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zonhin
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Well, yeah, I know that now. I just thought is was funny, is all.

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12-23-2007 at 02:08 AM
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zonhin
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I just made my first character in ADOM. In the very first town I entered, I got critically hit by an assasin, and died in the wilderness of acute blood poisoning. I had 0 XP total. :lol

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12-29-2007 at 05:54 AM
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malkav11
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It's quite possible to be a casual roguelike player. I get into them for bursts now and then and then I get distracted. I've never once won any of them or come particularly close to it. I also can't get into NetHack at all, which saddens me because of how much people seem to like it, but I'm so used to Angband and variants now that it really does not make any sense to me. Not even the controls.

I second the recommendation of DoomRL, which is far better than a roguelike based on an FPS has any right to be.

My personal preferred Angband variant is Steamband. TOME is deeper but in my opinion overcomplicates things (I'm not a great fan of wilderness or multiple towns in any roguelike to date for one thing, although there's got to be a good way to handle such things somewhere.) Steamband offers a great theme (steampunk splashed with tons of references to Victorian-era literature, particularly of a science-fictional nature), an excellent skill system, and a lot of cool little things like steamware upgrades and racial spells. And while development has been lagging, it *is* still active.

Also - still somewhat early in development, but has a lot of potential: Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King. D20 OGL based with insane amounts of character development and explicitly rules-based interactions (as opposed to NetHack's special-case interactions). A lot of planned content isn't in yet, it's a bit buggy, and it's really, really hard to survive with many character builds. But already it's pretty amazing.

If you're not averse to paying a bit of money, ChunSoft's Mysterious Dungeon series is worth noting, if not often as deep as the best freeware games. Translated ROMs of SNES titles Taloon's Mysterious Dungeon and Shiren the Wanderer (I'm not sure about the former name, but it's something like that) are available. English-language releases include the PSX Chocobo's Dungeon 2 and Torneko: The Last Hope, PS2 release The Nightmare of Druaga, and GBA/DS release Pokemon Rescue Team. Possibly others. And while I don't believe ChunSoft had anything to do with it, Izuna the Unemployed Ninja for DS is also a pretty engaging roguelike.

Also on the commercial, but in this case no longer sold front: JauntTrooper - originally a Macintosh shareware series (Mission Thunderbolt and Mission Firestorm being the two entries, so far as I know), but the first of the two was ported to Windows. Both can be downloaded from Home of the Underdogs, although annoyingly there doesn't seem to be any source of the Macintosh version of the first mission, something which seems like it would be useful if one were to want to import one's character into the subsequent game (as is possible). Maybe the second game supports Windows save files, though. Dunno.
01-01-2008 at 11:29 PM
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goldenferret
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Yay! Steamband forever!
:punk
My other favorite Angband variants are Hengband (I think that's what it's called) and Animeband. They're both pretty great.

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01-02-2008 at 09:10 PM
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zonhin
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Angband variants bore me, personally. I don't know why, it just doesn't have that lighthearted, silly mood that Nethack has. (Yendor is Rodney backwards, for example.)

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01-02-2008 at 11:30 PM
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calamarain
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zonhin wrote:
Angband variants bore me, personally. I don't know why, it just doesn't have that lighthearted, silly mood that Nethack has. (Yendor is Rodney backwards, for example.)
That's what I like about Angband and its variants though. There's tactics rather than humour :P

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01-02-2008 at 11:46 PM
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BeefontheBone
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As someone who spends a lot of time re-inserting that humour, you surprise me :P

Tried out steamband recently, and I like it a lot. The archetypes are fun, I like the Verne-reversal of fighting your way up to the surface (irrelevant to gameplay, just fun) and the augmentations look like they might be interesting once I get sufficiently far to make use of them. The skill system is nice, too - the lack of excitement when you level up in *band (even if you can learn a new spell you're not likely to be able to cast it with a decent fail rate yet anyway) is why I tend to play chaos warriors and/or beastmen in Zangband. The wound system also adds a lot - teleporting followed by resting isn't enough any more, which is fun if a little tricky to get used to :) Not sure about all those dinosaurs though - I reckon a compsognathus would be able to do quite a bit of damage to me were I to run into one in an enclosed space :)

Regarding zangband's wilderness, I've never noticed that being an issue playing the TK variant - the dungeons are identical and the wilderness is small enough to make getting from one town to another straightforward, at least once you know where they are. They ability to go level up on sea trolls and dragons is handy, although the way the dragons in the mountains work it's trivial to kill them long before you would be able to in the dungeon, since if you get wounded you can step one tile left onto another section of wilderness and recuperate. Doing that as soon as you're able to, a single mature dragon drops a huge amount of loot and xp at that stage.

