Hatin' identification, inventory management and hunger clock

[chezzo]

I love identification, inventory management and the hunger clock. Am I alone on this?

I love when I'm about to die in a roguelike and I'm reading unidentified scrolls and chucking unidentified potions. I think WazHack does this brilliantly. There are so many identify scrolls in WazHack, and price identifying them and identifying them because you get so damn many more than any other scrolls is easy. It really works! You've always got an identify scroll for rings and weapons and such, but you don't necessarily use them on potions and scrolls until endgame.

I really like inventory management, too! I like picking up every damn thing I can possibly carry, and then have to decide what to throw away when I become burdened. I like making stashes, and I like it when monsters get in my stashes, and I can say, "Hey! That's my wand of death you just killed me with, Goblin." I think it's the way I exercise the hoarding gene lovingly passed down from my parents.

And the hunger clock. If there isn't a hunger clock, why wouldn't you always rest after fighting a creature? Even if the creature takes one hit point. I know I would! And that is pretty lame, it makes me feel like a wimp.

However, I think all these things are the last bit of polish I'm going to put in my game, partly because they'll make testing a bear, and partly because they're a bit of a hassle. But I think they are a hassle in a good way.

Who is with me?

[darkgod]

They are good in a game designed around them, you game can be, ToME certainly is not
And yes TE4 could handle them most easily if that's the question

[Frumple]

DG covered the TE stuff, so have some rambling

I don't mind ID and inventory management when they're meaningful and more than just a nuisance or time/turn waster. This is rarely done, and apparently difficult to do. Not a mark against it, per se, but I can't really think of an instance they were actually enjoyable. It seems that, at best, they stay out of the way.

I universally dislike time constraints (food clock, turn limits, etc.) in turn based games, period. I dislike them even more when they're easily side steppable (here's looking at you, Crawl, Nethack, ADOM, *band variants, etc.) and ultimately boil down to little more than annoying busywork. Incursion's food clock was bearable, as a comparison point. ADOM's corruption thing was vile and I had to memory edit it away before I could really enjoy the game. Crawl's food is more annoying than meaningful, and Angband and its closer ilk's food system is a pointless annoyance that, at most, eats up an inventory slot and a turn or two occasionally with no particular impact beyond that.

Caveat to that being that I don't mind hyper focused and very short games that have very limited duration-type shenanigans. I can dig efficiency as a virtue, but it degrades the experience for me when it's in a game that last longer than, say, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.

I don't mind limited resource games, so long as I'm consuming those resources for reasons beyond an arbitrary clock tick. I'd rather be facing off against an armor durability that's slowly degrading as enemies whack on it, weapons that are slowly chipping away, and a mind that grows more and more tired of twisting the aether to its whims, rather than a stomach that's apparently infested with an entire colony of ravenous tapeworms who are, themselves, infested with smaller tapeworms. I want epic fantasy, not a simulation, basically.

Unless I want a simulation, anyway. Basically I've not seen many examples of the two trying to come together that ended well. "Realism" is a terrible building block for game design, generally.

[edge2054]

I haven't played it but Brogue sounds like a game you'd really like chezzo if you haven't checked it out yet. I've been meaning to myself actually.

As Darkgod said, those aren't /bad/ things. But they're just not things ToME was designed around. In IRC the other day this came up as well and I think I basically said, Hunger clocks can be a great thing. If they exist to limit resting. If they're like they are in Angband (or at least how they were the last time I played Angband which was probably ten years ago) they're very bad. All they do is add tedium to the early game.

[SageAcrin]

Identification is nearly useless with ToME's design. I'm not against it per se...it just doesn't have consumables. So the only thing it could as is tedious annoyance and things like beating up your own Dread Choker summons and etc., the same sort of worthless tedious Dungeon Crawl phased out.

ToME has inventory management, for equipment/infusion/etc. swaps. It just autosells things-which is mostly annoyance prevention-and gives you a stash-which many major Roguelikes do. If you mean the fact that it doesn't spam consumables...the game's challenge is very much designed around using the replacements for those all the time, to the point where you would have to have hundreds upon hundreds of consumables to really have the game be the same. Again, not really part of its design.

Hunger clocks have always struck me as artificial-make a nice, fuzzy, vague timer, to force speedrunning of a game as the natural way to play, and then hide it behind imprecise values so that you can give a good leeway while giving an illusion of challenge. I've never seen one that was worth a damn at what it did, though supposedly Brogue's, from what I hear, at least actually forces the speedrun. Otherwise, all they did was prevent resting every single time you took any damage...maybe...in some areas.

So basically, your first two points are tied to consumables-which ToME has phased out in favor of a different kind of challenge. Rather than managing your consumable stack, which is usually psychological as an issue unless you get unlucky, rather than being a raw challenge issue, you instead just get a bunch of enemies that will kill you incredibly fast if you don't constantly use healing, defenses, buffs, etc, which I personally prefer.

And the third is something that, at best, I consider only good as an alternate mode. Forced speedrunning, with timers everywhere and downsides for it, is definitely something I can appreciate. Forced speedrunning as the main mode is a waste, and games like Dungeon Crawl and Nethack have laughable "timers" due to their food clocks, that can let you practically never worry about food once you get the system down. Brogue sounds to me like it has the spirit of the idea-a real time crunch-down, but it's still not going to be for everyone. Some people like a game to be hard, but not to have that form of pressure.

