Endless Angband?

[Grotug]

I thought it might be fun to have an alternate mode of Angband where the goal is to see how high a score you can get, rather than defeat Morgoth and then the game is over.

I don't know how hard it would be to program, but it'd be cool if after you defeat Morgoth you unlock "NIGHTMARE" mode of the game. At this point you'd be given the option to retire or invoke NIGHTMARE mode and descend deeper and face unknown terrors. If you choose to continue, will no longer be able to use the upstairs. Below DL100 random, unknown monsters could be generated with random names. With lots of heavy hitting monsters with the 'very quickly' and 'incredibly quickly' flags. Maybe even some monsters that get +1 or +2 movement speed. And Monsters that are resistant to teleport other. So monsters would be much more dangerous, but loot would also be even crazier, so that the super powerful and super rare artifacts in the set would have a greater chance of being generated (and ego items would also have greater pluses as the deeper you descend). And so the goal would be to see how much exp you could get. The dungeon switching to forced descent after defeating Morgoth would be so that you can't just hang out at DL108 until you are safely powerful enough to descend further. The point would be to keep the game dangerous even as @ gets incredibly powerful. Because as long as the dungeon is dangerous, it is fun! Also, this nightmare mode would be fun because you could have ongoing competitions to see who could reach the farthest into the dungeon. Deep Descent scrolls would become more common after DL100 to help egg on adventurers to see how deep they could go.

It would be cool to program an algorithm that would make super tough/dangerous monsters but give them drops and experience that would be commensurate to their difficulty level. Or maybe instead of the game making random new monsters, existing monsters could receive levels. So a level 5 Annihilation dragon might be "Incredibly Quick" with +2 movement speed and resistant to TO. And a level 2 Black Reaver might be very quick and do 580 damage mana storms, but not resistant to TO. A level 4 Jabberwock might have 4,400 hitpoints, more hit dice, incredibly quick, +1 movement speed and resistant to TO, but 2.5X the experience points and better drops. Doing this would also allow the player to be surprised anew by how dangerous monsters still can be in the dungeon.

[Cryomaniac]

Sounds interesting, though it effectively would require significant changes in monster code (monster levels, random monsters) that would only be relevant in postgame, doing nothing relevant in main game. Also, does it turn the game into ironman mode? If you're unable to go back and collect resources at this point, you'll need to grind for a lot of consumables before Morgoth fight in order to get an optimal postgame run.

[Grotug]

I left that ambiguous intentionally. But how about this: if you are playing a non-forced descent game your game gets "upgraded" to forced descent after you kill M but you can still return to town. If you set out at the start of the game playing forced descent, then your game gets upgraded to Ironman after you defeat M. If you were playing an ironman game at the start, then after you kill M your game gets "upgraded" to skipping a level (or two?) every time you take the stairs down. Or... all wands and rods of Teleport Other vanish from the game (and your inventory).

[Sky]

Originally Posted by Grotug

I thought it might be fun to have an alternate mode of Angband where the goal is to see how high a score you can get, rather than defeat Morgoth and then the game is over.

but of course this has always been the way to play the game, by how str0nk you can make your character by DL100.
Like, for example, right now i got a Mage that does 1000 damage / round vs evil. Yes a mage.
But i still need to find a dragon armor or two to pump the stats because his bas speed is only +17, that's +27 hasted, nowere near maximum pwng.
i think +35
1k damage
can cast rune
mass banish
resistance and shield

should be THE LEAST you expect out of a character.

[kineahora]

Originally Posted by Sky

but of course this has always been the way to play the game, by how str0nk you can make your character by DL100.
Like, for example, right now i got a Mage that does 1000 damage / round vs evil. Yes a mage.
But i still need to find a dragon armor or two to pump the stats because his bas speed is only +17, that's +27 hasted, nowere near maximum pwng.
i think +35
1k damage
can cast rune
mass banish
resistance and shield

should be THE LEAST you expect out of a character.

It would be as if maybe you put on the One Ring, became obsessed with killing, and went mad...

[PowerWyrm]

I've adapted the Nether Realm/Void dungeons from TOME to my variant to have a post-game for characters that defeated Morgoth. It's quite challenging. Good luck killing him again as Melkor at the bottom of the Void...