ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

When you face an easy enemy like a snake, you engage carefully in case he has friends, kill it, then rest. At the end you are almost exactly where you left off plus a tiny bit of loot. This is 80% of TOME's game play and once you settle into a pattern it becomes tedious. So the key is to not let people settle, add global time pressure to the entire game so that players are encouraged to truncate the cautious engagement and rest steps. Bring optimal and fun closer together.

I imagine there used to be food and hunger like other roguelikes and that was cut out since it is also tedious. I'm sure we can figure something better out. It doesn't have to be a punishment for being slow, it can also be a reward for being fast. Ideally it should incorporate both. I don't have a great idea but let's brainstorm. My ideas so far:

• Add a loot/exp bonus buff that increases with kills and fades with time.
• Give a similar buff but instead of increasing loot and xp it increases your max health and resource bars.
• Add bosses/vaults/bonus level entrances which flee/close/disappear after X turns. Do not tell the player when these cowards are on the level but do tell the player when they leave thus encouraging them to search harder next time. Don't spawn these on levels with escorts.
• Add a days adventured clock on the character sheet (or just on the new day announcement) and give achievements for fast runs.
• Add a birth option where you have a deadline to win the game.
• Add "reinforcements are coming" timers to many levels, especially orc prides but also some earlier zones. The reinforcements patrol around the dungeon in a group once they arrive.
• Add monsters who flee and sound the alarm, aggroing everything in their faction and sending them to your last known position (hopefully by many different routs so it's not just a conga line of doom).

I think I like the achievements for speed and the disappearing bosses the most, what do you guys think?

BoomFrog wrote:

• Add a days adventured clock on the character sheet (or just on the new day announcement) and give achievements for fast runs.
• Add a birth option where you have a deadline to win the game.

These two would certainly be the easiest to make work, and might actually be rather fun...

I'm always for alternate modes/new achievements for neat things.

Having said that, adding a basic time pressure to a game that is already pretty hard is uncouth. There's just no need for it, and the game can get "Take an hour to not die on X floor" levels of difficult as it stands(Dreadfell 9 with a bad RNG is a good example of this).

*groan* I got into roguelikes in the first place to get away from time pressure...

Well, there's Time pressure, and there's forced time crunch. I don't object in the slightest to making some sort of notation of the time used, or even achievements for a 'speedrun' (though this should probably be in-game time passed, or turns used, or something similar, rather then a real-life clock. (In the first place, the tome clock can be gamed something horrible, as my old computer accidentally discovered) Real time clocks would make severe issues of unfairness on older computers that can drop to a turn every second while autoexploring, instead of 20 turns a second while autoexploring.

However, setting up something where you are forced to massively advance as fast as you can, because there's some unseen doom sneaking up behind your character is just unnecessarily cruel. As Zizzo (sort of) said, roguelikes shouldn't have time pressure. One of the advantages of roguelikes is that you can (and SHOULD) be taking your time, not being forced to rush through. (And speed leads to mistakes. Mistakes lead to deaths. Deaths lead to anger. Anger leads to hate, and hate leads... well, you can finish the quote.)

Anyone here remember classic platformers with forced scrolling? *shudders*

Optional speed tracking records are an acceptable thing, even speed tracking records based off in-game time, and real-time. But don't make it something we're FORCED to participate in.

Similarly, events that are forced for us to handle rapidly, like bossing fleeing, present a situation where loot/exp could get out of control, or players are FORCED to pursue them for the exp reward. That presents balance issues.

We had a Roguelike Radio episode about this just last week! In it I referenced ToME as a game with no need for a clock, since on a practical level it doesn't allow scumming.

However one conclusion I came to in the episode is that meta-game incentives can work very well to make it matter only to those that really care about it, which makes everyone happy. And I believe strongly in the carrot approach rather than the stick approach here - so rewards for good behaviour rather than punishments for bad play.

So I'm all for the achievements route. Would give something extra to seek after finishing the game. Some classes would be naturally better at it, but that's all part of the game. Maybe there'd be a Chronomancer achievement for beating the game in negative days? :P

Personally I don't feel the need for constant time pressure in ToME. There are already enough considerations in the game that we don't need to add something to keep pushing a player forward - plus with enemies that can flatline you at full ready from time to time, I certainly like to be at full health.

An idea though might be to instead examine having more events that might pop up from time to time that make you want to push forward - like maybe make it so that you might get 'dying escorts' who need to get out of the level as soon as possible, make it so a zone will slowly cause detrimental effects on you while your in it until you escape. Little mini-events like the graves spawning constant skeletons or the one that drops Air Elementals on your head do well to keep a character on his toes, and this would probably be a better way to go in ToME.

Well it sounds like the consensus is:

Add an in game tracker of in game time. Probably just add to the new day notification, "You've been adventuring for X days."

Add some achievements for in game speed for example, "Speed Slayer: Killed the master within the first Y days of your adventure." "Shooting Star: Won the game within Z days of starting your adventure." Someone very experienced with the game could come up with some good targets. Or maybe we should start a forum challenge to see who can do best before we fix some achievements? Does the game always start on the same day of the game calendar? If so can someone post the full in game calendar relevant to the start of your adventure?

Continue adding verity as has already happened to some early zones. Mini-events are fun!

You'd have to revise a lot of game mechanics if this mattered. Right now, for example, there are some classes with forced downtime because of slow resource regeneration. And a lot of the dungeons are extremely tedious without autoexplore, which adds a major layer of time overhead (along with autocasting and rest until healed.) With the game as it is, none of these things matter. They matter a lot if turns actually count.

I would be okay with achievements for fast wins, but I would be very Not okay if time limits were introduced. Do not make ADOM's mistake. Don't give me a huge world to explore, and then penalize me for wanting to do All the Things. That's just mean.

I wont
I have nothing against time pressure, but they need to be central to the game if they exist, and this is indeed not the point here.
I am however not against special time limits as show by a few select quest, where time IS the important element.

As for achievements, this is a very good idea!

Like Aporia Fold Lys and getting the awesome rock with incredibly negative time?

If a clock is added, should it be a calendar clock or a turns used by player clock? The calendar is mostly advanced by moving around on the world map, and turns are mainly used resting. If it goes by turns, then turns on the world map could be ignored so if someone has the lost hermit spawn in the north, they aren't penalized for delivering potion ingredients to him.

I like the idea of having an incentive to complete a level quickly. Either partially to find a bonus loot or completely for some other reason. Maybe you could make a vault that closes after ~200-300 turns, plenty of time for someone to find it, but if you rest after each snake, you probably won't get there in time.
If there's concern for xp, then maybe the vaults could be unguarded and only be a time issue.

That's a good point about the overworld travel. I'm torn since planning an efficient route might be incentive to change dungeon order. Still I think your right, for any speed record or achievement turns inside a dungeon make the most sense.