User:Bluescreenofdeath/Blog - Revision history

Bluescreenofdeath: /* Design principles */

2020-04-30T18:24:54Z

‎Design principles

Bluescreenofdeath: /* Design principles */

2019-12-09T11:45:56Z

‎Design principles

Bluescreenofdeath: /* Design principles */

2019-03-19T09:04:20Z

‎Design principles

Bluescreenofdeath at 18:13, 5 October 2018

2018-10-05T18:13:49Z

Bluescreenofdeath at 09:00, 18 September 2018

2018-09-18T09:00:31Z

Bluescreenofdeath: update the design principles

2018-09-18T07:55:51Z

update the design principles

Bluescreenofdeath: /* Areas required for completion */

2018-03-23T07:55:27Z

‎Areas required for completion

EasterlyIrk: /* Areas required for completion */

2018-03-22T19:48:31Z

‎Areas required for completion

Bluescreenofdeath: /* Design principles */

2018-03-09T10:43:26Z

‎Design principles

Bluescreenofdeath: Added rudimentary SLEX design principles

2018-03-09T10:41:00Z

Added rudimentary SLEX design principles

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 * The monk's main strategy is to punch everything until it dies, and the monk's techniques give even more incentive to play them that way. We have a lot of monsters with dangerous passive attacks, but apart from that there's little incentive for the monk to use something other than fists. They do have a bunch of spellcasting and ranged weapon skills though, so at least it's possible to diversify if the player wants to.
 * Melee is basically a cure-all, it (almost) always works, unlike ranged combat (runs out of ammo, and some monsters are hard to hit with missiles), spellcasting (you don't always have mana, and directional spells rarely hit your target if you're stunned, plus confusion basically shuts down spellcasting completely), wands (limited charges) and pets (they tend to die a lot in the later parts of the game when hostile monsters hit harder and survive many rounds of combat with your pet). Not sure how to go about this; giving ranged attacks too much ammo essentially takes away its chief downside, making attack spells too powerful and/or mana regenerate too quickly means that once you have magic missile, finger of death and fireball at your disposal you're an unstoppable killing machine that can kill everything before it even closes to melee distance, making wands infinitely and too easily rechargeable also makes you unstoppable and additionally makes support wands ultra powerful, and buffing pets even more means that once the player obtains a really powerful one, the only remaining threat will probably be a level teleporter. That being said, since every role (including ones meant to be primarily spellcasters, archers or petkeepers) is capable of melee, I guess melee always being "viable" isn't necessarily a bad thing.
 ==Dungeon overhaul for SLEX==

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 * The actual potion of cyanide, imported from Nethack TNG, would make quaff-testing potions a crapshoot, since it would instakill you. I made it do severe HP damage and drain strength instead, so it's still very bad to get this one when testing potions but at least the player can recover from the ill effects.
 * There is a cloak of death, and it can kill the player when being put on, but it's so rare and the instadeath only triggers 5% of the time, meaning that no player would cite that particular cloak as the reason why wear-testing cloaks is dangerous in SLEX. It is dangerous to wear-test them due to the existence of certain other cloak types, but those other types don't instantly end the game when worn. Granted, the cloak of death does directly violate the no cyanide rule, but a magic resistant or undead or otherwise death-resistant player will survive.
-* The scroll of warping can be a game-ender if the player reads random scrolls early on and gets this one. This will make read-testing scrolls very dangerous until warping is identified; in order to avoid it, a player would always have to drop unknown scrolls near monsters, see whether they pick them up, and then damage the monster and see if that makes them read the scroll, because if the monster warps to a random dungeon level it's much less bad than if a XL5 player character is warped to, say, dungeon level 83. This is actually a rather annoying implementation, but I'm not sure about how to fix this, because being warped to a random level just happens to be the effect of that scroll and it would feel arbitrary if reading it gave something like a "do you want to warp to a random level?" effect instead of the current unconditional warping effect.
+* The scroll of warping used to be a game-ender if the player reads random scrolls early on and gets this one. This made read-testing scrolls very dangerous until warping is identified; in order to avoid it, a player would always have to drop unknown scrolls near monsters, see whether they pick them up, and then damage the monster and see if that makes them read the scroll, because if the monster warps to a random dungeon level it's much less bad than if a XL5 player character is warped to, say, dungeon level 83. It got fixed by changing the scroll to give a "do you want to warp to a random level?" prompt where the player can simply decline if they feel that being warped could end their run.
 '''No Stalling''': The player should not be able to keep taking turns indefinitely without making progress in the game. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)

