Rebalance Sil-Carving to fit Song of Sharpness changes

[locus]

To carve a Sil, you need to do one point of damage more than the crown's protection roll. The crown has a huge protection roll. This means that the difference between SoS reducing the roll by 50% and reducing it by 40% or 30% is immense. Sil-carving is now much more down to whether or not you found a non-nerfed sharpness weapon (or two, if you're going for a multi-sil victory).

[half]

Is it really so difficult to get a single Silmaril? I'd thought that since we made that a lot easier many versions ago, it had become only difficult for stealth characters, and that others should be able to get one without any form of sharpness.

I agree that the second and third Silmarils are probably too difficult. The theory had been to require some form of sharpness to get all of them, which would be fine if people treated getting them as a small extra thing. But since the ladder uses it for sorting, this does make more of a big deal of it, and makes it less good to just leave that to the chance of what you were able to find.

[locus]

Requiring "some form of sharpness" was more reasonable when Song of Sharpness counted as a form of sharpness.

I dunno, even without the ladder, it's way more impressive to bring back all the Silmarils. It feels like you're a big man, instead of barely scraping out a win, comparable to multi-rune wins in Crawl or ultra wins in ADOM. And this is a good thing, you want it to be tempting to make Beren's mistake.

I guess the difficulty level of an ultra win in ADOM is more comparable to a Morgoth kill in Sil, but the point stands, it's nice to have different levels of victory.

[Derakon]

Maybe make it easier to get multiple Sils and far harder to survive getting them? I mean get seriously blatant about stacking the deck against the player when they have two or three Sils. Force the dungeon generation to make gauntlets of alert and angry monsters, give the player horribly bad luck, periodically make them make a Will save or be entranced by their new shinies, etc.

[Matoro]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Force the dungeon generation to make gauntlets of alert and angry monsters, give the player horribly bad luck, periodically make them make a Will save or be entranced by their new shinies, etc.

"You stare the beauty of the Silmarils hypnotically, completely forgetting everything around you. Unnatural lust for the jewels of treelight fills your mind. You lose x number of turns!
Morgoth, the Lord of Darkness, hits you! You die."

[taptap]

I really wonder why people have problems with the crown when playing a melee char with song of sharpness. I mean, seriously, get one of the greatswords that lie in the throne room (or suitable battle axe, great axe) and you should have a Sil. Some people need to get Sils out as archers or singers or with blunt weapons - and they do.

[debo]

I think the biggest frustration comes when you've already killed Morgoth, to be honest -- which you can reasonably pull off without a thing or a song (thong?) of sharpness. At that point, there is nothing in the throne room that can harm you, and you end up spending a billion turns trying to get the 3rd sil out. It's super tedious, especially if you're strong enough to have filed the ULTIMATE BUG REPORT.

Anyways, I personally still think the key to this is in some of Scatha's ideas around changing scoring. There were some ideas before to allow people to 'chip away' at the crown, which might be neat too.

I also don't really understand why the crown gets an evasion roll... have we ever considered removing this?

[debo]

Originally Posted by taptap

I really wonder why people have problems with the crown when playing a melee char with song of sharpness. I mean, seriously, get one of the greatswords that lie in the throne room (or suitable battle axe, great axe) and you should have a Sil. Some people need to get Sils out as archers or singers or with blunt weapons - and they do.

The first one is easy. It's the third one that is silly. (Pun intended

[debo]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Maybe make it easier to get multiple Sils and far harder to survive getting them? I mean get seriously blatant about stacking the deck against the player when they have two or three Sils. Force the dungeon generation to make gauntlets of alert and angry monsters, give the player horribly bad luck, periodically make them make a Will save or be entranced by their new shinies, etc.

This already basically happens. Removing the second Sil doubles the number of monsters you meet on the ascent; removing the third forces you to roll each skill check twice, taking the lesser of two rolls.

Again, if you're strong enough to kill V and take 3 sils, it's unlikely that anything on the ascent is going to be very threatening unless you generate packs of Carcharoths and Glaurungs.

[taptap]

Originally Posted by debo

I think the biggest frustration comes when you've already killed Morgoth, to be honest -- which you can reasonably pull off without a thing or a song (thong?) of sharpness.

Locus has sharpness, no?

Morgoth kills without any sharpness are overall quite rare if I look at the ladder. If you are strong enough to kill Morgoth with a mattock, hammer or great axe without sharpness you can easily take out the 1st Sil or even consider taking the whole crown if you want more. (I believe Hugo started this business after failing to take out bonus Sils with a blunt weapon char.)

Knocked out or sleeping people get an evasion roll as well. It is not a representation of effort anyway.