No number statistics

[whtspc]

Hello,

in the process of creating my pretty non-conventional rl, I'm playing with the idea of discarding numbers from the screen. Stats will be displayed in words, for instance HP will be described as 'unwound' , 'scratched', 'bleeding', 'wounded', 'heavily wounded' and 'almost dead' depending on the numeric value behind it. Experience levels will have names like 'rookie', 'the new kid on the block', 'apprentice', 'warrior', 'killing machine', 'monster from hell'. But enchanted weapons also won't be described with a plain +2 or something. I think you get the idea..... What I'm wondering about is: if stats are all descriptive is a roguelike is still playable, does it boost it's difficulty enormous (player has to memorize the descriptions of everything what's actually just plain numbers), or do you think it could be a good idea?
I hope it could benefit to push up the imagination of the player. What does have a better feel?: 'HP:3/34' or 'Heavily wounded'. 'STA:6' or 'Your overall condition is good'. 'DEX:2' or 'You still have problems handling those weapons like a pro'.

Thanks in advance for your reply,
Wouter

[kraflab]

I remember having a similar discussion on here somewhere, although I can't remember what it was about.  In my opinion, this type of situation is needless obfuscation.  I want to know exactly how close I am to death.  This adds in guessing for the sake of flavor, which is not a fair trade in my opinion.  Something you could do is make it so it displays "wounded" but hovering your mouse over the text changes it to "20/35" etc.

As far as items, I think things should have special names (in Epilogue I use words like "honed" or "flawless" etc).  Of course, if the numbers go up pretty high, this would create situations like "well, is a superb dagger better than an excellent dagger?"

Basically, flavor is good, but everything should be available to the player if you want them to make fully-informed decisions (which is a lot of what makes a roguelike a roguelike and not a dice roll simulator).  It would also be annoying for a new player who does not know the scale of things.  I.E. "wounded" means different things to different people, but I think everyone understands what 5/10 or 50% means.

[TheCreator]

I tried similar approach (replacing stats with bars) and in my opinion it didn't work. Roguelikes are probably too complex for that. Simpler games, like Diablo, are doing very well without all that details displayed on the screen, but in those games the player character dies very often and you can load game at any moment, so it does not matter that much whether your character will survive walking into a trap or something like that.

[AgingMinotaur]

I agree with kraflab and UglyTroll: If there's a typically complex RL system under the hood, it's best to show the player the numbers. Replacing them witn soft/semantic values doesn't make the game world more accessible to the player, but can serve to make it more opaque.

Of course, it's another thing if your underlying system is also simple (in terms of numbers, not tactical depth). So if you only have 2 hit points, anyway, you might display health with strings ("fine", "hurt", "dead"). But there's no fun in trying to guess whether you can take one more hit from that goblin without dropping to "very hurt", or what might be the difference between a "honed, accurate bastard sword" and a "sharp, balanced long sword".

As always,
Minotauros

[Quendus]

A lot of roguelikes give exact numbers for the player's stats and text descriptions (if anything) for monsters; I think this is supposed to reflect the player character's ability to judge their own state of health better than they can that of something that's trying to eat them.

[TheCreator]

However, it should not hurt if you display textual descriptions as an *addition* to the numbers (for example as "tooltips"). It could be helpful for beginner players who probably don't know yet if the strength of 10 is high or low in your game.

[whtspc]

Thanks again for this (quick) reply,

I am going to play the devil's advocate here a little, although I'm totally not an expert in roguelikes.

I can understand you want to know what your exact amount of hitpoints is: you experienced that a certain monster doesn't hurt you more than 5 hp in this stage of the game and you have 6 left, you decide to save your magic for later and hope to heal by resting after the fight.

But in terms of stamina, armor class, dexterity, vitality etc. When you are playing a game, do you really use and therefore need these numbers to calculate your chances? Or do you just try to level them up, depending on your playing style or player class?

Hunger isn't displayed as an integer regularly, that would be unrealistic. Why are we expecting to see our health as an integer then?


 

[TheCreator]

But in terms of stamina, armor class, dexterity, vitality etc. When you are playing a game, do you really use and therefore need these numbers to calculate your chances? Or do you just try to level them up, depending on your playing style or player class?

I don't think anybody actually does such calculations. Maybe we just like to see the numbers as they grow up, maybe that gives us the feeling that our character is developing, which is much harder to see without numbers.

[Holsety]

Most of the time numbers are best for conveying information.
If it's things that are, numbers is best. (Hit points, stats, armor class, fatigue)
If it's things that happen, words are best. (The game telling you what's on the ground, what you picked up, what you zapped)

For impact, it depends. (How hard you just hit someone, how much damage your wand blasted all over someone's face, the result of your jumping skill check to get on the table.)
I prefer both, with the option to turn off either one  
Ie. I like it when the game tells me I "scored an excellent hit" and the orc "failed to hurt me", but I really really goddamn prefer it if it gives the numbers too. I want to know what I rolled for that excellent hit and if I can expect more, and I want to know if the orc failing to hurt me was because he is weak-sauce or because the planets aligned just this once and he's going to explode my guts all over the cave with his next attack.