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 * The actual potion of cyanide, imported from Nethack TNG, would make quaff-testing potions a crapshoot, since it would instakill you. I made it do severe HP damage and drain strength instead, so it's still very bad to get this one when testing potions but at least the player can recover from the ill effects.
 * There is a cloak of death, and it can kill the player when being put on, but it's so rare and the instadeath only triggers 5% of the time, meaning that no player would cite that particular cloak as the reason why wear-testing cloaks is dangerous in SLEX. It is dangerous to wear-test them due to the existence of certain other cloak types, but those other types don't instantly end the game when worn. Granted, the cloak of death does directly violate the no cyanide rule, but a magic resistant or undead or otherwise death-resistant player will survive.
 '''No Stalling''': The player should not be able to keep taking turns indefinitely without making progress in the game. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)

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 * If the player has a bunch of options to choose from, no single option should be so powerful that it completely dwarfs all the other options in every regard. That means for example if there's 20 different weapon types the player could be using, and let's say one of them is a knife does so much damage that a player would always use it over every other weapon even if the player doesn't have the knife skill at all, something is most certainly wrong. A player doing more damage with the knife while restricted at its skill than he'd do with a long sword at master skill? Yeah, now think about what a player with master knife skill can do with the same knife. Every player would seek out that knife, and ignore all long swords or whatever other weapons there are. In a way, the crysknife and tooth of an algolian suntigers are indeed overpowered in SLEX. The former needs to be kept in the player's inventory or it may revert, requiring scrolls of enchant weapon to keep it in working condition, but it's rare to involuntarily drop the knife so this is mostly a non-issue and as a result the crysknife may be too powerful. It also used to be too easily obtainable so I lowered the drop rate of worm teeth. Currently it seems reasonably balanced though; at least I don't see it being used much at all nowadays.
 * No role or race that the player can pick should be so strong that it makes the game too easy. Otherwise, everyone who's "playing to win" would pick that one, making all the hard work I've put into the remaining ones go to waste as they never get played. The monk role and angel race are somewhat guilty in that regard, but as of right now they far from guarantee a win and while the monk may be ultra strong in melee and good at magic, he does lack versatility a bit and may have trouble in certain situations. Angels have been receiving subtle downsides but those don't seem to be crippling enough; some upcoming global changes in the next couple versions may affect the angel race in a way that tones down its overpoweredness though, which would be a good thing, and they're not completely game-breakingly powerful anyway.
-* "Difficulty elements" (for lack of a better term) should have a mechanism that scales their frequency of appearing by the expected effect on game difficulty. That means, the more unfairly difficult a monster is, or the more crippling a trap is on the player's game when triggered, the more rare it should be. For example, let's say we have two level 0 monsters, one of them has a 1d1 shock attack and the other has a 1d1 data delete attack. Shock attacks are slightly annoying, as they will deal damage to a player who doesn't resist shock (or with a low chance, bypass the resistance and damage a resistant player anyway) and have a slight chance of destroying a ring or wand in the player's inventory. Nothing too terribly dangerous. So that monster ("grid bug") is giving a spawn frequency of 20, and will therefore be a common sight in the dungeon. The data delete attack, on the other hand, is the most dangerous and detrimental attack in the entire game; a single hit from it may randomly destroy items from the player's inventory (including stuff like a +7 rustproof Excalibur or a stack of +12 darts, i.e. stuff that can't be replaced), make the player unable to pray for the entire remaining game, reset the player's experience level to 1 and reduce the max HP/Pw by a