Complete N00b's Journey: The Series

[wizard44]

Thank you for the input folks.

Pete Mack: This is part of my policy that you can’t scum your birth strengths and weaknesses in real life. It’s a longtime creed of mine that part of life’s challenges is to deal with the things that you are dealt with.

Hugo the Great: I’ve heard of angband.live. However, I will not be playing any more characters after this, and will be moving on to Pixel Dungeon, the last game on my second roguelike tour of duty.

Quirk: Yeah, I’m aware that my approach is a non-ideal way to play the game. I’m actually going to go into more detail on my thoughts into this in my review of this game.

Surprisingly, this character actually managed to get to 250 feet, meaning that Embar will now get an exclusive thread! Check it out below.

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=9677

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by wizard44

Pete Mack: This is part of my policy that you can’t scum your birth strengths and weaknesses in real life. It’s a longtime creed of mine that part of life’s challenges is to deal with the things that you are dealt with.

I'm curious what you'd think of a hypothetical game where it was literally impossible to win without putting a lot of care into your starting race/class/stats/etc.?

Mind you, I'm not saying that's the case in Sil. You're just making an already-hard game even harder.

[fph]

Originally Posted by wizard44

My random character generation will involve randomly choosing the character's name, sex, history, age, height, weight, race, and house. For allocating my stat points, I randomly chose one of the four stats until I spent all 13 points. The reason why I do this is my general policy regarding roguelikes, which is to leave every starting circumstance "at birth" to chance whenever possible ... after all, trying to scum for the highest stats or play the most uber powerful race/class combo is getting far too close to save-scumming in my book. After all, you can't just reroll life's board such that you're born into a wealthy family or a family with superior genes. Dealing with such hardships from your starting circumstances, I say, is supposed to teach you about life and about the necessary need to adapt or die. The starting experience points, however, will not be spent until the character is fully generated and proper guidance is given by at least one member. This exception is because experience is technically a post-birth resource, making it a resource that I am okay controlling to some extent.

Notice that this is not how real life works in practice, if that's your goal. You first know your starting 'stats', and then these stats determine if you become a nuclear engineer or a pro football player or a TV presenter. In addition, you will train some of these stats depending on your career path: the football player will spend time in the gym (+STR,CON), the TV host will take public speaking lessons (+CHA). This notion fits well class stat bonuses.
So, just my two cents, but if you want to simulate real life you should randomize your race and the decision how to spend your starting stat bonuses, and then choose your class based on them. (Sil is perhaps the only game where this idea does not fit thematically, since it has 'houses' rather than classes.)

[wizard44]

Derakon: My personal opinion is that games where it was impossible to win without picking a certain race or class is too much of an extreme for me to get into. For one, if it is literally impossible to win with a certain race or class, that option shouldn’t exist. I mean, nobody wants to pick a race that literally says “You lose!” and takes you back to the starting screen. Granted that’s a huge extreme, but I believe in games that allow you to win with every combination of race and class. Fortunately, the great majority of roguelikes, including this one, provide a credible path, although it will be very difficult for certain combinations, to do just that. Trying to find out these paths is part of the fun. Hell, that’s what I did for vanilla Angband.

Fph: That’s a very interesting explanation of real life, and there are quite a bit of truths there. The only problem with that analogy is that in some games (Nethack comes to mind due to partial randomness) you don’t precisely know which stats you start out with before you have to pick your class. For those games, I do think random class selection is justified, although this is an imperfect fix. For this game, I did randomly choose my race and starting stat bonuses to simulate life. As for the houses, I made a judgement call and randomized that since the house (or caste if you want to be historical) you were born in is beyond your control and selected from birth.

Anyway, my fourth character got killed, so it is now time for a brief review from a n00b’s perspective (or an outsider if you want a more polite term used):

Complete Noob’s Journey: Epilogue

The game definitely has promise, and I can see why there is so much interest in it, since there are a lot of mechanics that often force you to think outside the traditional box that one might develop from traditional hack and slash games. My only concern is that getting into the game requires selecting a single race (the Noldor) and sticking to certain stat distributions and builds for the gameplay experience to be reasonable. Now, I understand the races are supposed to be difficulty levels, but for a total newcomer to roguelikes, this knowledge is counterintuitive. If a person’s imagination has a secret affinity to be a dwarf or a human, they might want to instinctively select these races without consideration to difficulties. It also is not rather obvious on what skills to get when pursuing a certain build, and trying to properly allocate experience requires quite a bit of research (through either youtube or forum posts) or direct consultation with other users.

One minor gripe is that there should be a way to force chests open (like you can with doors) by either kicking them or throwing them against the wall. In a lot of roguelikes, such an option was open when picking the lock failed, albeit at the cost of destroying some of the items’ contents.

I think that the in-game tutorial and tips to get new players started is a very big help and a plus in general, as the actual gameplay itself can easily hook players given enough time. I also like the simplification, realism, and accuracy to Tolkien’s writing that the game adheres to, which further adds to the authentic experience. The art in the manual in particular is totally killer as well.

My conclusion? The game is well thought out and is an excellent game to play for roguelike fanatics. It is really immersive and plays to our genuine fantasy tastes while keeping things realistic in the right way. It occupies a unique niche in the world of roguelikes, which stays in your mind once you experience it. The learning curve can be a tad too difficult for quite a few players to enjoy, though. The game really has made an excellent attempt of smoothing it out, though, at the severe expense of player choice. My overall ability and knowledge in the game, however, falls squarely on the Poor category, since I only managed to get to the 350 ft level at best.

I would like to thank all of you for giving me tips and support for playing this game, some of you which I must renew my gratitude for those of you that know me in my vanilla Angband experience. And the community is certainly a great one to get involved in for both this game and Angband, and I wish you all the best of luck moving forward.

So now, I will move on to my final game in my second roguelike tour of duty: Pixel Dungeon. I don’t suppose anyone has any input on how to survive for that game? If anyone does, I’d appreciate any such tips.

[HugoTheGreat2011]

To be honest, making it to 350ft on your only 4th attempt ever (if that's the actual case) is quite impressive.

[Quirk]

Originally Posted by wizard44

Now, I understand the races are supposed to be difficulty levels, but for a total newcomer to roguelikes, this knowledge is counterintuitive. If a person’s imagination has a secret affinity to be a dwarf or a human, they might want to instinctively select these races without consideration to difficulties.

To be honest, if you've read the source material, you might already have the impression that elves are easy mode, and it's definitely described as such in the manual.

Originally Posted by wizard44

It also is not rather obvious on what skills to get when pursuing a certain build, and trying to properly allocate experience requires quite a bit of research (through either youtube or forum posts) or direct consultation with other users.

Well, there isn't really one correct way to build. Different players will choose different options. Some things work together better than others. One thing I think is a bit awkward with Sil is that heavy early investment in abilities is a bit of a trap for melee characters, and often a new player will do better by investing solely in the skills for the first few hundred feet.

Originally Posted by wizard44

The learning curve can be a tad too difficult for quite a few players to enjoy, though.

You may have experienced a little more difficulty than most, but I would agree that the early levels are a bit brutal in original Sil (Sil-Q has toned down difficulty early, and lifted it a bit in the late game).

There are unfortunately various legacies of Angband past buried in that overly complex keyboard layout. I much prefer Brogue's scheme, but I really don't want to support another set of key bindings, so I've been leaving the controls as they are with Sil-Q despite their somewhat arbitrary and off-putting nature.

If there are other things you can think of that make the game difficult to adjust to, I'd be glad to hear details.