Monster Penalties/Cheats

[Dark_Oppressor]

I'm working on the design of my current roguelike project, and I am wondering how other roguelikes handle the issue of monsters. Specifically, do other games (or perhaps more importantly, you guys) penalize the monsters' stats? Allow them to ignore food or other needs? Cheat for/against them in other ways?

[Darren Grey]

I've never seen a game with monsters needing food...  In general monsters have set stats, no real equipment (fake the stats they would have), no requirements beyond killing the player, and only regenerate health if that's a special power.  There's no point coding things that the player will never see.

[Dark_Oppressor]

Well, monsters and the player are identical in code, except an "is_player" variable. Anything the player has, monsters have. So it's trivial to have them need/have things like food/equipment, and it would be equally trivial to give them some modifications like no food need.

I couldn't recall ever NOTICING anything like food need for monsters in other games, but I thought maybe I missed it. I think they did need it in my last 7DRL, but that was just because I liked seeing them keel over randomly. It was not thought out much gameplay-wise, heh.

The reason I thought to ask this and didn't just say "monsters don't need food" is because I thought it might cause them to sometimes abandon the chase to instead race you to some nearby food. However, the more I have thought about your reply, Darren, the more I think I was overthinking it to begin with. Easy to do with roguelikes!

I think most/all the situations I had in mind were far too subtle to even be noticed by players, let alone really affect tactics.

[NON]

There's no point coding things that the player will never see.

This.

Unless a major point of your game is to simulate an ecosystem, why bother? From a player perspective, there is no difference between having monsters actually go hungry and start to prioritize/eat food, or just occasionally gobble up a snack or a corpse completely at random (if this is a behavior you want to show the player).

Abstract and simplify everything as much as possible. Always try to trick the player into thinking your game is more deep than it is*. Fake complex AI. That's how you get it done fast.

*Of course this only applies to certain areas of the game design. For things like combat mechanics you should of course make them clear and easy to understand completely.

[Darren Grey]

Note also that complex AI can often seem to act very dumb to the player, or just not be fun or interesting when you just want to kill things.  On the other hand dumb AI with some randomness can seem very intelligent, as players assume patterns to things.  I've seen people talking about how tricksy and smart the AI in Gruesome is at staying in light places, when in fact the enemies move purely at random.

[NON]

Note also that complex AI can often seem to act very dumb to the player, or just not be fun or interesting when you just want to kill things.  On the other hand dumb AI with some randomness can seem very intelligent.

That's exactly my experience. I like a simple straightforward AI. Then you add some monster-specific behaviors (with distinct and tangible results) like walking back to the "lair" if you lose sight of the player, following a leader monster, or preferring cells outside the player's FOV, and you're good to go.

[wire_hall_medic]

While I construct monsters in the same way as players, they fill a fundamentally different role.  Specifically, the player should have an overwhelming chance to win in a straight up fight.  For example, if the player were evenly matched with a creature (50% chance of success), he's never going to make it through more than a couple of fights (.098% chance of winning 10 encounters).

So I like to do two things.  The first, is to design monsters that will wear a player down.  They need to be able to hit and hurt the player, but not murder him in a single hit (death should be the result of player choices, not one bad roll).  This is a little flexible; for example, a very strong creature that is slow and has no ranged attacks.

Second, I like to have a way for the PC to recover health.  I like combat.  I like killing things and taking their stuff.  If every weedy goblin hits for 3% of your health that you'll never get back, combat becomes very unattractive.  For me, this is where a lot of the balancing goes on.  I like to have some variation on vampirism; hurting and/or killing enemies gives you health.  This keeps the player motivated, especially if resting DOESN'T cause you to recover health.  I also like health potions/medpacks.  It gives the player a resource to manage, which again makes death the result of a series of poor decisions.

[Dark_Oppressor]

Thanks for the responses everyone! You are absolutely right, I agree. I was just over thinking what should be a simple decision. I already have distinct monster abilities and behaviors, and this would be unneeded/unnoticed. Far better to put time into a monster that can drain your mana, or slow you down, or curse your items, or ... etc.

[AgingMinotaur]

Not barring what's been written here so far, I think some similarities can be neat, especially if you already have "the player is a monster" in place. For instance, I like a game where monsters wield weapons, quaff potions and zap wands. A particularly good weapon will simultaneously be a challenge and its reward, you get special strategies to let monsters use-identify stuff "for" you, fooling them to zap their buddies with a wand of fireballs, etc. Crawl does this, I think, as well as a lot of other games.

As always,
Minotauros

[Dark_Oppressor]

Ya, not only can it ease development, it can lead to some cool stuff that just sort of "happens", which is always nice!

[JollyRoger]

Well, well, well.
I wouldn't replicate good posts, that complex and cleaver AI and simulation aren't good for roguelike and developer should concentrate on "how it looks for player" theme, but I write about my own experience, maybe it would be helpful!

Idea - player identical to monster sounds cool and great, but when it comes to real game play, that shining idea starts to fade.
You can trust me, person who managed to create one of dullest roguelikes in the world.  
 PC was identical to NPC and has is_player flag only, but you know, fighting equal opponents all the time isn't interesting (I don't mean stat identical, but identical checks to be wounded, killd, etc)! Damn, it is devastatingly dull!


Of course, it is cool, from time to time to have arena-like battle with equal opponent, but most of the time, player wants FUN!
So, game should give fun at first place.
Equal opportunities for monsters? What? Is it Monsters Rights League?  
No!
Player wants interesting combats, so player wants to fight monsters, have challenge, win, have a chance to be fairly defeated and have epic feelings.
So, NPC should be modded to provide it.
PC enemies would be:
fodder, tons of them. They should have "easy to defeat injection".
they would give :YARRRR! ME STRONG, KILLED HORDES OF THEM!! ARRR!
Equals. Arena-like gameplay.
This is good challenge. Nice game experience, but NOT 100% of game play.  
Overpowered
Or bosses. Epic fight, that player would win, because has "legitimated cheats" (healing, running away etc)  
Epic battles, epic results.

Well. something like that.