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01-04-2008 at 11:41 PM
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Zmann
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You guys! It's not Nethack vs. Angband; there's a happy medium:

Linley's Dungeon Crawl.
01-05-2008 at 07:33 AM
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BeefontheBone
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How the heck did I miss that change of maintainer? D'oh!

Started (after a long time playing Zangband inexpertly) with Angband 3.0.9 a couple of days ago and am liking it so far - the squelching in particular is nifty. If only shift-direction actually resulted in running!

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01-05-2008 at 08:58 PM
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calamarain
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Yeah, Tak's doing a really good job with Angband. Taking out a lot of the unpopular stuff and actually *listening* to what the players say. I'm very impressed with him.

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01-07-2008 at 03:58 PM
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hartleyhair
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I'm utterly new to all this roguelike stuff, so forgive me.

I just downloaded Angband, after discovering it was Mac-Friendly, and played it to see what it was like.

Being a great believer in wizarding as opposed to brute strength, I chose High Elf. I wandered around in a town for a while, buying some supplies and spellbooks (as well as upsetting Farmer Maggot by killing his dog), and after a time I found myself in some kind of small area near a Rock Lizard.

I had almost finished him off when, embarrassingly, I was charged by a fruit bat and killed.


Is it just practice, practice, practice and eventually I'll be experienced enough to make some headway? Is High Elf a bad starting choice? Or am I just inept?

Advice, please!

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[Last edited by hartleyhair at 01-07-2008 07:15 PM]
01-07-2008 at 07:01 PM
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zonhin
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hartleyhair wrote:
practice, practice, practice
A lot of this and a good helping of dumb luck too.

Edit: Also, you're doing fine. You'd have to be a really good learner to get down more then 10 or so levels in your first year.

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[Last edited by zonhin at 01-07-2008 07:11 PM]
01-07-2008 at 07:08 PM
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BeefontheBone
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That's a slight exaggeration :P

High Elves aren't totally ideal for learning how to play, but more importantly, mages aren't - they're the toughest class in vanilla to get to grips with. Warriors are dead easy to start off but tend to be trickier to win with - I'd recommend paladin or ranger for a bit of both worlds; ranger especially since bows are so useful in vanilla.

In other variants (ZAngband in particular), warrior mages, chaos warriors and the like are also a good choice to start out if you want to do some wizarding.

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01-07-2008 at 07:24 PM
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hartleyhair
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Thanks! Have a modpoint.

I think I'll go for a Paladin - at least that maintains some magic-like mystique...

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01-07-2008 at 07:44 PM
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calamarain
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Yep. Treat magic-using classes (Mage especially) like glass. They are fragile and easily broken. Attack from a distance and run/teleport/recall away lots.

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01-07-2008 at 08:10 PM
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Maurog
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I think learning to run away is the hardest part of roguelikes.

The whole "nono, I think I can take 'em" attitude loses me like 80% of characters.

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01-07-2008 at 08:14 PM
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BDR
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Running away is hard to learn mostly because most games have changed their save systems and death-handling to reward persistence over perfection, from what I've seen. Not that such changes aren't fitting, but it does make the change of playstyle harder.
01-07-2008 at 11:20 PM
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eytanz
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BDR wrote:
Running away is hard to learn mostly because most games have changed their save systems and death-handling to reward persistence over perfection, from what I've seen. Not that such changes aren't fitting, but it does make the change of playstyle harder.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "perfection" in this context, or how the save systems were changed.

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01-08-2008 at 12:10 AM
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calamarain
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eytanz wrote:
BDR wrote:
Running away is hard to learn mostly because most games have changed their save systems and death-handling to reward persistence over perfection, from what I've seen. Not that such changes aren't fitting, but it does make the change of playstyle harder.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "perfection" in this context, or how the save systems were changed.
The roguelike games allow you to save your progress... but if you die, that's it. You cannot restore to an earlier save - your savefile is deleted and your character is gone.

Most modern day games have endless savepoints and savestates. So if you screw something up, you can just restore to five seconds back or so and try again.

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01-08-2008 at 12:24 AM
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Oneiromancer
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I'm sure Eytan is more than familiar with the save system common to roguelikes, since he created his own a while back.

I believe BDR is referring to how other games besides roguelikes have a save system that rewards persistence, whereas roguelikes do not. I don't believe he is saying that any roguelike save systems have changed.

