Grinding

[Parcae2]

Tome 4 has a philosophy of opposing grinding. At the moment, however, there are still several locations where it is possible to farm for items indefinitely or almost indefinitely, with very little risk:

1. Ruined Dungeon
2. Oozenest
3. Orc Breeding Pits

Not only does the existence of infinitely or near-infinitely spawning enemies that can drop items obviate the purpose of having non-respawning levels, but it also means that the best way to win, especially on Insane, is via extreme boredom. Worse still is the fact that this system gives a massive random bonus to characters who happen to obtain Oozenest, the least boring area to grind.

I therefore propose that:

1. The Ruined Dungeon pedestals should zap the player instead of spawning enemies if an incorrect pedestal is chosen
2. Enemies on Oozenest 2 should never drop items
3. Orc Babies should never drop items
4. A new high-level vault should be added that offers high risk and high reward, mostly in the forms of items rather than XP, to compensate for these changes in a way that is more in key with Tome's overall design philosophy. It might be a random map encounter at level 40, with progressively higher levels of risk and reward as players go deeper, and it should have numerous guaranteed artifacts. I believe that there is already such a vault in the addons section that can serve as a template.

[SageAcrin]

Ruined Dungeon has such a high spawn range of enemies that grinding on it is very similar to grinding on Adventurers, having done it(not for items or EXP, but for damage values for Pyro/Cryomancer).

Let me tell you, an Archlich will ruin your day at L20.

Sludgenest already got its own thread and is basically fixed in depository(albiet, you can still grind there, but you'll probably make 1k cash and a level before you run out of level).

Orc Babies are a weird thing. I think they're just pulling from a general loot table, and I don't know how you make summoned ones not drop loot. (I'd rather not see the entire area become low loot for normal players.)

Perhaps just a greater restriction on how many times the Mothers can summon? Maybe just add three~ drops to Mothers to compensate for them not giving loot(This has to be the easiest answer)? Regardless, I agree that summoned orc babies shouldn't give loot.

[Parcae2]

For Insane difficulty players, at least, grinding Ruined Dungeon is routine. It is not remotely comparable to adventurers, in my opinion - not only are high level spawns massively rarer, but you can easily teleport away in perfect safety, given that the whole level should be clear by that point.

We already have two high risk/high reward infinite grinding possibilities in the game. Even if you think that RD is comparable in difficulty to adventurers and farportals (and I strongly disagree), you can hardly deny that it is also incredibly boring by comparison.

I can't speak to the technical problems involved in removing loot from orc babies. Perhaps they should be made regular summons, with a (very long) timeout.

[SageAcrin]

Maybe the Ruined Dungeon orbs should just have a small chance of opening the door/solving the puzzle if you keep mashing the same one.

It offers an out then for people who can't figure out the puzzle, and kills the grind potential.

I'm still not entirely convinced it's a big deal, though. There hits a point where there's a time cost involved in grinding.

Sure, it's technically the safest run on Insane to grind up there, but you have to ask yourself if the advantage five levels and mid-tier loot/few thousand in cash would bring is worth the fifteen extra hours or so it'd take to hit that kind of a value. Consider that those 15 extra hours equate to more runs, and more chances to win, after all.

The Orc Breeding Pits are, of course, a different story, because, as I understand it, it's common practice to skip out on any and all loot problems you might have by grinding them, lategame. Quite another question, and one that takes less time and has more impact.

(I am thankful you don't need to do this to clear Nightmare.)

[Parcae2]

OK, let me rephrase the question. What is the point of having Ruined Dungeon grinding in the game at all? Whether it's a powerful strategy or a pointless timesink, it's at best pointless and at worst contradicts the game's design goals.

What is it about the current system that's better than just zapping the player when (s)he gets it wrong?

[SageAcrin]

One could argue that the puzzle doesn't need to be there at all, by that logic.

The answer to "Why is zapping worse?" is because zapping is less interesting than having no penalty(as it's literally just "hit rest"), and having no penalty means there's no meaningful danger to failing the puzzle.

At least enemies can show up with an OoD, and if you're not fairly skilled, that makes mashing out the puzzle at least some risk.

