Difficulty

[Rya.Reisender]

Heh yeah that's how I play my JRPGs. If I die once I quit the game and move on to the next unless the game is really fun. Someone once called my playing style the "absolute perma death". Though honestly I don't think this applies to roguelikes very well as you can usually only learn from mistakes in them and then get better by repeating over and over. It just gets ridiculous when you learned a lot on your last trip and then die on the second floor just because you were not lucky.

[Z]

Quoting a song I found on the Internet:

Your fingers may move with blinding speed
there may be no game you can't beat
but can't you see that noone can defeat
the man who throws the Tetris piece

some popular games are designed to be unwinnable If a roguelike has an unreachable or almost unreachable (that is, except in case of extreme luck) ending, it is not a very good design, but if the game just gets harder and harder, like Tetris, that could be acceptable. Although players would want some sense of "achievement of victory". (Maybe beating the global highscore could be an achievement? But then the game would have to constantly present the player with new challenges, which are based on skill, not on luck or grinding.)

[Krice]

I don't like difficult games, especially the way roguelikes are difficult. The difficulty should have some kind of logic in it. Besides I have really started to think that hack-n-slash (killing thousands of monsters) is boring. That's why I'm turning Kaduria into gardening simulator. I also liked fishing in Zelda, so I think there is going to be fishing.

[corremn]

Yawn, boring.

[Krice]

Yawn, boring.

Gardening and fishing? No way! I have always liked the way you can do something ordinary (in contrast to epic hero stuff) in games.

[Rabiat]

You notice a dandelion.
You pick the dandelion.
The dandelion dies.
A tiny ant comes into view.
The tiny ant crawls onto you. (x3)
You cut back the rose bush.
Your (+3, +1) Gloves of Gardening resist.
Now wielding an irredescent fishing rod.
It sticks to your hands!
Identified the (-5, -4) Fishing Rod of the Ancients.
Really drink from the pool? (Y/n)
A brown frog appears.
The brown frog hits you.
Ouch! That really hurt!
You die...

[Vanguard]

Heh yeah that's how I play my JRPGs. If I die once I quit the game and move on to the next unless the game is really fun. Someone once called my playing style the "absolute perma death". Though honestly I don't think this applies to roguelikes very well as you can usually only learn from mistakes in them and then get better by repeating over and over. It just gets ridiculous when you learned a lot on your last trip and then die on the second floor just because you were not lucky.

I'm the opposite of that.  There are way too many games out there of every genre that I can clear in one shot without dying.

I'm always disappointed by games that can't manage to kill me.  The newest DS Castlevania, for example, was a nice surprise because it killed me off quite a few times, and I had to actually play carefully against some of the bosses to beat them.  That doesn't happen most of the time.

[AgingMinotaur]

I think it is acceptable, nay mandatory, for RLs to kill you quite quickly the first time. But ideally, even the most inept player should see something interesting before he dies. Getting some sense of beginning (talking to some people, getting a quest, travelling in an overworld, whatever), and then being killed by a frog after two minutes, is better than just seeing a little @ move around when you press the keys, and suddenly getting a message that "a stone block fell and crushed your head."

When it comes to mid- and end-game difficulty/low winnability I think RLs are generally very hard, and I wouldn't mind some more lenient ones. Imagine a RL where an intermediate player could get a lucky win. Getting killed by random stuff is IMHO part of what makes the genre great, so I think a 100% winnable RL is an absurd notion. My taste says there should be situations where you just die to bad luck, but also ones where you slap your head afterwards, or better yet -- heave a proud sight of relief after a narrow escape, where you had to rely on your wits and your luck, and prevailed!

Then there's this argument that random content ensures replayability. But that should also mean that the game is just as fun after you won it. It demands that you implement an endgame that is random and fluid just like the midgame, instead of one that revolves around (getting certain powers to face) certain, fixed levels/bosses/obstacles. But if you have 5 locations, 5 overlords, and 5 fatal weaknesses to kill the overlord, you can get 5^3 variations on the final showdown

Computer games in general are often about clearing levels to unlock content. In some RLs, it can feel a bit cheap and needy, like the game is trying to get me hooked with promises of cool content deeper down in the dungeon, but allowing me very slow progress. Compare to board games, for example, where you get an overview of the entire game after a few sessions, but it stays enjoyable because the pieces of rules/content continue to come together in new, astonishing patterns.

I think I would find very sympathetic, a roguelike that let me win after a hundred games, but that I might still pick up to play, because losing is almost just as enjoyable as winning.

As always,
Minotauros

[Ex]

You notice a dandelion.
You pick the dandelion.
The dandelion dies.
A tiny ant comes into view.
The tiny ant crawls onto you. (x3)
You cut back the rose bush.
Your (+3, +1) Gloves of Gardening resist.
Now wielding an irredescent fishing rod.
It sticks to your hands!
Identified the (-5, -4) Fishing Rod of the Ancients.
Really drink from the pool? (Y/n)
A brown frog appears.
The brown frog hits you.
Ouch! That really hurt!
You die...

This is an awesome idea, first.

Also, I've been considering a type of roguelike in which death doesn't affect the contents of a special "bank account". This would make death not really death, while maintaining a certain element of risk. Also, has anyone ever implemented MMORPG like death in roguelikes? There are many different ways in the MMORPG industry of dealing with player death, and any of them could easily be applied to roguelikes...

