ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

As I've proudly told you a few times, I won the game with my very second character, a Thalore Archer (my first character, a Dwarf Fighter died already in the starter dungeon at something like clvl 3). That was in b23; I found out to my joy that ToME4 was a well balanced game where deaths were caused by overconfidence while careful playing and proper preparation ensured the survival of the player.

Sure, I pestered the folks on the chat by consulting the more experienced players every time I was about to do something dangerous, but my carefulness did indeed bear fruit.

Now, a year later, I'm not completely sure if I like the direction the developement has headed. Of course, it's a constant process and it takes a while for newly implemented stuff gets balanced, but all in all it feels like ToME4 now has a different philosophy regarding difficulty and safety... I don't know why this is, but my guess is that it is because ToME4 has become more popular among more casual players while it was mostly played by fans of Angband and other roguelikes before.

It seems like most players nowdays see Adventure as the "default" difficulty level and Roguelike as a challenge mode aimed only at the nerdiest folks. Because Darkgod is such a great developer that actually listens to the input of the players, the shift from Roguelike to Adventure as the most popular difficulty level probably means the he doesn't get enough complains about unavoidble deaths, which results in ToME4 being a little more aimed to players who have more than one life. Of course it's not like Darkgod has forgotten the Roguelike players, but I guess the most vocal group of players with one life really are a bit nerdier (and simply better) today. I imagine this has led to polarization among the players, the skill gap between more casual Adventure players and hardcore Roguelike players is perhaps bigger today. And I, a Roguelike player who likes to plan ahead and be careful, but probably is much less skilled than the average person with only one life.

Here is a short list on things that have been changed since b23 that IMO makes deaths much harder to avoid, even if you carefully plan the more dangerous things that you do:

• Random bosses. From what I hear they can sometimes be totally unfair
• Adventurer parties. From what I hear, you can start in the line of sight of dangerous archers and mages when dealing with those. Ouch.
• No renewable source of item drops. Unless you like risking your life to the two things I just mentioned in the form of Adventurer encounters and Farportals.
• Stair scumming has been made much harder. I personally didn't think the ability to stairscum hurted the game that I won. Already in b23, I felt that the game punished players who made cheesy stair tactics part of their playstyle. You couldn't stairscum in the end game, and while you could do it earlier the game could throw in some really nasty suprises if you relied on it. I learned that the hard way thanks to a couple of near death experiences. For example the Mark of the Spellblaze corruptors teleported me away from the safety of the stairs, others enemies could achive similar results by using knockback. The stairs back were also missing in some of the more intense fights every now and then, like temporal rift, shadowy crypt and the tower that you enter before you can go to the East the second time. And, even when you could safely stairscum I still think the game punished you for doing it, as playing like that gave you a false sense of security and hindered you from develop playing skills that were going to be crucial for surviving the end game. But still, I liked the freedom of having the option to stairscum.
• You can no longer hide from the orc patrols at dungeon entrances and so on. The patrols in the East were bad enough even when you could hide. My archer didn't really have problems surviving them if I took careful measures to make the battles as well-prepared as possible. But having to be so careful just to not risk your life in a world map encounter was very, very tedious! And I think other classes could have an even harder time when trying to handle orc patrols in a safe way.
• Lots of players complain about confusion being too deliberating and hard to find protective gear against. Maybe that was the cause in b23 too, but I did at least feel safe. As soon as confusion started to become more common (read: Daikara) I had good protection. When I still got confused, I could cure myself with a Wild Infusion or just wait the confusion out. By the end of the game I had had 100% immunity for a long time.
• By the end of the game, I was actually immune to pretty much every threat worth mentioning and highly resistant to most kinds of damage. I think I sometimes worried a bit about me not being able to be fully immune to knockback, pin, teleporting and disarm at the same time, but it was very, very rare for me to suffer from those kinds of deliberation. I don't think I ever got forcibly teleported after coming to the East for the first time and I hardly ever got pinned. I got disarmed a couple of times at High Peak though, something I remember I felt rather threatened and unsafe by. But as I said, I could become fully or mostly immune to those three effects too, just not at the same time without having to take of equipment that I really liked. Very late into the game, during the High Peak, I did swap equipment a bit to match my resistances according to the situation. I don't know how well-protected an endgame character in b38 usually gets, but in b23 I didn't feel completely comfortable with my Healing, Shield and Regeneration inscriptions. so I farmed the Old Forest a short while after clearing all other places except High Peak. There I found great Regeneration and Shield, and something much better than a Healing inscription: A Wand of Healing! That wand, together with another wand of Teleport, saved my life during the final boss battle (would I have been without them, it is possible the extra life from Ring of the Dead would have saved me instead but it is possible that hadn't been enough and I had lost the final fight)! Having those wands avalible was like having a Teleport Rune and a Heal Infusion avalible without cooldown and without taking up any inscription slots. That gave me the possibilty of using movement infusions for the first part of the boss battle, where you had to move swiftly to stop the tables being turned against you in the battle. After that, I could focus on Speed and Protection runes, Regen and Wild Infusions and so on. All my incription slots were crucial to my victory.
• Speaking of saved inscription slots, I had a pair of artifact shoes, Eden's Guile, that gave me an insane speed bonus based on my Cunning (which I raised to very high levels just because of those shoes!). I think the shoes doubled my global speed or something like that. And when the shoes were recharging I used speed runes instead.