Also doesn't really work with ToME, where some resources only recover(at least for some classes) with long term resting, like Stamina, too.

[tiger_eye]

Please note that the original post was not explicitly discussing ToME or suggesting any changes for ToME. Heh, I think he wanted more opinions on and a discussion about identifications systems, food clocks, inventory management, etc., and I think he's gotten that!

If you want to listen to a discussion on these matters, check out these Roguelike Radio episodes:

http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2012/04/e ... stems.html

http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2011/11/e ... ement.html

[SageAcrin]

Yeah, I was trying to address them both as they related to ToME and as I feel about them in general.

I mean, I wasn't sure, so may as well cover all my bases.

[bricks]

I think hunger clocks make a lot of sense in game where you should keep moving forward, but may have some reason to backtrack. Brogue is a good example, and I think POWDER does a good job too.

Identification drives me crazy because it's so spoiler-dependent.

[XLambda]

I think people aren't giving the original Rogue enough credit. It's actually a pretty well-designed game, where most of these mechanics made sense. Many roguelikes copied them without putting a lot of thought into them.

[edge2054]

I think people aren't giving the original Rogue enough credit. It's actually a pretty well-designed game, where most of these mechanics made sense. Many roguelikes copied them without putting a lot of thought into them.

Indeed.

[chezzo]

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. Put thought into these functions and not just cloning them.

I played the hell out of Brogue, and it's really fun. I love how things get identified if you use them.

What makes identify systems work? Would starting the characters with a scroll of identify, and put them all over the damn place work?

Listening to Roguelike Radio, they make a lot of really good points. There's the tactical top down game, and then the game in your inventory of identifying items.

What makes the hunger clock work?

In my game, instead of a dungeon that is completely foreign to you, you start in your home, which happens to be Hell. You would know what stuff is already. And maybe you just don't get hungry in Hell.

It would certainly be less work.

[phantomglider]

I think the hunger clock works when it's balanced so you have enough time to rest every so often, but not enough to sit there for a full heal after every scratch, so you have to balance danger and time in your exploration.

I'm wondering if a way to do it might be that a piece of food spawns every X turns, which is a bit too slow for you to avoid eventual starvation. But if you keep moving and progressing (killing monsters? going down stairs?), that knocks enough turns off the timer to keep you fed. Sort of a Gauntlet timer. You might want to refluff it in that case.

[bricks]

I think I've seen two viable approaches to hunger - make it persistent and annoying, with lots of food available, or make it slow and steady, with carefully doled out food. In the first case, you typically have monster corpses as a source of food, which are plentiful but hard to transport (rot, too heavy, etc) and also have side-effects which may be good, bad or both. The second case is all about encouraging forward exploration (persistent or one-way dungeons) and keeping levels dangerous enough that the player weighs exploration against starvation.

Any other method will just be a grind or a death clock, sometimes both. The only major exception to these guidelines would be a roguelike focused specifically on survival as opposed to dungeon crawling. In that case, you'd need to give the player a wealth of tools for determining how much food they have and how much food will be needed. Otherwise it's too guesswork/spoiler-heavy.

@phantomglider: I had a similar idea, once - in addition to actual items you would find on the ground, every time you exposed a new part of the dungeon in your exploration, you'd have a small chance to discover other useful objects, like food and crafting materials. Things small or important enough that you'd always want them and they'd take up no inventory space. I prefer the idea of a game that abstracts away most or all of the survival and exploration gameplay away from the tactical gameplay, otherwise it starts to feel too much like a simulation.

[Frumple]

I'd call Incursion's food system a viable third approach, though it may fall loosely in the slow and steady category... it also manages to sidestep resting issues quite handily while not having an arsehole of a food clock, in most cases.

In Inc's case, resting is about the only way to really consume food (barring a trap or two and some monsters, iirc.), and food and safety are the primary limitations on resting.

The trade off, so to speak, is that hit points (and fatigue, which is sorta' like T4's stamina) do not regen (barring one very rare item and a few feats/special abilities that have some hefty costs to them), and the primary psuedo-renewable resource that can heal (healing spells) chews up semi-permanent mana (locks the mana used down until you rest).

What it boils down to is that healing is a limited resource, and resting is one of the (relatively) few ways to get a hold of that resource (both by directly restoring some HP and by restoring some resources that can do the same). The game is more focused around attrition damage (losing a hit point to a goblin despite killing the goblin, ferex, may be a net loss) than the burst-style that most other roguelikes focus on.

Now, Inc does screw up a little because of something else (Healing potions are incredibly plentiful, especially as you get deeper in the dungeon, which takes a tremendous amount of pressure off the player and ultimately makes resting rarely needed), but it's a fair example of an (excellent, imo) alternate methodology for dealing with food as a resource. It does functionally get rid of the food clock though, as it takes specific and direct action from the player to reduce the food resource instead of ticking it down. You can return to my post a ways up about armor degrading and weapons breaking; I much prefer this sort of thing to an actual clock-style system.

[bricks]

Food as a means of long-term recovery (as opposed to a true clock) does sound good. Even the 'soft hunger' systems bother me - unless we're talking about complete and total starvation, I'd expect a hungry creature to be much more dangerous than if it were sated.

This article is pretty good: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment. ... _of_Hunger.