Noise in Angband

[spacepenguin]

I've started trying out a kobold rogue in 4.2.1 and sneaking around the dungeon with sleeping monsters made me wonder if "making noise" impacts if monsters wake up. If so, does closing doors help deafen the noise created outside of the door (I believe Sil had noise mechanisms that operated like this)?

[Sky]

nope. you can fireball an enemy right next to a sleeping monster and it won't change a thing.

soft leather footsteps > banging chainmail.

[Nick]

There are variants which give noise to different actions, but currently in V monster waking only depends on player stealth and how close player and monster are (via dungeon path, not straight line distance).

[Sky]

it would be nice to build an entire new Angband game around this concept of stealth and noise; sleeping mobs are harder to wake, but once awakened, their noise, and the noise from fighting, spreads through the level, jumping from mob to mob.

I had adapted this .. uh .. over 30 years ago, in my D&D campaigns. Traditional D&D modules will happily have mobs wait in a room while there is fighting in the next.
Instead of cranking up the mob level as my players levelled up, i just put in bigger dungeons, and more real-life disadvantages - alarms being the first. Then they would have this scenario where just killing a few screaming mobs would lead to the entire dungeon emptying onto them. Classic D&D never prepared you for 140 goblin archers.

Of course they got around this by fumigating the dungeon with burning smoke, collapsing it via earth elementals, or hiring an army. They were pretty smart.

[whartung]

Originally Posted by Sky

it would be nice to build an entire new Angband game around this concept of stealth and noise; sleeping mobs are harder to wake, but once awakened, their noise, and the noise from fighting, spreads through the level, jumping from mob to mob.

That's always been the way in WoW. You enter a building and there's a long corridor with 3 or 4 different groups. You go up, kill one with fire and sword, and the other group is just lallygagging.

But, at the same time, I've been on the other side of that coin.

In WoW, your "aggro" (aggravation) radius is a function of the differences in character level. The bigger the (positive) difference, the wider it is. So, low level characters attract high level monsters from farther away.

In one of the dungeon, the map is effectively a spiral to the top of a mound.

With my high level character, I took in another player with a character too low for the dungeon. His aggro radius was enough to trigger the boss monster at the top of the hill. Another thing monsters will do, is if the aggro'd monster passes those that are not triggered, it will wake them up.

The net result was that we pulled the top monster, and he pulled the entirety of that spiral up that hill, and a torrent of monsters came raining down on us. It was a sight to behold, no we didn't live lol.

This vision of those monsters are the kind of thing that keeps you up at night when you sit in the dark.

[Sky]

Originally Posted by whartung

so, low level characters attract high level monsters from farther away.

LEEEEEERROOOOOOY
jenkins !!

[spacepenguin]

Thanks for the responses!

[DavidMedley]

IIRC, monsters from the same pack being awake are given a chance to wake their friends as well. It's not as obvious or effective as in Sil, but it's there.