I don't know if the Eden's Guile still are in the game or if they have been nerfed, while lots of people probably saw them as broken I really liked them, I sure hope they are! Sure, they were probably not the most balanced shoes, unfairly good artifacts are unlike unfairly lethal monsters a pleasant suprise. As monsters don't respawn anymore players aren't able to farm the same level over and over in hope of finding Eden's Guile, so as I said, they're just a pleasant suprise.

With my quick bow of extra speed and Aim actually increasing the firing rate in b23 made me able to fire off six arrows each and every single turn when I was speeded! That the speed bonus to Aim was probably an unintentional exploit (Rapid Shot would in turn slow down your rate of fire and was thus completely useless!), but using it I don't really hinder me from feeling that my win was legit. As there were also bugs who worked against me (the worthlessness of Rapid Shot and the Alchemist monster part quests not working) I felt okay with reaping the benefits from the Aim bug. I think it would have felt cheaper if someone on the chat had introduced the exploit to me, but as I actually managed find the good bug myself it felt more like my curious and cautionous playstyle bore fruit and rewarded me with a secret super skill!

Sorry for the overtly long post, it recalled so sweet memories that I got carried away! I hope that you don't misunderstand the post and think I'm some kind of bitter "old school is always best" geek or that I look down on players not playing on Roguelike difficulty. I just give my opinons of the game, and I do think Darkgod has done a great job with his constant updates. Now that I have shared my opinion regerding the unfair deaths and unfair ways to cheese yourself to victory, I also want to say that in general, the changes since v23 has been for the better.

What do you think? Am I right in my estimate that a larger portion of the players are playing on Adventure today compared to a year ago, and that the game is more suitable to be played on Adventure nowdays, if you want your precious high level characters to have a reliable path to victory without having to be that afraid of losing them to inescapable dangers? Is this okay, or do you share my opionion that you should be able to win every game even on roguelike if you play carefully?

I agree with some of your gripes, but I wouldn't want the game to be in a state where exploits, broken equipment stacking, and unbalanced skills were the appropriate way to win.

I think any skill that restricts action needs to be looked at; confusion and stun are two cases where you can be left in an extremely bad situation. Daze is also pretty bad but much less common (Rush being the main offender).

I agree on confusion. Personally I feel confusion could cap out at 50% (that would be math.min(50%, 10% * talent level) in the code) with most of Daikara being more like 30% and still be very powerful.

