Notation

[beardedkeet]

Is anyone aware of notation used to describe a play through in the same way as chess?

I've taken to describing the key actions in Rogue (levelling up, descending a level, change in a key stat) using one line in Notepad holding key stats. Looking over it after a game helps me to analyse my decisions. It's a useful way to compare gameplay at a glance.

Does anyone know of any games that use notation or a log (other than the message log), or anywhere where people exchange notation to easily compare play styles?

[guest509]

  I know of none offhand but its seems like the Nethack boys would have cooked up something like this.

[Quendus]

Angband added something like this in the 2000s, and all the recent variants include equivalent features. It's somewhat more useful in variants like Sil where the character-building process involves choosing specific skills to learn; in vanilla angband it's more indicative of whether the player likes to dive aggressively or explore thouroughly.
These systems, as well as automatically recording level-ups, slain unique monsters, found artefacts, and (in Sil) skills learnt, also allow the player to insert custom notes.

Wouldn't be surprised if Crawl has something like this?

[beardedkeet]

Thanks - just found the character history in Angband. It gives the key events and is editable so I'll play around with the notes.

Ideally I'd like a snapshot of the character numbers and the ability to pick the events monitored.

If the output was universal you could compare across different titles, where similarities in structure and mechanics permit.

My notepad notes do that for now, just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing something obvious.

[Quendus]

If you want character snapshots you're best off making a character dump. Probably most major roguelikes have this facility, Angband and variants certainly do. http://angband.oook.cz even has a character ladder where you can submit them to be formatted nicely and compared to similar characters.