Tweaking the game

[ripforareason]

I'm interested in tweaking the game a little bit, in particular, adjusting some artefact rarities, maybe removing Creeping Horrors, and maybe adding an item or two. Basically, I'm trying to get a slightly different distribution of artefacts so that the same ones don't show up every game - the usual suspects are Fingon, Kiteshield of Hador, Glamdring, Belthronding, Maedhros, Gamil Zirak, Taur-nu-Fuin. Fingon in particular is very good and seems to spawn at least every other game, but its rarity is pretty high and comparable to some artefacts that I've never seen playing Sil. edit: apparently it spawned in 2/3 of my winning games, wow.

Do I need to do anything other than edit artefact.txt, monster.txt, and the like?

[bagori nd]

Originally Posted by ripforareason

Do I need to do anything other than edit artefact.txt, monster.txt, and the like?

Nope! Also, if you haven't yet you might want to see this old post (http://angband.oook.cz/forum/archive...hp/t-6990.html) to see how the existing rarities work in practice.

Actually, this topic might be worth more discussion. I tweak some rarities, too, but I also make a few more substantive tweaks (all to item properties). For example:

--) Quarterstaves automatically grant Leaping; are (2d1) hand-and-half weapons; can be found at lower depths.
Mainly a QoL change, but I find it's balanced the way shovels are balanced. You can navigate more of the dungeon at the cost of an inventory slot.

--) Rings of damage don't exist.
Rings of damage hurt both balance and immersion. They're flatly superior to rings of strength for an annoyingly metagame reason, and in virtue of this undermine the valuable but already tenuous role of weight in making weapons feel and function differently. But with the addition of Momentum, they don't need to exist. If you want to do more damage independently of the str/weight limit, wear a ring of accuracy.

--) Narsil does 2d5 damage but has sharpness instead of resistances; depth and rarity replaced with Saithnar's (see below).
Primary lore-motivated, in order to fit the image I have of Narsil (or really Anduril) from the books: it's a sharp weapon, not a resistance stick. It "fill[s] Orcs and Men with fear," and presumably not because their fire and cold attacks are less effective; it cleaves helmets in a flash of light; it slices off fingers even when broken. Gameplay-wise I'd really recommend it: it turns out to have a great feel.

--) Saithnar is now vampiric and a mithril greatsword (and hence virtually unfindable).
Since the Narsil change adds another sharp artefact, this one compensates by taking Saithnar out of circulation. Saithnar was always in an odd place, since it overlaps so much with the black blades; now, it joins Ringil and Celeg Aithorn in the realm of fantastically-rare mithril dream weapons.

--) Aranruth is more common (Narsil's original rarity).
Given how interesting an item Aranruth is, it's a shame that it's too rare to have an impact in most games.

Do other people make changes like this? Does anyone change monsters? If so, I'd be curious to hear them.

[ripforareason]

The artefacts at the top of that list look like the ones I find very often, except Orcrist. I find Glamdring every other game instead... It would be cool to see some of the artefacts at the bottom of that list more frequently, and some of the artefacts at the top less frequently.

Anyway, I had written a list of small tweaks on artefacts that I think might be cool, that I might try implementing:

Nimphelos: add Light. Gra<+2> isn't super useful to anyone but a smither or singer on its own, imo. I would probably wear Con<+1> or Blessed Realm<+1> over it since Light is so important.
Hauberk of Nevrast: (-1)[-4, 2d8]
Galvorn armor of Maeglin: Add Armorsmith. Presumably, Maeglin learned armorsmithing from Eol, so it fits thematically. I'm going for a quasi-"smithing set" here of items that give Smithing abilities. Chances are a player doing Smithing will take Armorsmith way before encountering Maeglin, but, oh well. Perhaps it could be changed from being a drop to being find-able in the dungeon. For example, Calris is Gothmog's blade but he seems to leave it laying around Angband.
Kiteshield of the Swan: (-1)[+0, 1d7], dex <+1>. Sustain con is very common in Sil, and it is basically just a kiteshield of protection otherwise. A bit underwhelming compared to the other artefact shields.
Aranruth: remove Danger. I'm not sure if it's only there for thematic purposes, but it's weaker than Glamdring.
Great Axe of Norgrod: (-3, 4d5)<+1>
Celebrist: Get rid of the Con penalty. One of the few artefacts I consider unusable, along with the great spear of Melkor, Crown of Dark Secrets, and Great helm of Utumno.
Telchar: Add Weaponsmith. Telchar did make Angrist after all, iirc
Crown of Feanor: add a Smithing ability, one of Enchantment/Artistry
Silverhand and Celebrimbor: Give Silverhand Free Action, and Jeweller, or perhaps Jeweller + Masterpiece, to Celebrimbor. Celebrimbor would later make the Rings of Power, after all, so I think it's a good thematic fit to round out my idea of a "smithing set".

[HallucinationMushroom]

"Does anyone change monsters? If so, I'd be curious to hear them."

One of my favorite experiments concerning editing monsters is to take away the players ability to easily discern what they are seeing and/or fighting. I remove descriptions and make them appear to all be the same thing... kind of like prosopagnosia?

Character and screenshot, if you are interested. I probably describe what I'm doing in the character dump, but if not, I'm attempting to create a sort of 'random monster experience'. I would like to play an Angband variant where there are completely randomized monsters that you have to engage with to discover what their attacks and weaknesses are. Anyway, for what it is worth.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=14068
http://angband.oook.cz/screen-show.php?id=2266

[debo]

Changing art rarity isn't as easy as it seems because the game picks a base type first and then "boosts" it into an artefact. One of the reasons you see the same arts so often is because their base type is common.

For example, boosting the heck out of ringil will make it very likely that it will be the first mithril longsword you find, but it won't help you find that first mithril longsword any faster than normal. (I think -- I could be wrong, it's been awhile since I looked at gen.)

[ripforareason]

Originally Posted by debo

Changing art rarity isn't as easy as it seems because the game picks a base type first and then "boosts" it into an artefact. One of the reasons you see the same arts so often is because their base type is common.

For example, boosting the heck out of ringil will make it very likely that it will be the first mithril longsword you find, but it won't help you find that first mithril longsword any faster than normal. (I think -- I could be wrong, it's been awhile since I looked at gen.)

I had guessed it had something to do with the "depth" figure, I believe I read somewhere on here at one point that there was some sort of artefact smoothing that made you less likely to find artefacts the more you found, so that items with a low depth (Fingon has depth 8 for example) tend to be found in the midgame, but by the time you reach 950' you have a lower probability of finding artefacts anyway, due to all the ones you've previously found, making you basically never see a Ringil, Celeg, and so on.

[debo]

Originally Posted by ripforareason

I had guessed it had something to do with the "depth" figure, I believe I read somewhere on here at one point that there was some sort of artefact smoothing that made you less likely to find artefacts the more you found, so that items with a low depth (Fingon has depth 8 for example) tend to be found in the midgame, but by the time you reach 950' you have a lower probability of finding artefacts anyway, due to all the ones you've previously found, making you basically never see a Ringil, Celeg, and so on.

The artifact smoothing also causes problems, yes. But even if that were gone, the mechanic I mentioned above would probably make it somewhat tricky to understand what tweaking the rarity numbers in artefact.txt actually does.