We have a ton of status effects in the game now... so many that I imagine most players don't know them all but the ones that are still the two biggest offenders are Confusion and Stun :/

Random uniques really need smarter/better gearing and much lower talent levels.

Eden's Guile and all other activatable items did get nerfed with the recharging thing. I'm also a big fan of those shoes but it's nice to know players can't quick swap them in (because aside from the speed bonus they don't really do anything).

I agree mostly.

Random bosses are by far the worst. It often takes the fun away, when a carefully built player is smashed instantly. Even out of depth characters can do this at times, such as nagas in old forest!

bricks wrote:I agree with some of your gripes, but I wouldn't want the game to be in a state where exploits, broken equipment stacking, and unbalanced skills were the appropriate way to win.

I think any skill that restricts action needs to be looked at; confusion and stun are two cases where you can be left in an extremely bad situation. Daze is also pretty bad but much less common (Rush being the main offender).

Skills could be a bit unbalanced IMO as long as they're fun. I mean, it doesn't really hurt if some skills are overpowered, no one is forcing you to use them as long as the game isn't so hard that you feel you almost have to if you want to stand a chance of making it far.

On the other hand, skills that players almost never chooses need to be beefed up or replaced with something else. Not neccessarily something that's as good as the overpowered ones (that would only lead to power inflation, one skill is raised, then another one to match the first, then the danger level of the monsters, etc ad infinitum).

When it comes to exploits I thought the Aim bug as fun, as I felt rewarded for figuring out the trick. But as I said, had someone else just told me about the exploit it would have felt a lot cheaper, cheesier and cheatier. And after winning one game where I used the Aim exploit, I don't think it would be that fun to do it again. So I am happy that the Aim bug was removed.

The hiding from orc patrols by standing on a dungeon or town is on the other hand an exploit that I would be happy to see returned to the game. Orc patrols were tedious if I did them carefully and dangerous when I didn't bother using all talents I had at my disposal, and I think it was rather logical that the player hid in a cave or something and the orcs gave up their search, that the players entered a pride and the orcs figured that the other orcs there would take care of the player or the orc patrol getting killed when he tried to chase the player into Gates of Morning.

I agree on confusion. Personally I feel confusion could cap out at 50% (that would be math.min(50%, 10% * talent level) in the code) with most of Daikara being more like 30% and still be very powerful.

We have a ton of status effects in the game now... so many that I imagine most players don't know them all but the ones that are still the two biggest offenders are Confusion and Stun :/

Random uniques really need smarter/better gearing and much lower talent levels.

Eden's Guile and all other activatable items did get nerfed with the recharging thing. I'm also a big fan of those shoes but it's nice to know players can't quick swap them in (because aside from the speed bonus they don't really do anything).

How does the debuffing status effects really work? I remember that there used to be talk of making non-perfect confusion res or mental save still subtract from the duration of the status effect, even if the player failed to resist. With 30% conf and 50% conf, do you mean that different confusion attacks have different chances of randomizing the movement of the player, and that 50% means player character is equally likely to move randomly and do as told by the player?

What's the difference between daze, stun and freeze, btw? Is daze like paralysis in Vanilla Angband, NetHack, etc? I remember that stun actually was like that in b23, but you could make yourself immune to it by using a movement infusion. 100% stun res was required by the time you went East, but I managed to get it much, much earlier - it was readily avalible. But it was rahter annoying that stun was so deadly that anything less than 100% was a death sentence once you got to the East, that didn't really add anything to the game, it just limited your equipment options! But stun is changed now so that it no longer makes you completely helpless, right? What does it do exactly? And what does freeze do? Is it ice or cold attacks that freezes? And what level of helplessness defines a frozen player or monster?