As for hit points. Numbers. No excuse ever.
Angband does this thing where when you attack a monster a health 'bar' shows up with stars to exemplify health, like so:
[**********] and then it goes all [*******---] or maybe not because it is dog shit and doesn't give you any idea how much health the monster has and if you're even actually doing any damage at all.
You might think it's cute to use words to describe health-state of the player, but it is a dick move  
Absolutely horrible  

However, it should not hurt if you display textual descriptions as an *addition* to the numbers (for example as "tooltips"). It could be helpful for beginner players who probably don't know yet if the strength of 10 is high or low in your game.

I like color coding for stats. Red for low, orange/yellow for normal and green for 'good', maybe even purple for 'awesome'.
Whether you define low/normal/good/awesome by the average for that race or by a static 1-18 scale is up to you. (the difference between giving a rat with 14 str a green 14 str or a purple 14 str, see?)

I can understand you want to know what your exact amount of hitpoints is: you experienced that a certain monster doesn't hurt you more than 5 hp in this stage of the game and you have 6 left, you decide to save your magic for later and hope to heal by resting after the fight.

Not just that (tossing aside the chance that that monster could hit for 6 or 12 damage suddenly), usually the player's maximum HP increases over the course of the game, so will "piddly health" mean the same thing after 20 levels as it did when you started the game? Probably not. It's just really annoying to not be able to clearly know the most vital statistic, lol.

But in terms of stamina, armor class, dexterity, vitality etc. When you are playing a game, do you really use and therefore need these numbers to calculate your chances? Or do you just try to level them up, depending on your playing style or player class?

Knowing the number helps with planning;
-how high is this stat? (a scale (1-10, 1-18, 1-500, whatever.) is universal.)
-how much did the stat-drainer just knock off? (Knowing that potions of restore X restore 1-2 points lets you plan for how many of said potion you need, other than blindly chugging them untill you go from 'pencilnecked' to 'beefripple')
-how high does it have to be in order for me to be able to do this or that? (18 str and 16 dex to get three hits per round with a longsword, ok. 'Melon-armed' and 'Outruns cougars'? Is that the same for my orc as it is for my elf??)

Numbers are simply to cleanest way to convey information. Words are too ambiguous.

Hunger isn't displayed as an integer regularly, that would be unrealistic. Why are we expecting to see our health as an integer then?

I'd love if hunger was displayed as an integer :p
Knowing I start at 5000 satiation, iron rations (if not cursed) restore 1000 and each turn drains 1; this lets me plan ahead. Going from normal hunger to hungry, eating something, then going hungry again when you exit the room is frustrating.
But hunger is usually not shown because the food clock is one of the challenging factors of roguelikes, and not knowing the exact numbers adds excitement and suspense.
If you did it to health it'd add annoyance, alt+F4 and shift+delete instead...

As a side note, I appreciate Halls of Mist for 'removing' food. Instead the dungeon is filled with darkness that will drive you insane, so torches are now the new 'food clock'. And Angband always shows how many turns a torch has left. Then again, it's (almost) always possible to go back to the surface and buy more torches in Angband...

More examples! Crawl has gods. Please your god, gain piety. Usually gods grant abilities that can be activated in exchange for piety.
Annoying part? Piety goes up to 5 stars. Piety cost for using abilities? Unknown. Game simply states 'Piety'.
Will activating this ability make me go from 4 stars to 3 and lose passive abilities X, Y and Z?
I don't know, since I haven't read the spoilers and counted my piety manually outside of the game.

Madou Monogatari for the SNES. RPG, translated by AGTP. No numbers. Health is described by animations and text. (You play a 5-year old girl who can cast spells, derp) As your health drops your giant onscreen portrait goes from "smiling and waving" all the way to "looking like she lost her mom in the supermarket".
Fun times when encountering a minotaur while at the "halfheartedly smiling with hand in air"; he slaps your shit in one hit. Turns out you could have taken that one hit and cast your ultimate spell to beat him if you were full health.
-You don't know how big your health pool is
-You don't know how much his attack knocks off
Does this situation make you:
-Do some work to fill your health to maximum (or what you think is maximum, based on whenever she starts smiling AND waving)
or
-Go the fuck somewhere else thinking this guy out of your league for the next 4 hours of gameplay.

That's annoying, right? Now imagine with permadeath!

But in terms of stamina, armor class, dexterity, vitality etc. When you are playing a game, do you really use and therefore need these numbers to calculate your chances? Or do you just try to level them up, depending on your playing style or player class?

I don't think anybody actually does such calculations. Maybe we just like to see the numbers as they grow up, maybe that gives us the feeling that our character is developing, which is much harder to see without numbers.

Depends on the game.

In Incursion knowing the goblin's making a 1d20+5 attack roll versus my 33 armor class lets me clearly know I don't give a shit about said goblin untill he starts throwing criticals.
Knowing I'm hitting a certain ur-dragon for 1d8+12 and that it blocks 15 points of damage always lets me know that just under half the time I'm doing no damage at all and that maybe I should go away.