So, essentially, there's no point in having a puzzle you can mash out in 30~ actions with no risk, and while the current setup isn't a lot of risk, it's enough so that anyone that isn't specifically interested in grinding won't do it.

By the logic currently present in this conversation, the best way to fix this would be to have it summon a rare/two rares/a randboss/enemies when you bop the wrong orb, like a chest, instead of just normal enemies; That ups the reward, but greatly ups the risk(As drawing a randboss lich occasionally is certainly cause for alarm for grinding.).

[Mewtarthio]

Zapping is boring. It's just "You touched the wrong orb! Now you must hit the 'rest' key! Mwahahaha!"

What should happen is the game raises the zone five levels before generating the monsters.

[Infinitum]

Or simply have the zapping get progressively worse the more blunders the player commits. Losing 90% of ones total life might not be a big deal in a safe area, but 104% is.

That said the puzzle is quite out of place and could just be removed wholesale without incident.

[Sirrocco]

Zapping is boring. It's just "You touched the wrong orb! Now you must hit the 'rest' key! Mwahahaha!"

What should happen is the game raises the zone five levels before generating the monsters.

I like the puzzle. I also like this idea. Sure - go ahead and grind it, if you really want to.

[SageAcrin]

Or simply have the zapping get progressively worse the more blunders the player commits. Losing 90% of ones total life might not be a big deal in a safe area, but 104% is.

That said the puzzle is quite out of place and could just be removed wholesale without incident.

Bleh. I don't like the idea of any event ever purposefully doing over 100% of the player's life.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Plus, the puzzle really needs to stay. It's a unique experience. I also like the point of increasign danger if you fail more then once. You can currently just blunder your way through it, by guessing with no real danger. I'd love to see it randomized, so it uses a different order each time, forcing you to gather the clues again and again. Less tedium, more unique.

[Sirrocco]

Randomizing the order would be cool, but someone would need to write more poems.

[b0rsuk]

Once upon a time I checked the Inscriptions page of Tome4 wiki, and was flabbergasted:

ToME4's inscription system is one of the biggest gameplay changes from traditional roguelike games. First introduced in beta 14, the inscriptions (infusions and runes) replace potions and scrolls. The design goal behind inscriptions is to eliminate the time spent by the player "farming" potions and scrolls in weak zones, in order to make a run at a tougher zone. They are unlimited in use, but have cooldowns attached, so you must carefully time your use of them to survive. Unlike many other RPGs you cannot rely on a large stack of potions to get you through a tough battle. Mastery of the inscription system is a key step towards mastering ToME4.

Inscriptions a way to eliminate farming ? Really ?! In a game where vast majority of zones has no respawning enemies, what is there to grind ? You could easily introduce one-use potions in the game and it wouldn't break balance, because monsters are almost always finite.

Take a look at Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It technically has unlimited monsters, but the spawn rate is very slow after a level is cleared and the game's hunger mechanic doesn't allow you to stay on one level indifinitely (There are exceptions, like Mummies and Kobolds, but you don't see anyone doing that with a Kobold at least). The DCSS way of handling too difficult zones is either run past most dangerous monsters, or go explore a different dungeon branch.

I don't mind that Tome4 has inscriptions and runes - it plays differently than other roguelikes and that's nice. But as DCSS shows, in a game like this it's completely not required to eliminate grinding. In fact, inscriptions enable grinding in areas like Ruined Dungeon, Orc Breeding Pit, or with adventurer parties. But once these ways are removed, the game will be pretty much grinding-free.

[SageAcrin]

Once upon a time I checked the Inscriptions page of Tome4 wiki, and was flabbergasted:

ToME4's inscription system is one of the biggest gameplay changes from traditional roguelike games. First introduced in beta 14, the inscriptions (infusions and runes) replace potions and scrolls. The design goal behind inscriptions is to eliminate the time spent by the player "farming" potions and scrolls in weak zones, in order to make a run at a tougher zone. They are unlimited in use, but have cooldowns attached, so you must carefully time your use of them to survive. Unlike many other RPGs you cannot rely on a large stack of potions to get you through a tough battle. Mastery of the inscription system is a key step towards mastering ToME4.

Inscriptions a way to eliminate farming ? Really ?! In a game where vast majority of zones has no respawning enemies, what is there to grind ? You could easily introduce one-use potions in the game and it wouldn't break balance, because monsters are almost always finite.