How was Eden's Guile nerfed? Are the shoes weaker or have they just stopped recharging unless you wear them? Swapping armours just to use their different talents is IMO tedious and I didn't do it more than once or twice in my b23 win. Removing that kind of behaviour from the game sounds like a good decision. As long as Eden's Guile gives the same global speed bonus they're well worth wearing if you ask me. As I said, I even thought they were worth putting lots and lots of points in Cunning for. Making Track more effective and increasing my critical chance were nice bonuses, but the name of the main reason was of course never anything else than Eden's Guile!

jenx wrote:I agree mostly.

Random bosses are by far the worst. It often takes the fun away, when a carefully built player is smashed instantly. Even out of depth characters can do this at times, such as nagas in old forest!

When it comes to out of depth monsters, I guess they can be interesting as long as they are rare.

Most classes get some way to detect monsters from afar, right? Like Precognition, Track, Control Summon and so on. If it's possible to detect and avoid the Out of Depth monsters, they can probably make enhance the intensity of the playing experience. But the RNG should perhaps be given a few guidelines so that the OoD monster generation is within reason. Breeding OoD monsters (outside of vaults) filling up a whole level wouldn't be very fun if you ask me! Also, it should be important for the RNG to abstain from generating shooting/spellcasting/very quick monsters too many levels Out of Depth.

Are you with me on this, that the OoD generation shouldn't be 100% random but follow guidelines so that try to ensure that no wandering death sentences get spawned.

Where are random bosses spawned, btw? I've heard that they guard the exits of fairportals and the stairs of High Peak, but being random, can they appear anywhere?

What is a farportal, btw? I've heard much about them, that they're somehow connected to the Sher'Thul fortress, that they are dangerous, that they contain random bosses that can be completely unfair (like having 100% physical res and good healing capacities before the player has means to overcome such obstacles), etc.

Nemesis1 wrote: How does the debuffing status effects really work? I remember that there used to be talk of making non-perfect confusion res or mental save still subtract from the duration of the status effect, even if the player failed to resist. With 30% conf and 50% conf, do you mean that different confusion attacks have different chances of randomizing the movement of the player, and that 50% means player character is equally likely to move randomly and do as told by the player?

Daze is basically a full paralysis but it breaks on damage. 100% confusion is basically a full paralysis that doesn't break on damage but lets you use items (probably an oversight) and instant talents (intentional). Stun right now is fairly balanced (aside from putting escapes on cooldown) and daze isn't bad except when coupled with something like Rush.

Confusion is probably the worst debuff in the game right now (aside from some very rare talents like Beckon that may still need some balancing).

How was Eden's Guile nerfed? Are the shoes weaker or have they just stopped recharging unless you wear them? Swapping armours just to use their different talents is IMO tedious and I didn't do it more than once or twice in my b23 win. Removing that kind of behaviour from the game sounds like a good decision. As long as Eden's Guile gives the same global speed bonus they're well worth wearing if you ask me. As I said, I even thought they were worth putting lots and lots of points in Cunning for. Making Track more effective and increasing my critical chance were nice bonuses, but the name of the main reason was of course never anything else than Eden's Guile!

Yup, swapping items resets power to 0. So if you want to use activatable items you must wear them.

Randomly generated bosses are the thing that really stops me from playing on Roguelike. Confusion can be reliably dealt with using a mental wild infusion in the early game, stun is a bit worse since wild infusions aren't a reliable solution for it, but you eventually become immune to both of them. The fact that attaining immunity is pretty much mandatory is sort of silly and uninteresting, but not a huge deterrent to actually succeeding on Roguelike difficulty.

On the other hand, you can never get immunity to being hit for 3000 damage in one turn through capped resistances by randomly generated bosses. It's just a dice roll on whether the random can one-shot you or not, and although the odds are fairly low, I don't really want to invest hours into a character just to have it permanently die because I got unlucky despite making all the right decisions. And you can't just avoid them either, because of High Peak and the Pride uniques.