Whereas in Crawl I'm swinging at an ogre for damage with a chance to hit and he'll maybe kill me in one hit sometimes or he'll do 1 hp damage. Whee fun times with uncertainty.
I can have a level 6 character get splatted by an ogre, or I can have a level 1 character (same race/class) kill 5 ogres no problem. And then get splatted by an ogre.

There's information thats fine to keep from the player, and there's times when not giving a player information is super annoying. And people who are way more qualified than me to talk about game design still struggle with this, so have fun!

[Darren Grey]

If you want to get away from numbers then use bars.  Health bars are a great way of communicating HP status quickly and intuitively.  Don't use qualitative descriptions as these can be confusing, especially to an international audience.  and your novel descriptions get old very quick, whilst also being slower at giving information.

[AgingMinotaur]

whtspc, what are you hoping to achieve by hiding the numbers?

If you have a compelling idea why it should be so, and how this would improve gameplay, you have something to work with to design an alternative system. But if your idea is to take a "typical RL" and make the numbers invisible to the player, there's a danger of just getting a suboptimal UI. If having a trait rated as "good" as opposed to "average" simply means I passed an arbitrary limit on a sliding scale, I see no problem solved. But I'm all for it if the difference is real and tangible.

Note there are plenty systems that use stuff like "health levels" instead of "hit points" for a more palatable system (classic pen and paper RPGs like Rune Quest, Ars Magica, Vampire, as well as an arcade game like Super Mario …)

Truth to be said: There can be a bit too much staring at walls of digits when playing some of the best RLs.

As always,
Minotauros

[kraflab]

It might be interesting to have a stat that determines how well you judge your own health.  Maybe when you start out you just have vague descriptions but later on you know 11-14 / 15 and finally 13/15 exactly.  I think something like this could hypothetically be fun, as anything could, but it is as AgingMinotaur said: if you are talking about taking a default roguelike and tacking words over the numbers, that probably won't work.  The whole thing needs to be redesigned with this format in mind.

[Quendus]

But in terms of stamina, armor class, dexterity, vitality etc. When you are playing a game, do you really use and therefore need these numbers to calculate your chances? Or do you just try to level them up, depending on your playing style or player class?

I don't think anybody actually does such calculations. Maybe we just like to see the numbers as they grow up, maybe that gives us the feeling that our character is developing, which is much harder to see without numbers.

The number of people that actually do such calculations depends directly on the complexity of calculations and number of spoiler or help file lookups required to get the desired piece of information.

If the player and monster have known attack and defence scores which are easily seen in tooltips or the monster memory window, and there's a simple, known formula for hit chance, like (50 + ATK - DEF)%, then a lot of people will start calculating that (even if they prefer to see it given onscreen).

On the other hand, if your weapon damage is 3*(5d8 + 17) and modified in some unknown or complex way by the monster's armour rating and your boost from dexterity, you might get a few people calculating the min, max, or mean damage of the weapon, but no-one's going to have a clue how much damage the weapon is expected to do to the monster - just that it's a lot.

In general, it's not a bad thing to have some numbers hidden from the player. There are pitfalls, which other people have mentioned, with giving inexact information about the most crucial things like player hit points. However, if the game is designed to allow the player to survive in an uncertain environment, then things like reducing monster HP to a number out of 10 can be fine. Rather than calculating "I do 152.6 +- 27.4 damage on average against this kind of monster, I should be able to kill it in 7-10 rounds", you think things like "I barely scratched it and it just ate a quarter of my health", or "we're both doing about 10% damage each round, I'll need a healing potion to survive this fight".

Similarly for skill checks, a very polite game might tell you you have a 71% chance to pick the lock on this chest without activating a trap, whereas a game that makes the player deal with greater levels of uncertainty would simply tell you that it looks easier to open than the one that exploded in your face earlier on.

In general, the more specific statistics and exact probabilities you give the player, the more the player is able to work out the exact expected benefit of performing a specific action, and the more they're able to engage in exactly optimal play. For me, having all of that information makes me feel forced to use it to calculate optimal actions (provided the formulae involved aren't too complicated). That's why I like games that hide or give approximate information for appropriate variables such as monster health or probability of succeeding a skill check.

When there's just the right amount of variance in the expected outcome of different courses of action, the player is forced to use heuristics to survive - comparing the present situation to an earlier one which was more or less difficult, and factoring in any improvement or setbacks to the PC's abilities since that experience is a good example. This is how I like to play roguelikes.

Too little variance and too much information, and you end up playing with a calculator. Too much variance and too little information, and you get a slot machine:

I can have a level 6 character get splatted by an ogre, or I can have a level 1 character (same race/class) kill 5 ogres no problem. And then get splatted by an ogre.

[kraflab]

I think that if your game has enough depth, giving all the information does not mean the player certainly knows what play is optimal.  They ought to at least have the capacity to figure it out though.

[guest509]

  It comes down to your audience.

  Your general roguelike player has no fear of the maths, and in fact likes seeing their stats increase and what not. They want to know if they have 89 or 92 strength. They want to know their hit %. Can I take another hit or do I blink now?

  That's just my take. Not saying it can't be done, but some of the fun might be lost.