Mucking around with confusion and monster status effects

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Estie

Another use for status effect not mentioned is to reduce the amount of monsters acting against you. For example, sleep a room full of orcs and fight one at a time.

In Angband, this isnt a very powerfull ability since monsters start out sleeping and if many are awake, you leave the level rather than put them to sleep again. Also, fighting in bottlenecks makes maintaining a 1v1 situation easy.

I dont really see great potential for confusion, unless maybe for a mage or other ranged attacker. The random movement is going to make any melee combat awkward and long, certainly not something that should become the default mode of fighting ? Slow seems like a much preferred debuff for the melee fighter.

Maybe confuse should be the way to go for ranged fighters then.

Originally Posted by Estie

The problem with all this is that the premise is wrong: there is very little incentive to kill tough monsters. Inventing elaborate ways for fighting previously unkillable monsters is fine, but there also has to be a good reason to bother.

For example, take Ithangast. Typically my encounters with him proceed as follows:

The first times I see/detect him his breath would 1-hit me and I stay away as much as possible. When my hit points catch up, he still is fast and while I could suvive a round or two, it would be foolish to fight him yet. Later, assuming I am fast and have fire resistance, I could kill him, but would use many potions and lose half of my consumables to his fire, so I dont.
If I happen to have a source of double fire resist, this might change.

The problem is not that there's no incentive to kill powerful monsters. The incentive is there, especially for uniques since they have a significantly increased chance of dropping artifacts. The problem is that uniques are incredibly overstatted. And furthermore, in a game like Angband, you can always "wait until later". It's a tough problem and it makes balancing stuff like this very difficult. My thoughts usually are to try to balance around a "visit each level once" and if players want to take it slower they can.

We do give an extra "wait until later" incentive by improving drops at later depths. This makes sense for normal monsters, but maybe we don't want to do that for uniques.

Originally Posted by Estie

Lastly, there is one debuff which isnt in the game but would be very usefull: an effect that reduces damage, either all damage or at least breath damage, to get out of 1-hit land more easily. Maybe call it "debilitation" and have the afflicted creatures damage reduced by 1/3, with a short but fixed duration if it works - no randomness here as that would make the effect basically useless. Of course, the monsters are also entitled to use it on @.

It exists from the player side, and is stun. I agree that this is how stun should work.

[fizzix]

I figure I should also answer my own question to how successful confuse should be, because I differ a bit from Derakon in one key case.

Clevel 15, monster 15: I think the success here should be very high, something around 80%. The reason is there's already a huge opportunity cost on the spell in that the mana pool is very limited at this point, and the spell will have a significant fail chance. We take advantage of the fact that clevel ~= dlevel up to about 20, after which it starts lagging. I think duration of about 10-15 turns is reasonable. Failure should cost a monster a turn, which means something like a 20% slop on monster succeeds but loses a turn.

Clevel 40, monster 15: I agree with 100%, and in fact I think you should be near 100% at clevel >= mlevel + 5. If you're using the spell in this scenario it's to provide defensive cover, since you likely can just straight up kill the monster anyway. Duration can be very long as well, 20 turns or so.

Clevel 15, monster 40: This situation comes up if you have a crazy OoD monster, say from a vault or something. I think success should actually be reasonable here, something like 33%. This is a last ditch effort to get away, because your teleport staff got destroyed, or Nick implemented something that nerfs the instantaneous and cheap escapes we've become so fond of. Duration should be around 10 turns, enough to hopefully get out of LoS, initiate recall or whatever. Failure may cost the monster a turn, but there's a good chance it's moving at double speed anyway.

Clevel 40, monster 40: 80% is fine for this as well. Clevel 40 characters are near endgame usually, while monsters at level 40 are midgame, so there's a power imbalance here. This is nice because it means whatever formula you use for clevel 15, dlevel 15 can also be used for any other clevel = dlevel value. In other words, difference in level can be the scaling factor. Duration should be longer here, 20 turns.

Now I can start thinking what my formula should look like. The scaling factor is the difference between character level and monster level. Duration should be based entirely on character level. At about clevel = mlevel - 15, the success should drop to around 50%, At clevel = mlevel - 30 it should be low, this is the scenario of a late midgame character (level 35) and an ancient wyrm (level ~65). Confuse should lose its utility by this point.

And to deal a bit with Estie's critique, I'm not at this point too worried about using it to defeat tough monsters (uniques). I'm thinking more of using it as a way to defeat at depth monsters, perhaps in a more accelerated fashion than in the past.

[Estie]

Well I know that I avoid erratic monsters, so I suspect that I wouldnt want to use a spell to change their movement to erratic, not if the alternative was to have them lined up in a hallway.

Maybe I am wrong here and it actually becomes a worthwhile debuff; if not, here is another idea:

Confusion disables spell casting, which is nice but niche. How about extending the disable to special attacks, so for example an Algorth´s bite wouldnt poison, a ghosts touch not drain etc while they are confused.

[fizzix]

@Estie: I think we should certainly discuss what exactly the effects of confusion are. You could also have it greatly lower AC, or allow a character to more likely get a critical. Confused monsters that bump into another monster can attack it. etc.

Anyway, I went and made a simple formula that fit the criteria I outlined above, and put it on a spreadsheet here. There's a template there in case anyone wants to play with their own formula.

I used about as simple a formula as I could make. It's linear with chance of success being:

((clevel - mlevel)*2 + 80)%

with chance to at least lose a turn:

((clevel - mlevel)*2 + 100)%

and duration given by:

((clevel)*2/3 turns

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by fizzix

and duration given by:

((clevel)*2/3 turns

Is the idea still that the duration gets reduced by some factor?

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by takkaria

Is the idea still that the duration gets reduced by some factor?

I'm not sure I understand the question.

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by fizzix

I'm not sure I understand the question.

Yeah, fair enough. I'm just wondering if what you said earlier about the duration being related to the saving throw roll was still something you were thinking about. It seems to make sense to me that the relation between monster and player level should come into it somehow.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by takkaria

Yeah, fair enough. I'm just wondering if what you said earlier about the duration being related to the saving throw roll was still something you were thinking about. It seems to make sense to me that the relation between monster and player level should come into it somehow.

Yeah, I guess I changed my opinion based on what behaviors I wanted the function to take. I think it's reasonable to have duration based solely on clevel.

[MattB]

Originally Posted by Nick

I'd like to redo that as having personality attributes, which combine to affect things like cleverness and power of spellcasting, resistance to status effects, etc.

We could call it...oh, I don't know...charisma?