Also uh, not to undermine your ingenuity, but I don't think "use Aim because it's bugged" really constitutes a trick. Nor can I agree with your reasoning that "broken skills are a good thing as long as I personally get to abuse them once before they're fixed". I think you're confusing what makes you, personally, feel clever or special, with what is actually good for the game. I do, however, agree that perfect balance is neither necessary nor desirable.

donkatsu wrote:Also uh, not to undermine your ingenuity, but I don't think "use Aim because it's bugged" really constitutes a trick. Nor can I agree with your reasoning that "broken skills are a good thing as long as I personally get to abuse them once before they're fixed". I think you're confusing what makes you, personally, feel clever or special, with what is actually good for the game. I do, however, agree that perfect balance is neither necessary nor desirable.

But I never said the Aim exploit was good for the game, I just meant I had a fun time discovering how to build my character to make him shoot as many times at possible per turn, and that I didn't really care that Aim was bugged so that it was better than it was meant to be. Discovering game mechanics is something I personally enjoy, and when experimented with different ways of increasing my shooting speed iI thought it was rewarding to find out about Aim. It was actually more tricky than just putting a point in Aim and see my firing speed go up. For example, it didn't work if was wearing the Thaloren Tree Longbow when I sustained Aim, but worked when I was wielding the Dragonbone Longbow of Great Speed. Even if I swapped to the Dragonbone after activating Aim with the Thaloren Tree, I didn't get that impressivly fast shooting. On the other hand, if I sustained Aim when I was wielding the Dragonbone and then shifted to Thaloren Tree, I could almost shoot as fast as I could with the Dragonbone. The Thaloren Tree Longbow did have a range of 18 squares in b23, by the way! That meant that I could do some really great things if positioned myself looking into the open door of a vault and used Aim wielding the Dragonbone. Then I switched to the Thaloren Tree, making use of its long range and the abilty to do splash damage around corners with Scatter Shot. That would wake up the inhabitants of the vault, even though I couldn't see them. Then I started firing arrow after arrow into the vault, continuing to hurt monstes that I hadn't even seen yet. Soon enough they would come pouring out of the vault, and if the monsters were tough enough to make it through pinning and crippling shots all the way to get next to me, I could use Disengage to jump away from their melee range and use my instant summoning skill Nature's Pride to place som Treants between them and me. A couple of times a Dolleg or something would get me by using Rush (or some other skill that would make him close the distance in no time) and in the next instant disarm me, rendering my bow useless unless I had a Wild Infusion ready. As I didn't have Phase Door inscribed and using charges from the Teleport Wand was only something I did in emergencies. Not just because of the limited number of charges - teleporting in High Peak could mean an instant death - or at least instantly using up my Ring of the Dead to save myself - if in case I was to be unlucky with the teleport destination.

In a situation like that I would have to turn Aim off, activate a movement infusion and run for my life with an overwhelming vault room of monsters after me. Aim would of course be on cooldown then, so repositioning and resuming my Aim bombardment wasn't an option either. In other words, Aim was like star scumming, effective but lethal to the player if foolishly relied on too much.

What I aimed (pun intended) to explain with this post was my interesting process of discovering the mechanics behind the game. To me it was a pragmatic thing to do, I didn't take that much of what was the realistic way of doing things or how Darkgod had meant it should be played, for me it was all about what you could and couldn't do and how to make the best of what I had. I had Aim. I had stairscumming. I had cautious uses of Treants and splash-damaging Scatter Shots to empty vaults. I had orc patrols not being able to engage me if I stod on the entrance to a dungeon. But I also had a useless Rapid Shot skill and ingredients to elixirs that just refused to drop from the monsters as they supposed to. But most of all, I had a great experience discovering the mechanics of an unforgiving game, and I used them with two objectives in mind: 1. Winning the game. 2. Having as fun as possbile while doing it.

