[Announce] POWDER 100 Released

On 2008-02-08, Jeff Lait <torespondisfutile.RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Poly is also tricky as you have to rely on the RNG to give you enough
> poly wands to get into an iron golem state. (To control poly into
> one, you likely are powerful enough you could win normally)

Disagree; you just have to have found the ring of poly control, amulet
of unchanging, and a single poly wand or chameleon corpse.

"A broken thing that happens only rarely is still broken, it's just random."

This is one of the design principles I really live by, so I feel
compelled to advocate it at everyone when possible (though I promise not
to preach too much! Sometimes the "random" part is OK, sometimes
not. I'm not sure that it being less-than-trivial to get into an iron
golem shape in the first place is enough to balance out the "relatively
effortless win" effect, in this case.

--
Derek

Game info and change log: http://sporkhack.com
Beta Server: telnet://sporkhack.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net, #sporkhack
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On 2008-02-08, Jeff Lait <torespondisfutile RemoveThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 8, 9:21 am, Derek Ray <de... RemoveThis @moot.its.only.a.spamtrap.org>
>> On 2008-02-08, Jeff Lait <torespondisfut... RemoveThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>> > Poly is also tricky as you have to rely on the RNG to give you enough
>> > poly wands to get into an iron golem state. (To control poly into
>> > one, you likely are powerful enough you could win normally)
>> Disagree; you just have to have found the ring of poly control, amulet
>> of unchanging, and a single poly wand or chameleon corpse.
>
> Unlike Nethack, poly control only lets you polymorph into creatures
> that you have killed. If you've killed an iron golem, you no longer
> need to poly into an iron golem to win, as you are already likely
> powerful enough to win.

Ah. That does put a bit of a damper on it, and is probably overall a
reasonable solution to the whole "polymorph into god" problem. Though
you still only require Sticky Flames to kill an iron golem...

>> "A broken thing that happens only rarely is still broken, it's just random."
> So are you removing random Amulets of Life Saving?

A single amulet of life saving is not going to win the game for you, of
course, so amulets of life saving should not be considered 'broken'.

> You could find amulets of life saving on every dungeon level, after all.
> Such a broken game is just a random dice throw away.

And how big do the dice have to be to manage this sort of thing?

As I mention below, sometimes the random is OK. In your example, the
player has to hit a one-in-a-billion (roughly) chance; this sort of
'random' is perfectly fine, because it _is_, after all, a game with an
element of randomness to it. Most, if not all, players will play all
the games of POWDER they ever will during their lives and never
experience the above, so it can actually be an accurate prediction to say to
any single player "That will never happen." Mathematically it's untrue,
but in practice, you'll always be right.

The principle is more to guide when you're creating something which only
needs a single occurrence to be broken; consider the "ring of polymorph
and control", which gives both effects in a single item and only shows
up 1 in every 1,000 rings.

> full of them. My choice is to allow "lucky" games that might
> significantly reduce the difficulty.

(rest snipped; this is generally a valid way to go, as long as "lucky"
is spread over several fortunate occurrences instead of a single
bonanza.)

> Nethack has this where a large scroll shop on an early level may
> suddenly make the game considerably easier for a mediocre player.

Normally they toast themselves with the scroll of fire in this case.

> Or, the favorite, a wand of wishing on level 1.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that I made all non-Castle wands
non-rechargeable and a random 1-3 wishes.

The wand of wishing on DL1 _was_ an "instant win" when you were likely
to get 6-7 wishes out of it, see; it fell across the threshhold of too
big of a positive swing. Now, the wand is still a good effect, but it
won't give you _everything_ you need; you still have to play the rest of
the game and solve some more problems. (Your early game fears are gone,
though.)

> The advantage of this is that you don't have to be a
> roguelike master to win, you can win by getting a lucky game. That's
> fine by me.

Sure. There has to be the possibility of good luck, or it's no fun;
again, the principle is intended as a guideline to head off creation of
either "out of control good" or "out of hand bad" luck.

> Serious players can always impose their own conducts on
> their playstyles to avoid what they feel is too lucky a game.

My views on conducts are better suited for a different thread.