Take a look at Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It technically has unlimited monsters, but the spawn rate is very slow after a level is cleared and the game's hunger mechanic doesn't allow you to stay on one level indifinitely (There are exceptions, like Mummies and Kobolds, but you don't see anyone doing that with a Kobold at least). The DCSS way of handling too difficult zones is either run past most dangerous monsters, or go explore a different dungeon branch.

I don't mind that Tome4 has inscriptions and runes - it plays differently than other roguelikes and that's nice. But as DCSS shows, in a game like this it's completely not required to eliminate grinding. In fact, inscriptions enable grinding in areas like Ruined Dungeon, Orc Breeding Pit, or with adventurer parties. But once these ways are removed, the game will be pretty much grinding-free.

Inscriptions were included back in an era of ToME where it was much more possible to grind, to discourage grinding specifically for more resources.

It's really hard to fathom how much ToME has changed over time without at least looking at some somewhat older code. Even I don't really have a feel for it, but I know enough about ToME before I got here to say that that change sounds reasonable.

As to the rest of that...I'm gonna be honest here. I wouldn't look to Crawl for a good way to avoid grinding. It has, but it's essentially a house of cards effect, and nowhere near as simple as "It has a food clock".

The food clock handling in Crawl is inherently flawed as an anti-grinding system, and optimal runs would basically always grind somewhat. There's an optimal point where enemies grant you enough food by appearing without starving you with any race-sure, it's just a little bit of grinding, there, and it's unreliable, but it's there. (Unless you're one of the high metabolism races.)

Optimal grinding would do things like revisit anywhere with decent EXP once you get hunger mitigation(especially if you get Necromutation), grind a Mummy every floor for thousands upon thousands of turns(Wait, people actually do this), etc, as well.

Oh, and there's Pan/Abyss, which are literal infinite grinding grounds and usually grant enough food for it(Especially the Abyss...Pan I remember being kinda weird about food, dropping more on the floor but having less edible enemies?).

Dangerous, but...well, unless the newnewAbyss that replaced the new Abyss since I last played has changed things notably enough, you can still reasonably grind the Abyss at, say, the same levels and gear you can handle most branch ends at. If you don't mind missing runes, Pan's probably better, even, especially if you have some decent permafood so that playing the odds is safer.

There's other reasons heavy grinding hasn't happened as a general thing, I think.

First, the game has no higher difficulties, so there's no reason to grasp that kind of advantage. In fact, the player metagame has basically gone more towards speedrunning for higher challenge, or running challenging combinations(which often tend to have more restrictive food clocks, like Trolls and Ogres, or off-type casters, which consume more nourishment); Basically only Mummy challenge runs really encourage grinding. So, there's no place for it for high end players.

Next, with the heavy RNG emphasis, it's terribly, horribly short-sighted to ever grind in Crawl-it's more efficient to splat and rerun unless you're past Lair, and it's questionable even then... and clearing the game five levels under the fairly low EXP cap is easily possible, even if you're not a godplayer, just by getting good gear or playing carefully enough.

For a short version...I'd say Crawl's version works because of a combination of general metaplay shying away from grinding, level impact not being all that high, levels capping fairly easily on the average run, and grinding giving very few advantages(enemies don't tend to drop the important loot, so it's basically just EXP).

Oh, and the lack of higher difficulty modes, and that the game's pretty short, so running again for better advantages from the RNG(less nasty enemy placement, better loot) is generally faster and more effective.

You could probably turn every Crawl resource into rechargeables tomorrow, and rip out the food clock, and it wouldn't change much, in this regard. (In a lot of other regards, sure; It would imbalance the heck out of the game without some retooling, of course... But I don't think people would grind much more.)

But this is kinda off topic. Just thinking about the comparison.

[PureQuestion]

A new high-level vault should be added that offers high risk and high reward, mostly in the forms of items rather than XP, to compensate for these changes in a way that is more in key with Tome's overall design philosophy. It might be a random map encounter at level 40, with progressively higher levels of risk and reward as players go deeper, and it should have numerous guaranteed artifacts. I believe that there is already such a vault in the addons section that can serve as a template.

Hehehe, talking about mine?