Back then thought it was fun and rewarding to use the Aim exploit whenever I felt like it, today I wouldn't enjoy using the same exploit even if it still was in the game. But if I was to find a new exploit with my current Summoner, it is very possible that I would use it. Wait, I've already used an explot, or at least very cheesy tactic: using respec without respect (pun intended again).

donkatsu wrote:Randomly generated bosses are the thing that really stops me from playing on Roguelike. Confusion can be reliably dealt with using a mental wild infusion in the early game, stun is a bit worse since wild infusions aren't a reliable solution for it, but you eventually become immune to both of them. The fact that attaining immunity is pretty much mandatory is sort of silly and uninteresting, but not a huge deterrent to actually succeeding on Roguelike difficulty.

On the other hand, you can never get immunity to being hit for 3000 damage in one turn through capped resistances by randomly generated bosses. It's just a dice roll on whether the random can one-shot you or not, and although the odds are fairly low, I don't really want to invest hours into a character just to have it permanently die because I got unlucky despite making all the right decisions. And you can't just avoid them either, because of High Peak and the Pride uniques.

This is the exact reason why I'm not playing on Roguelike either. So far almost all of my deaths have been caused either by my own carelessness / stupidity or by random bosses (and just one from a status effect: chain daze from the daikara backup guardian).

To illustrate this, I just won with a skeleton reaver, after dying 7 times: once to a pride boss that shot me for more than 1k damage in a single turn (level 25 bow mastery + level 15 steady shot), and 6 times to the randboss in high peak 9. That guy was a cursed / paradox mage. I couldn't escape, because of beckon(11) and dimensional step(23). I couldn't kill it, because of unnatural body(23), fade from time(11) (which put it over 100% resist all for several turns), and evasion(11) (70% chance to evade for 10 turns). On the first of those deaths I didn't even know where the boss was, it beckoned me through a wall, and then I could only watch myself cross half of the level while being pummeled by orcs. After using up my two teleport wands hoping to land close to the exit, a controlled phase door fizzle finally put me right next to it, and I was able to escape.

That was b37, in b38 I might have gotten away with a few more lives left, with the changes to beckon and dimensional step, but I'm pretty sure I'd still have died a few times anyway. Random bosses really need to not be able to have these insane skill levels, or every single skill needs to have its returns truly fall off the cliff past level 5.

Suggestion to nerf confusion:

If you attempt the same action on multiple turns in a row while confused, each successive failure should make the next attempt more likely to succeed. (so if you try to teleport repeatedly with 100% confusion, the first attempt would always fail, the second time would have 50% success, and the third time might succeed automatically -- or whatever; the exact numbers would need to be tweaked for balance.)

That way, confusion would still suck, but would be less likely to spell certain doom as long as you have an escape option and are playing carefully enough to not be one hit away from death.

(One issue is that the AI probably won't be able to take advantage of this, but so what. The AI doesn't have to survive every fight, and players do. That makes things like Confusion much more devastating for the PC -- the AI can afford to risk its life on coinflips in situations where the player can't.)

I dont know what roguelikes the OP has been playing...Most of them are absolutely horrid,in a good way, and destroy you sometimes without even making it clear how and why you died....
You need to play for ages to have a chance of finishing...

Having out of depth creatures, every once in a while, and random bosses makes the game great because sometimes there SHOULD be a surprise hard character and sometimes some playthroughs should be almost impossible to complete, just by chance..
Its the awesomeness of randomization.
Sometimes it's super hard, even unfairly hard, sometimes its much easier, most of the time its somewhere in between, thats what makes roguelikes awesome and i always play and always will play on roguelike(IMO it should be the default option).

I think if people are frustrated by it it just means that perhaps the experience while playing is not diverse enough and people feel like thye are grinding and not really having a blast while playing.
The game should just work harder on rewarding the experience by making starting areas much more diverse with more mini events and more tile diversity and creature diversity.
every game should feel very different and every dungeon should have a lot of randomization in construct events in it and creatures in it.

the fact you can sometimes die randomly, cause the level contains a super strong random boss or because some naga decided to have a stroll through the forest, is IMO fine and makes the game world feel much more alive and real and ripe with possibility of weird and interesting occurances.

