New player experience with dreaming horrors

[kazak]

And this was the big surprise for me--that veteran players would crap on you for having issues with dreamscape. I was under the impression that a lot of people have problems with it. It's received a fair amount of attention on the forums, and actually, ohioastro's explanation above is the first time I've seen someone really break it down.

[Frumple]

There may have been a bit of hostility, so to speak, coming from both sides. Insofar as the drama bit th'OP was referring to, most people were responding quite reasonably despite Ehl starting off the show and keeping it rolling with varying degrees of vulgarity and the occasional personal attack (sometimes perhaps warranted, sometimes not.). There were a few that didn't react quite as even handedly, and the "can't take shitty death, go away" thing was more about the beta status of the game than anything else, some point after folks had told Ehl it probably involved a bug. Crap was being flung from all sides, heh.

In retrospect, what actually was happening to Ehl, from what I could tell, may have been that backlash/retaliation loop* buggering things up a bit and making the fight less comprehensible. That'd definitely add another level of "WTF just happened" to things, especially if you're not aware it's what is happening. Took me a while to figure out what the hell was causing it when I ran into it yesterday, m'self.

*

, after about 30,000 lines of game log repeating ", 1 mind, 1 mind, ..." over and over

[ehlissa]

As a followup to this, my skeletal reaver encountered two solipsists today and killed both!

One put me in dreamscape, but I survived. I noticed the alternate versions of my character at the top where escorts and golems would be, and switched to each to heal them with reassemble skeleton. I think I hit the dreamscape solipsist with one, but I'm not sure. I ended up popping out and killing it with a couple more hits.

The next one I just ganked normally, no dreamscape.

Oh, there was a 3rd random boss dreaming horror in Lake Nur but I ran from that on turbos. So it's still a bit tricky as to how to deal with the dreamscape but it's not as bad as when I first ran into it.

[Reidan]

easiest way by far i've found to deal with dreamscape is to have a maxed out reflect shield available when you enter (displacement shield or a strong rune of relection i suppose) pop that on each new clone and nuke as hard as you can and its usually pretty easy

[Hunter]

This brings up an ancillary question about the wiki and documentation in general. Given the number of devoted players and developers here, it's strange that the wiki is -- while quite helpful on many points -- as spare and rarely updated as it is. Dreamscape is one area (I tend to just flail around until at goes away and I'm still alive, which happens surprisingly often) but there are many nuances in the game that people more involved with development seem to consider perfectly obvious but the rest of us are unclear on. In that sense -- understandably, since the game is in constant development -- ToME is more a programmers program than a player's program, which means new players are going to be harder to attract. They can search the forums, of course, and I've found people here perfectly willing to be helpful (even if their explanations often require explanations ) but it's a fairly inefficient approach for players who want a quick and simple reference in the middle of gameplay rather than the more convoluted approach that takes time away from enjoying ToME itself.

[supermini]

For the last few weeks there have been dozens of changes every day. Unless you have a dedicated team of people updating documentation, whatever you write is probably going to be obsolete in some way by the next version. I'm sure it will improve after v1 is out.

[edge2054]

For the last few weeks there have been dozens of changes every day. Unless you have a dedicated team of people updating documentation, whatever you write is probably going to be obsolete in some way by the next version. I'm sure it will improve after v1 is out.

qft

[bricks]

Source-diving is so easy that I've never really wanted a wiki.... I think a lot of the game could be automatically transcribed into a wiki format, too. Talents and monsters for sure, and probably also zones to some degree. A separate page or section could carry gameplay tips. Somewhat tricky, but character sheets are already integrated into the website very well.

[Hunter]

As I said, I'm aware it's under constant development. But unless the mechanics and details of everything are changing constantly in the middle of each version besides the nightly development one (and some wiki pages have proven quite consistently helpful over the last two years at the very least), it would seem possible to at least develop some general framework, especially since months often pass between updates. But if you feel it's simpler to do everything ad hoc and deal with frustrated players (like the one who started this thread) on an individual basis until a definitive version is out, I'm not going to argue. I just avoid entire classes (notably, paradox mage) and certain skillsets of other classes rather than flounder without any real enjoyment of the gameplay. It is, as I said, a developer's game right now, and I'll just accept that not everything is geared toward the player.

Edit: I do like brick's suggestion. Something for the non-source code savvy amongst us, translated into a reasonably simple format.

[tiger_eye]

Complaining about a wiki--and lack of information therein--rarely makes much sense. It is a wiki. Feel free to modify and add to it as you see fit

[Hunter]

Complaining about a wiki--and lack of information therein--rarely makes much sense. It is a wiki. Feel free to modify and add to it as you see fit

If players like me had the knowledge necessary to write definitive information to the wiki, we'd hardly need the wiki, would we?