>> This is one of the design principles I really live by, so I feel
>> compelled to advocate it at everyone when possible (though I promise not
>> to preach too much! Sometimes the "random" part is OK, sometimes
>> not. I'm not sure that it being less-than-trivial to get into an iron
>> golem shape in the first place is enough to balance out the "relatively
>> effortless win" effect, in this case.
> Most reports I see of people getting into an iron golem form usually
> results in them dying horribly, so I wouldn't be so quick to call it a
> "relatively effortless win".

Well, I used "relatively" here for a reason -- some players get good
fortune and then still fail to put in the minimum of effort required,
and thus die anyway. But it's sure a lot less effort than plowing
through with 30HP and only one resistance.

> I will, however, agree that skilled
> roguelike players will find it a relatively effortless win, which is
> why I'm trying to think about ways to nerf the iron golem a bit.

Heavy-duty water vulnerability seems ideal (as, I think, someone else
has already suggested), along with what you've already identified as the
_real_ problem with selfpoly -- skill slots!

(This wouldn't be a problem except that, of course, someone with a poly
wand can and will go 'round polying his skill books, which get a random
number of charges even if they were at 1 when polied -- something I've
abused gleefully in the past.

--
Derek

Game info and change log: http://sporkhack.com
Beta Server: telnet://sporkhack.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net, #sporkhack
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Jeff Lait wrote:

> Roguelikes do have, inherently, a problem of different games being
> radically different difficulty because of RNG choices.

Not necessarily a problem...

> My choice is to allow "lucky" games that might
> significantly reduce the difficulty. Nethack has this where a large
> scroll shop on an early level may suddenly make the game considerably
> easier for a mediocre player. Or, the favorite, a wand of wishing on
> level 1. The advantage of this is that you don't have to be a
> roguelike master to win, you can win by getting a lucky game. That's
> fine by me.

....as you explain here.

> Serious players can always impose their own conducts on
> their playstyles to avoid what they feel is too lucky a game.

To me, conducts should not be necessary (but then, my background is Crawl,
of course). I think that better players will be distinguished by how hairy
a situation they can still cope with. [This assumes that there is a limit
-- not all games can be won; otherwise that grading would become useless.
As far as I understand it, from this stem the different philosophies
between Nethack and Crawl.]

David
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On Feb 7, 9:38 pm, Jeff Lait <torespondisfut... DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 6, 11:59 am, Brendan <brendandetra... DeleteThis @yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Feb 5, 10:09 pm, Jeff Lait <torespondisfut... DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > On Feb 4, 11:20 am, Brendan <brendandetra... DeleteThis @yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > 2-Could you put in a "safety" toggle for movement based attacks?
> > > > Playing as a cleric becomes tedious simply because you have to move so
> > > > slowly to avoid accidental kills. With the very nice drag and drop
> > > > menu system, turning the toggle on and off for movement attacks would
> > > > be a lot less tedious that crawling step by step, click by click
> > > > through the dungeon.
>
> > > I think this already exists?  If you click far away from yourself, ie,
> > > *not* the four adjacent tiles, you will do a "safe move" that doesn't
> > > attack anything.
>
> > Ah, but I am a D-Pad mover! I will try this out when I try being a
> > cleric again. I have never liked using a stylus for movement. Blocks
> > the screen too much.
>
> I'm afraid you are out of luck for d-pad.  Pre-DS, I'd tell you it was
> user error and you are to trade caution with speed at your own
> discretion.  Now that the DS provides a "safe walk" it is questionable
> why keyboard/dpad users lack it. One problem is I can't think of a
> good way to switch between, your switch idea seems to complicated.  I
> want the play of POWDER to be fast - selecting combat mode defeats the
> objective of steamrolling weak monsters.
>

The problem is that not having a toggle slows play extremely for
clerics. For other classes it doesn't matter much(except maybe
necromancers). Besides, people could leave it toggled off if they want
to. Here is how it could work. When turned on, the player running into
any monster would attempt to swap places. For unfriendly monsters it
would also attempt to swap, but respond the usual way i.e. "you can
not swap places with something you are fighting..." Think of it as an
autoswap toggle. When the cleric wants to fight he would toggle it
off. It would not slow gameplay at all, in my opinion.
 >> Stay informed about: [Announce] POWDER 100 Released 

