, but it would solve the whole moving around slowly problem.

Moving more than once per turn could work. It seems that the player who gets somewhere first would have the major advantage though. Especially if there was any type of PVP. If one player got to another first, stabbed them 8 times, then the other player wouldn't be able to even react. Well, certain moves could take up more of the turn. For example, attacking will end your turn instantly. Moving will use up a fifth of your turn. So on and so on.

[requerent]

Gambits!

When we think about how we play roguelikes, we more or less honor a specific play-style pending upon how our little dude has been built, developed or what equipment we have or whatever.

Most of the decisions that a player makes involve how they're equipped, how they're leveled, and in which situations are consumables used or what equipment changed out or which spell is cast.

With that in mind-- you can incorporate a simple logical language into the game where people describe the basic behaviors of their character.

"If Enemies in a hunting state targeting player > 4, move to closest previously visited tile with 2 adjacent empty tiles."

Basically, run to a hallway if you run into a pack of enemies.

It can get supremely complicated, but if players basically script their own AIs, you can just allow players to pause game progression whenever a genuinely difficult decision needs to be made.

I mean-- when Playing brogue, you only need to break autoplay a few times to get to D11.

[yam655]

Personally, when I think "multiplayer roguelike" I don't think of an MMO. (Probably because I hate MMOs.)

My first thought is multiplayer like Civalization. It's turn-based. While each unit has few choices, each player controls a lot of units at the end.

So: a small group of friends play together.

Now consider: there is no actual requirement to keep the turns in sync across all players except when they're within line-of-sight. If I can't see you the difference of you going one turn or 10 to my one turn is meaningless.

So, when players are within line-of-sight, they need to wait for the other players to finish their turns. Talking to each other is still a free action, of course.

Next, more squelching of boring things.

If the group is moving as a unit, one player is given control and everybody moves as a single unit until enemies are encountered. This is simply squelching manual follow commands.

If a player is on auto-explore, their next command is handled automatically by the system so there is zero delay. If every one in the party is on auto-explore together, they should fan out, explore the map, then converge on the first monster found. (Given that talking is free and the first thing a person in their party would do is say, "Hey, there's something I need help with over here!")

So, yeah... the only time you should be waiting for other players is when you're near each other and monsters are around -- or you're near each other and playing non-cooperatively.

Then again, I see multiplayer as an extension of single-player multiple-character. We see those sorts of games in RPGs all the time, but they're rare with roguelikes.

Cheers,
Steven Black

[george]

There's a problem with async turns regardless of line-of-sight -- it ruins causality, which is a major component of any multiplayer game.

Take Player A and Player B, not in LOS.
Player A hits the Enemy on turn 1. Enemy flees.
Player B runs into the Enemy on turn 2. He throws a potion at Enemy, which happens to be a potion of gigantism. It lasts 10 turns. Player B and Enemy pillar dance for 8 turns.
In the meantime, Player A gets a cup of coffee, comes back and takes turn 2.
Player B hits the Enemy and it flees back to Player A on turn 11. According to B, Enemy has gigantism for 1 more turn. According to A, it's turn 3.
Now what?

[Alex E]

Player A hits the Enemy on turn 1. Enemy flees.
Player B runs into the Enemy on turn 2. He throws a potion at Enemy, which happens to be a potion of gigantism. It lasts 10 turns. Player B and Enemy pillar dance for 8 turns.
In the meantime, Player A gets a cup of coffee, comes back and takes turn 2.
Player B hits the Enemy and it flees back to Player A on turn 11. According to B, Enemy has gigantism for 1 more turn. According to A, it's turn 3.

That's a good point. I'd say that having a queue based turn system would solve that, but there's still the problem of waiting for the other person. It would just be too slow.

I keep going back to the idea of "real-time". Everyone says that it kills the roguelike experience, but what if it was "sort of real-time"? Let's say that every few seconds the players' turns end, and the enemies get to move. During each players few seconds of each turn, they may move up to once, attack once, or eat some food once. It's still a turn, but it's faster. However, it's also pressured...

[Holsety]

I keep going back to the idea of "real-time". Everyone says that it kills the roguelike experience, but what if it was "sort of real-time"? Like MAngband. Let's say that every few seconds the players' turns end, and the enemies get to move. Like MAngband. During each players few seconds of each turn, they may move up to once, attack once, or eat some food once. It's still a turn, but it's faster. However, it's also pressured...

I'd give MAngband a try, if I were you.
If you're shy of interacting with the playerbase (which is, like, 4 people.) it's easy as pie to set up your own server.
Once you've actually played it you'll appreciate how it works. I don't think any other system will work well for a multiplayer roguelike.

Which boils down to me saying that multiplayer roguelikes is a novel concept, but ultimately a fool's errand.
You NEED to be free to take all the time in the world and think about your options, especially in combat, because of permadeath.
If you take out permadeath it's not even a roguelike anymore, just boring.

[Alex E]

I'd give MAngband a try, if I were you.
If you're shy of interacting with the playerbase (which is, like, 4 people.) it's easy as pie to set up your own server.

I'll give it a try.

[Omnomnom]

I was thinking about this before. I wondered if it would be worth allowing players to see other player's screens during the other player's turn. That way if one player's turns are taking ages because they are having tough decisions then other players can at least spectate it. That might reduce some of the waiting for other players problem.

[Z]

I think that maybe a multiplayer roguelike where the two players play asynchronously and interact somewhat non-directly could be nice.

As an analogy, there is a chess variant called Bughouse or siamese chess (that I have never played myself, just watched) for four persons (white-A+black-A VS white-B+black-B). White-A plays against black-B, and black-A plays against white-B. Each of these pairs play a normal Chess game, except that whenever a piece is captured, the partner can put it on their board. The two subgames are not synchronized, so the game is more realtime (and usually played with a small time limit to discourage waiting for new pieces indefinitely).

In roguelike terms (where, say, white become players, black become monsters): two players play separate games, but monsters killed by one player will appear in the other world. Or they can lay traps for the other player somehow. Something like that. Although you could take your time to perform complicated actions or to think out difficult battles, it would be important to have a good average speed. So that would be a bit of a race, but I think that's not bad (speedrunning roguelikes is another idea that should be explored, I only know Jacob's Matrix, but real time passed is actually a good measure to score winners in most roguelikes).

I was thinking about doing something like this for a 7DRL challenge or something, but I am not sure whether there would be enough interest (it is much easier to try out a single player game... or am I wrong?).

[kraflab]

In terms of a 7drl, I would definitely try to get some friends to test things out with me.  Some kind of organization thread could probably get some pairs together.

A similar idea I was thinking of was having each player set up a dungeon, i.e. control monster and item placement.  There would naturally have to be some limits in place so you cannot just place infinite monsters.  Perhaps the more loot you place in an area the more monsters you can place for instance.  Then each player would try to defeat the other's dungeon.

Definitely I think competitive multiplayer has some options, although I still think cooperative multiplayer is a design challenge

[Holsety]

Competitive asynchronous multiplayer would be awesome.

You could have a relatively short roguelike (such as TSL or Rogue) and give the player a choice upon ascending;
-upload your score and increase the difficulty of the game from now on for every player by 1 step
-50% chance to lower the difficulty of the game from now on for every player by 1 step, your score is not uploaded

So you'd have the balance between victorious players who want to tone down the brutal difficulty even if they become unsung heroes and the victorious players who want to crank that difficulty as high as possible so nobody ever steals their n1 spot on the leaderboards, even if it renders the game absolutely unplayable.

(Maybe with a ladder season so the difficulty can get reset.)