Fully agree there. The one thing i'd like to see is a bit more unpredictability in the early/mid zones. In most games you tend to have a lot of escape options so I'm well up for the odd OOD that makes you flee and come back to the zone later. I play on adventure these days but I would be straight back to roguelike if a few more random surprises were thrown in. However, despite saying this I still think this is one of the best games out there in its current state.

BasiC wrote:the fact you can sometimes die randomly, cause the level contains a super strong random boss or because some naga decided to have a stroll through the forest, is IMO fine and makes the game world feel much more alive and real and ripe with possibility of weird and interesting occurances.

You know, now that I think about it, this is pretty spot on. I don't think I'd mind having to arbitrarily restart a character if the beginning of the game was as interesting as the end. As things are, the first 6 or 8 dungeons that you do are rather dull. Few talents to play with, weak enemies, boring equipment decisions (stun/confuse immunity is vastly more important than basically anything else). I think, however, that due to the talent system, the nature of ToME is to get more interesting as you progress through the game. This is not really a bad thing, but it does make having to start over particularly punishing unlike some other roguelikes, where the beginning of the game is just as exciting, if not more so, than the end.

So yeah, there are two possible solutions for saving roguelike difficulty: remove arbitrary deaths or improve the early game. Personally I think the first one is easier since all you have to do is fix randomly generated bosses, while the latter will probably require significant amounts of actual content to be added. Of course there's no reason not to do both!

BasiC wrote:I dont know what roguelikes the OP has been playing...Most of them are absolutely horrid,in a good way, and destroy you sometimes without even making it clear how and why you died....
You need to play for ages to have a chance of finishing...

I've mostly played Angband, plus some Rogue, NetHack and Dungeon Crawl.

Angband is definitivly not like that. If you play Angband safe, you never have to risk your life. Once you're immune to confusion and blind, resist poison and elemental attacks and has some enough speed to keep monsters from getting to act twice before it's your move, nothing can instakill you. And with Scroll of Teleport level, you can always escape! Detection is also much more powerful in Angband than in ToME4, so you can always know what's in a vault and see the threats before they see you. And should you lack a crucial resist or immunity, you can just stay away from vaults and going to deep into the dungeon until you have it. The non-persistant dungeon design means that Angband your pace and progress is decided on your playing style and character growth, not by you completing levels.

I have to admit that I'm not very good at NetHack, but I know that good players are guaranteed to win once they've gotten a bit into the game (unless they do something stupid). There are so many options and items in NetHack that there is no situation you can't handle once you're properly equipped and experienced with the game mechanics. I've actually heard NetHack veterans complain that the end game is way too unexciting.

I don't really know about Crawl, but I think its endgame is more deadly than NetHack. I've read a few character reports, both of wins and of late-game deaths, and I get the picture that the difficulty you have with the Realm of Zot can vary a lot because the randomness of the game and the huge difference between the playstyles of the different species, class and religion combinations. At least some of them should be rahter safe during the end game.

Of all well-known roguelikes, Rogue is the one that fits the ideal you describe. But Rogue is also a short game, and it's more arcadish than RPG'ish. Rogue is something you play to challenge yourself, and while you can play ToME4 for the challenge too it's also an adventure of immersion and character development. To me, the benefit of having just one life in ToME4 isn't the challenge, but that it intensifies my emotional bond to the character.

This is probably the reason why have different ideals when it comes to the dangerousness of ToME4. So whose needs should the game be designed to satisfy? If you ask me, the best compromise would be to make the mandatory areas safe if you play it safe, and have optional challenge zones where survival isn't guaranteed no matter how careful and well-prepared you are. And if optional challenge zones aren't enough, there's always the Insane difficulty setting.