On Feb 8, 12:52 pm, Derek Ray <de... DeleteThis @moot.its.only.a.spamtrap.org>
wrote:
> On 2008-02-08, Jeff Lait <torespondisfut... DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You could find amulets of life saving on every dungeon level, after all.
> > Such a broken game is just a random dice throw away.
>
> And how big do the dice have to be to manage this sort of thing?
>
> As I mention below, sometimes the random is OK. In your example, the
> player has to hit a one-in-a-billion (roughly) chance; this sort of
> 'random' is perfectly fine, because it _is_, after all, a game with an
> element of randomness to it. Most, if not all, players will play all
> the games of POWDER they ever will during their lives and never
> experience the above, so it can actually be an accurate prediction to say to
> any single player "That will never happen." Mathematically it's untrue,
> but in practice, you'll always be right.

Player play-space is *very* large however. This is why I run the
stress test for millions of moves - one in a million chances do occur
and I don't want them to crash. I thought I was fixing impossible
edge cases until a player reported that they had their life saved by a
silver item that had killed them with its damage due to them being
silver vulnerable. Fortunately, I had already fixed that crash :>

> > Or, the favorite, a wand of wishing on level 1.
>
> It probably won't surprise you to learn that I made all non-Castle wands
> non-rechargeable and a random 1-3 wishes.

Yes, I recall reading that changelog. A very good idea. It doesn't
affect the unskilled player (who will forget to wish for a scroll of
charging anyways) by closing the loophole. Indeed, the whole scroll
of charging dance is a bit too finiky for my tastes - I'd have gone
farther and made the castle wand guaranteed 3 with no recharging. And
also removed engrave id of wands... Now we start to see why I'm not
doing a nethack fork :>

> The wand of wishing on DL1 _was_ an "instant win" when you were likely
> to get 6-7 wishes out of it, see; it fell across the threshhold of too
> big of a positive swing. Now, the wand is still a good effect, but it
> won't give you _everything_ you need; you still have to play the rest of
> the game and solve some more problems. (Your early game fears are gone,
> though.)

It also means having the wand crumble to dust with the first zap not
be so painful, which has good and bad parts.

> (This wouldn't be a problem except that, of course, someone with a poly
> wand can and will go 'round polying his skill books, which get a random
> number of charges even if they were at 1 when polied -- something I've
> abused gleefully in the past.

If the library doesn't give it away, I want ending characters to be
little gods that have access to whatever spells/skills they feel like.
--
Jeff Lait
(POWDER: http://www.zincland.com/powder)
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On Feb 8, 5:09 pm, dpeg <pl... RemoveThis @zio.mathematik.hu-berlin.de> wrote:
> Jeff Lait wrote:
>
> > Serious players can always impose their own conducts on
> > their playstyles to avoid what they feel is too lucky a game.
>
> To me, conducts should not be necessary (but then, my background is Crawl,
> of course). I think that better players will be distinguished by how hairy
> a situation they can still cope with. [This assumes that there is a limit
> -- not all games can be won; otherwise that grading would become useless.
> As far as I understand it, from this stem the different philosophies
> between Nethack and Crawl.]

Conducts are, to me, a controlled way for the player to intentionally
get themselves into hairier situations. I follow the "play
recklessly" conduct which provides lots of hairy situations :>

Even Crawl has conducts - any rune past the three needed is, I
understand, an optional choice by the player to make the game harder.
--
Jeff Lait
(POWDER: http://www.zincland.com/powder)
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On Feb 9, 3:05 pm, Brendan <brendandetra....DeleteThis@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Feb 7, 9:38 pm, Jeff Lait <torespondisfut....DeleteThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm afraid you are out of luck for d-pad. Pre-DS, I'd tell you it was
> > user error and you are to trade caution with speed at your own
> > discretion. Now that the DS provides a "safe walk" it is questionable
> > why keyboard/dpad users lack it. One problem is I can't think of a
> > good way to switch between, your switch idea seems to complicated. I
> > want the play of POWDER to be fast - selecting combat mode defeats the
> > objective of steamrolling weak monsters.
>
> The problem is that not having a toggle slows play extremely for
> clerics. For other classes it doesn't matter much(except maybe
> necromancers). Besides, people could leave it toggled off if they want
> to. Here is how it could work. When turned on, the player running into
> any monster would attempt to swap places. For unfriendly monsters it
> would also attempt to swap, but respond the usual way i.e. "you can
> not swap places with something you are fighting..." Think of it as an
> autoswap toggle. When the cleric wants to fight he would toggle it
> off. It would not slow gameplay at all, in my opinion.