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01-08-2008 at 04:41 AM
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Angband ? I wouldn't trust my fun to a roguelike which can be reliably won ... by a bot. -_-

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01-08-2008 at 06:28 AM
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eytanz
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Oneiromancer wrote:
I'm sure Eytan is more than familiar with the save system common to roguelikes, since he created his own a while back.

I believe BDR is referring to how other games besides roguelikes have a save system that rewards persistence, whereas roguelikes do not. I don't believe he is saying that any roguelike save systems have changed.

Oh, thanks.

Yes, I read BDR as saying that there was a recent change in RL saving systems that makes the adjustment more difficult.

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01-08-2008 at 12:30 PM
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eytanz
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b0rsuk wrote:
Angband ? I wouldn't trust my fun to a roguelike which can be reliably won ... by a bot. -_-

Why? What does winnability by a bot have to do with fun? I enjoy a lot of puzzles that are easily solved by algorithm.

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01-08-2008 at 12:31 PM
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calamarain
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b0rsuk wrote:
Angband ? I wouldn't trust my fun to a roguelike which can be reliably won ... by a bot. -_-
:P The only reason Angband can be won by a bot is that it's more logical and straightforward than most of the others.

:P Besides, chess and scrabble can both be won by bots. :P So could Doom. Doesn't make them less fun.

Also, bear in mind that the bot plays *much* more slowly and cautiously than a human player. Wins by the bot generally take a factor of 10 more turns than human players.

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01-08-2008 at 03:38 PM
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Syntax
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calamarain wrote:
b0rsuk wrote:
Angband ? I wouldn't trust my fun to a roguelike which can be reliably won ... by a bot. -_-
:P The only reason Angband can be won by a bot is that it's more logical and straightforward than most of the others.

:P Besides, chess and scrabble can both be won by bots. :P So could Doom. Doesn't make them less fun.

Also, bear in mind that the bot plays *much* more slowly and cautiously than a human player. Wins by the bot generally take a factor of 10 more turns than human players.
And bots can generally not beat a half-decent player at Go. And that is *not* a fun game :)
01-08-2008 at 05:24 PM
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Oneiromancer wrote:
I believe BDR is referring to how other games besides roguelikes have a save system that rewards persistence, whereas roguelikes do not. I don't believe he is saying that any roguelike save systems have changed.

Yep, hit the nail on the head here. There are a small number of games that can technically be called roguelikes which feature saves that persist after death (Castle of the Winds being the least controversial example here), but the conventional wisdom is that the old way of permadeath is best when it comes to roguelikes. I dunno that this is *always* true; with Crawl it works well because the game is all about the combat tactics and permadeath is a great reinforcement to learning them (while the story is just an excuse for the game much like arcade shooters), but outside of that the more conventional story-based gameplay exemplified in many console games doesn't work nearly as well without some kind of adjustment (to see how it can be done badly, see IVAN; to see it handled better look for the 7DRL You Only Live Once). Still, I can't deny that permadeath forces you to stay on your toes or else risk losing all your progress, and it does provide that grand feeling of accomplishment when you *finally* win against all odds.
01-09-2008 at 02:11 AM
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BDR wrote:
to see how it can be done badly, see IVAN;
Heh, IVAN was one of the few roguelikes that held my attention for more than 15 minutes, although that may be mostly because it wasn't ASCII. What exactly did it do badly, again? I'm having much more trouble deciphering this post compared to the previous one. ;)

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01-09-2008 at 03:53 AM
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Maurog
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Why the obscure examples? Diablo is a roguelike which features an alternative saving system, which is between unlimited saves and final death. You have only one save, but you return to that save when you die.

To be honest, Diablo had the traditional roguelike ironman mode too.
And, uh, it was pretty successful, I think.

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01-09-2008 at 05:10 AM
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Yep, Diablo's definitely a modern graphical roguelike. Diablo II even more so, with the introduction of Rare items, and set items etc. I still prefer Angband though, it's easier to dip in and out of a game.

Plus, I can sneakily play it at work in a window next to my main output :P

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01-09-2008 at 04:02 PM
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eytanz
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This thread made me download Angband again (I have a lot of Angband variants on my home computer, but they are all about five years old, and Vanilla has changed a lot in that timeframe). I thought that maybe after all this time, I could simply play it, but no - I start playing it and immediately I see all the things I want to tweak, and worse, all the things I already tweaked in EyAngband and have gotten used to. I wish I had the time to revive it, uppdate it with new features that have been developed since I've dropped it, and resume some of my old development goals. But I have way too much on my plate as it is right now.

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