[bricks]

The problem with your premise, Hunter, is that there is a definitive, "right" way to play a class. That's not even remotely true, as a quick perusal of the character reports will show. The wiki would become a tangle of misleading advice. If a specific skill is confusing, you are really better off bringing it up in chat and on the forums so you can get immediate clarification and so the effect/text can be rewritten. I agree that classes like Paradox Mage are intimidating, but you have character reports, the character vault, and the in-game chat to help. Plus you can always enable cheat mode and play around, or reinvest talent points.

[Hunter]

The problem with your premise, Hunter, is that there is a definitive, "right" way to play a class. That's not even remotely true, as a quick perusal of the character reports will show. The wiki would become a tangle of misleading advice. If a specific skill is confusing, you are really better off bringing it up in chat and on the forums so you can get immediate clarification and so the effect/text can be rewritten. I agree that classes like Paradox Mage are intimidating, but you have character reports, the character vault, and the in-game chat to help. Plus you can always enable cheat mode and play around, or reinvest talent points.

I'm not talking about walk-throughs or class guides, though. I do enjoy looking at those (especially for melee classes, since all my winenrs have been archmages, alchemists or psionic classes and I'm woefully bereft of skill with the more melee-oriented ones), but I can live with discovering the optimal methods myself. I'm more interested in "how does this skill work?" or "how is that aspect calculated?" or even "what are these terms and how do they apply?" An example that came up recently, for instance, was the whole deal with Combo points in a brawler. I wasn't clear on what they were or how they worked and the in-game text didn't really help. I mean, I do enjoy spoilers as much as the next person trying to figure out which alchemist quest line to complete, and wouldn't mind stuff like the various egos, the meaning (and implications) of the tiers, and so forth, but, really, I'd just be happy with a basic analysis of what the various skills are, how the numbers are applied (say, the formula for spellpower's effect, and what spellpower does affect) and the like.

Chat, I suppose, is a possibility, but I find it distracting and tend to play off-line anyway to minimize the number of options I have to scroll over when dealing with items (I keep accidentally hitting the "Link in chat" option. It drives me crazy.)

I keep being tempted to find out how to do cheat mode, mainly so I can get a full list of potential artifacts, but have restrained myself. So long as I don't know how, I can't succumb to the temptation. I used to shameless abuse Control-A (Cntrl-Shft-A?) back in the Pern days, and when levelable artifacts came, I would eventually get myself Sting if I hadn't found it by the time I finished Mt. Doom.

[Frumple]

Mm... until we do get around to wiki-ing it up, it's worth noting that, well, the game's open source. Artifacts are mostly in ../data/general/objects/ then spread among a few files (generally with "artifact" in the name), and the rest are in specific zone files -- ../data/zones/<zone name>/objects.lua. The .team in your ../game/modules folder can be opened by anything that opens up a .zip file. It's all pretty human readable, even if you're not even remotely fluent in lua (I'm certainly not, but I do plenty of code diving for folks in the chat, when I'm on, when it comes to specific talent mechanics et al.).

My thing is I'm just pretty terrible with wikis and I'd rather be playing the game than interpreting and transcribing code S'much less trouble to answer specific questions than to try to wrestle with wiki formatting and transcribe several hundred talents plus... all the other stuff.

[Hunter]

Mm... until we do get around to wiki-ing it up, it's worth noting that, well, the game's open source. Artifacts are mostly in ../data/general/objects/ then spread among a few files (generally with "artifact" in the name), and the rest are in specific zone files -- ../data/zones/<zone name>/objects.lua. The .team in your ../game/modules folder can be opened by anything that opens up a .zip file. It's all pretty human readable, even if you're not even remotely fluent in lua (I'm certainly not, but I do plenty of code diving for folks in the chat, when I'm on, when it comes to specific talent mechanics et al.).

My thing is I'm just pretty terrible with wikis and I'd rather be playing the game than interpreting and transcribing code S'much less trouble to answer specific questions than to try to wrestle with wiki formatting and transcribe several hundred talents plus... all the other stuff.

That's completely fair. I realize I'm asking people about doing things over-and-beyond. Editing wikis isn't exactly jolly good fun. It's just what I was thinking about because ToME is, relatively speaking, a fairly complex and nuanced game as role-playing games go. It may not have the flash of a FPS, but it more than makes up for it in variety and development opportunity. So it's natural to want a more thorough set of documentation of how things work than your average role-playing game really requires.

When people talked about code-diving, it was never really clear exactly how to do it...every time I tried to open a file besides .txt and the game file, the computer told me it didn't know how to and asked me if I wanted to search the Internet. Which pretty much ended my attempts because I assumed this was a bit more esoteric than your normal Word document. I could do it quite fine with older rogue-likes, including older versions of ToME, but those opened on Notepad and were generally found in a single obvious folder (Edit, I believe.) Any suggestions on how to proceed, and what to expect?