I guess it becomes a sort of Adom "Coward Tactics + two shields"
thing. I'm still not convinced. Following Pax isn't supposed to be a
cake walk. To "do good" by not attacking neutrals should require
player attentiveness, not some computer run toggle. It's not like
attacking a neutral is that bad - it is merely discouraged, not
forbidden. Friendlies, who it is forbidden, already do auto-swap.

I'll keep it under consideration.
--
Jeff Lait
(POWDER: http://www.zincland.com/powder)
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On 2008-02-10, Jeff Lait <torespondisfutile.DeleteThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 8, 12:52 pm, Derek Ray <de....DeleteThis@moot.its.only.a.spamtrap.org>
>> On 2008-02-08, Jeff Lait <torespondisfut....DeleteThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> > You could find amulets of life saving on every dungeon level, after all.
>> > Such a broken game is just a random dice throw away.
>> And how big do the dice have to be to manage this sort of thing?
>> As I mention below, sometimes the random is OK. In your example, the
>> player has to hit a one-in-a-billion (roughly) chance;
>
> Player play-space is *very* large however. This is why I run the
> stress test for millions of moves - one in a million chances do occur

Certainly -- and especially in the context of "things players can create
by doing something", you have to assume that eventually a player _will_
do that something, and the thing WILL get created; see your example
below, where a player is wearing a silver thing and gets themselves
vulnerable to silver.

I was referring specifically above to the dungeon-generation case with
an AoLS on each level; THAT one is sufficiently random that if someone's
lucky enough to hit it, yay! They win the POWDER lottery. These sorts
of random I don't worry about _unless_ they cause a crash.

>> > Or, the favorite, a wand of wishing on level 1.
>> It probably won't surprise you to learn that I made all non-Castle wands
>> non-rechargeable and a random 1-3 wishes.
> Yes, I recall reading that changelog. A very good idea. It doesn't
> affect the unskilled player (who will forget to wish for a scroll of
> charging anyways) by closing the loophole.

Correct! I'm a big fan of changes like this; the player who doesn't
know anything other than the obvious use will never notice a difference,
but the player who's used to working the game over has things get
harder.

> of charging dance is a bit too finiky for my tastes - I'd have gone
> farther and made the castle wand guaranteed 3 with no recharging. And
> also removed engrave id of wands... Now we start to see why I'm not
> doing a nethack fork :>

Obviously, both of these go against my "Must remain Nethackish"
self-imposed rule, but I do note that "abundance of wishes" is at least
part of the problem with Nethack right now. The Castle wand is the
primary offender, but I'm always very hesitant to alter it too much.

Engrave-ID of wands would be fine if more of them were like the
teleport/cancellation/make-invis combo, where the engraving only lets
you know what category they're in and you have to spend a second charge
intelligently to find out precisely which one.

> It also means having the wand crumble to dust with the first zap not
> be so painful, which has good and bad parts.

(Nitpick mode: this can't happen; wands will always be generated with
at least one charge. Once you've reduced the charges to zero, it's then
a 1/121 chance of wrest-and-dust, which is sufficiently rare that it's
an Acceptable Bad Random Thing, see discussion above.

>> (This wouldn't be a problem except that, of course, someone with a poly
>> wand can and will go 'round polying his skill books, which get a random
>> number of charges even if they were at 1 when polied -- something I've
>> abused gleefully in the past.
> If the library doesn't give it away, I want ending characters to be
> little gods that have access to whatever spells/skills they feel like.

Yeah, but do you want the early-game characters to be that? (I
recognize that this is in context of selfpoly to iron golem, but still
worth noting here.

--
Derek

Game info and change log: http://sporkhack.com
Beta Server: telnet://sporkhack.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net, #sporkhack
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On Feb 10, 12:44 pm, Derek Ray <de....DeleteThis@moot.its.only.a.spamtrap.org>
wrote:
> I was referring specifically above to the dungeon-generation case with
> an AoLS on each level; THAT one is sufficiently random that if someone's
> lucky enough to hit it, yay!  They win the POWDER lottery.  These sorts
> of random I don't worry about _unless_ they cause a crash.