[getter77]

FATE and the upcoming Torchlight have options for the "MMORPG Penalty style" deaths I believe.  Torchlight even lets you choose from a range of options at the time...

[Rabiat]

This is an awesome idea, first.

It was just a joke aimed at Krice's remark about gardening and fishing, of course. But I can see his point. I often enjoy mundane or trivial tasks in RLs, too. Like herb gardening in ADOM or collecting slime molds in Angband. The way Dwarf Fortress allows you to shape your surroundings or do random things for their own sake is an excellent example.

Also, I've been considering a type of roguelike in which death doesn't affect the contents of a special "bank account". This would make death not really death, while maintaining a certain element of risk. Also, has anyone ever implemented MMORPG like death in roguelikes? There are many different ways in the MMORPG industry of dealing with player death, and any of them could easily be applied to roguelikes...

I once thought of your 'bank account' suggestion as having a starting village, much like the one in Angband. Every player character's corpse is buried in the village's graveyard, which serves as a score list. All items from the dead character's inventory can be bought from the village shop from that point on. Or the player could choose to play the child of the deceased character, who inherits some their late parent's possessions at the start of the game. I don't know if it would work in practice, but I like the idea.

MMORPG death as in WoW-style death doesn't appeal to me at all. If a game treats you fairly, death is usually the ultimate consequence of taking too much risk. If the game allows you to prevent death by developing your playing skills, I think permadeath increases the excitement of escaping from threatening situations. Permadeath makes me care for the character I'm playing, much more than if I'm given the opportunity to return to a previously saved game or a checkpoint.

[AgingMinotaur]

You notice a dandelion.
[...]
You die...

This is an awesome idea, first.

Yes, I loved this as well. "Gloves of Gardening"

Also, I've been considering a type of roguelike in which death doesn't affect the contents of a special "bank account".

How do you mean, exactly? That you could "deposit" equipment and gold for later characters, or something like that? Shiren has a system with storage rooms, that lets you prepare starting gear for upcoming games, which I thought worked quite well.

I've also lately toyed with the idea of having an overworld that is persistent between games, where you can build up resources on a longer term. It could be interesting if you let your characters do "community work", like opening a trade route to the neighboring village, or having a shrine built in the town square. There might be a system for retiring characters, turning them into helpful NPCs. You'd sometimes get the strategic choice of retiring a character or not. Retirement would surely give an advantage to upcoming characters, but if you could survive just one more dive, the gain would be even greater. Your long-term goal would be to clear the main quest of a certain world, not necessarily here and now, but rather within a certain amount of games (after maybe a dozen games, that world is abandoned, and a new one created).

It's a system that it's easy to dream about, but it would be quite hard to implement well. I'm not going near it, myself, at least not for the time being.

As always,
Minotauros

EDIT: The idea with a persistant overworld is nicked from Shockfrost, of course.

[Ex]

How do you mean, exactly? That you could "deposit" equipment and gold for later characters, or something like that? Shiren has a system with storage rooms, that lets you prepare starting gear for upcoming games, which I thought worked quite well.

You'd be able to deposit items, equipment and gold (Perhaps for a fee...) that would be permanent between games. You could also limit the size that the bank holds, and so on. The bank doesn't even need to be a bank, it could be a house that you drop stuff in whose contents are held between games. Then, you'd have to lug a treasure chest all the way back home if you wanted to store a lot.

Another idea would be to save a temporary savefile inbetween each dungeon floor. Then when the player dies, he gets kicked back one save file. Anything in the bank account may or may not be reversed as well, depending on how hard you want to be on the player for dying. Kind of like a forced Prince of Persia: Sands of Time time reversal effect.

[Z]

IIRC there was a bank in some version of Larn (together with IRS, you had to play tax before you could claim your savings with a new character).

[Dalton]

I'm kind of rewinding the conversation a bit here, going back to the issue of 'random deaths' rather than saving your loot in banks.

The issue of random deaths is why I like *band games so much more than other roguelikes. Crawl's character system is fantastic and I loved playing around with Crawl, but my deaths in that game more often than not are unavoidable, pure luck. Sometimes you just don't get that spell/item/weapon that you need to survive situation X, and you get thrust into situation X regardless with no way out. Sigmund, enough said. I feel similarly about Nethack, and any other persistent game.

In Angband, provided I get past the first few levels and get a bit of money, luck starts to play less and less of a role. Yes it's quite random still, but I've never had a mid to high level character die and be able to honestly say that the luck of the die screwed me over completely. I can always trace it back to my own mistakes: I should have used Detect Monsters/Traps more often. Or I should've known to flee after seeing (Insert powerful boss here) and knowing I don't have enough potions of HEAL. Or I should've known to chug some heals after that last boss fight, just in case I got teleported into a vault. Or I should've known not to go too deep in the dungeon without certain resistances and immunities.

The ease of being able to retreat to the town level to recoup and reconsider your packing list turns the game into a tactical one where it's all about carefully planning what you need to bring into the dungeon and weighing whether each battle is worth risking your life, or retreating. Such liberty is not available in games where food is finite and you can only keep pushing in one direction, deeper and deeper into the dungeon.

I can see the good sides to those games as well, don't get me wrong. But I like the feeling that my fate is almost completely in my hands, and get frustrated by knowing my character's entire fate relies on getting really, really, really lucky. As somebody elsewhere said it's about the equivalent of throwing dice at the wall and picking a number.