Yes, in terms of the 'chance' of such a thing occuring, I think it's
worth adding to all this that I wasn't even *trying* to self-poly into
an iron golem. I was ID'ing random wands on myself, one happened to be
poly, and turned me into an iron golem. Having already identified an
amulet of unchanging, I thought I'd prefer to bash zombies as a big
metal man rather than a wimpy adventurer.

Keeping also in mind the fact that I've been playing this game just a
couple of days, the chance of such things seems higher than, say, that
case of a Nethack Wand of Wishing on DL 1 (Played quite a bit of
Nethack, and I've only seen a /oW outside of the Castle once).

> ... but I do note that "abundance of wishes" is at least
> part of the problem with Nethack right now.  The Castle wand is the
> primary offender, but I'm always very hesitant to alter it too much.

Offtopic, I know, but personally I'd make it a single wish (so, an
empty, unchargeable wand). IMHO, the game just becomes dull after the
Castle because there's nothing left that I'm ever hoping to find
(though the boredom is also due to Gehennom's annoying level design),
up till the Sanctum and then the Astral Plane. The wand, along with
the fact that the player has probably amassed every useful intrinsic
by that point, makes him impervious to most of the exciting problems
in the game.

A good contrast to this would be Angband - there's always something
unattainable, super rare, that the player hungers for, but will never
really get (Bladeturner and The One Ring spring to mind). In time for
it to be useful, anyway (pre-Morgoth).
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On 2008-02-11, conkstah DeleteThis @gmail.com <conkstah DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 10, 12:44 pm, Derek Ray <de... DeleteThis @moot.its.only.a.spamtrap.org>
> Keeping also in mind the fact that I've been playing this game just a
> couple of days, the chance of such things seems higher than, say, that
> case of a Nethack Wand of Wishing on DL 1 (Played quite a bit of
> Nethack, and I've only seen a /oW outside of the Castle once).

You should rather consider the chance of a wand of wishing in Sokoban
(which has four guaranteed wands, one per level) -- about 2%.

>> ... but I do note that "abundance of wishes" is at least
>> part of the problem with Nethack right now.  The Castle wand is the
>> primary offender, but I'm always very hesitant to alter it too much.
> Offtopic, I know, but personally I'd make it a single wish (so, an
> empty, unchargeable wand).

The problem with this is that the Castle wand is there to help the
player fill in perceived "necessary holes" in the equipment that
otherwise also make the game no-fun; magic resistance and a bag of
holding come to mind. In Nethack, it's possible to win without either
of these but mind-numbingly tedious.

> (though the boredom is also due to Gehennom's annoying level design),
> up till the Sanctum and then the Astral Plane. The wand, along with
> the fact that the player has probably amassed every useful intrinsic
> by that point, makes him impervious to most of the exciting problems
> in the game.

Ah, well, you should be playing Spork then.

--
Derek

Game info and change log: http://sporkhack.com
Beta Server: telnet://sporkhack.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net, #sporkhack
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I love this game too...I play it all the time on my GBA (don't even play the PSP at the moment it's so good)...it's really hard to survive when starting out I find, but well worth the effort when you finally level up.

I too would definitely like to see the character's current profession and chosen god in the character dump, cos I often forget what my character is.

One other suggestion I would have, and please don't kill me for saying this, but would there be any chance whatsoever of having a trader in a dungeon level every now and then? Someone I could sell my less appropriate items to (like spell tomes, staffs etc if a barbarian), and buy some more appropriate stuff instead? I'm sure it would be a pain to program, but it's something I would certainly love to see.

The only other comments I would have is that maybe there are too many cursed (evil) items and not enough ways to "fix" them, and that the inventory is too big, although considering I often die on the first level, maybe reducing the inventory size and making the game harder might be a bad idea

Great game!
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While I'm here, I notice that with some weapons and armour there is no melee/thrown damage or armour class, even after the item has been tested. Is this because my character doesn't know how to use this item as a weapon/armour or is it because of another reason?
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