few hundred in the process, and more similarly game-crippling effects. Being hit by the data delete effect even once can be enough to completely ruin an otherwise promising game, and if it were as common as the previously mentioned shock damage, it would be completely unbalanced. As a result, the monster with the data delete attack ("deleterious bug" - stat-wise completely equivalent to the grid bug but with a data delete attack instead of the shock attack) only has a regular spawn frequency of 1 and also received the uncommon by 2, 3, 5 and 10 flags. This means that not only is the deleterious bug 20 times less likely to be selected compared to the grid bug, it also has to pass a 1 in 2, 1 in 3, 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 chance or it won't be allowed to spawn. In total, it's thus 6000 times less likely to spawn than a grid bug. And that makes it balanced, because while it can still happen that the RNG spawns one, most of the time it won't and the player is thus not constantly in high danger. If one does spawn and hits the player with the attack, it will still be exactly as detrimental, but that's because SLEX is unfair, not unbalanced. Unfair because there's things that can screw over the player through no fault of his own (the deleterious bug could have lurked outside the player's line of sight and gottne a turn when the player rounded a corner). Unbalanced would mean spawning the deleterious bug (and other monsters with the data delete attack) so often that the player would be guaranteed to be hit by it sooner or later and lose the game as a result. Admittedly, it's a fine line, i.e. making a really devastating monster attack too common can very easily destroy game balance, but at least the deleterious bug is sufficiently rare to make this a non-issue.
+* "Difficulty elements" (for lack of a better term) should have a mechanism that scales their frequency of appearing by the expected effect on game difficulty. That means, the more unfairly difficult a monster is, or the more crippling a trap is on the player's game when triggered, the more rare it should be. For example, let's say we have two level 0 monsters, one of them has a 1d1 shock attack and the other has a 1d1 data delete attack. Shock attacks are slightly annoying, as they will deal damage to a player who doesn't resist shock (or with a low chance, bypass the resistance and damage a resistant player anyway) and have a slight chance of destroying a ring or wand in the player's inventory. Nothing too terribly dangerous. So that monster ("grid bug") is giving a spawn frequency of 20, and will therefore be a common sight in the dungeon. The data delete attack, on the other hand, is the most dangerous and detrimental attack in the entire game; a single hit from it may randomly destroy items from the player's inventory (including stuff like a +7 rustproof Excalibur or a stack of +12 darts, i.e. stuff that can't be replaced), make the player unable to pray for the entire remaining game, reset the player's experience level to 1 and reduce the max HP/Pw by a few hundred in the process, and more similarly game-crippling effects. Being hit by the data delete effect even once can be enough to completely ruin an otherwise promising game, and if it were as common as the previously mentioned shock damage, it would be completely unbalanced. As a result, the monster with the data delete attack ("deleterious bug" - stat-wise completely equivalent to the grid bug but with a data delete attack instead of the shock attack) only has a regular spawn frequency of 1 and also received the uncommon by 2, 3, 5 and 10 flags. This means that not only is the deleterious bug 20 times less likely to be selected compared to the grid bug, it also has to pass a 1 in 2, 1 in 3, 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 chance or it won't be allowed to spawn. In total, it's thus 6000 times less likely to spawn than a grid bug. And that makes it balanced, because while it can still happen that the RNG spawns one, most of the time it won't and the player is thus not constantly in high danger. If one does spawn and hits the player with the attack, it will still be exactly as detrimental, but that's because SLEX is unfair, not unbalanced. Unfair because there's things that can screw over the player through no fault of his own (the deleterious bug could have lurked outside the player's line of sight and gotten a turn when the player rounded a corner). Unbalanced would mean spawning the deleterious bug (and other monsters with the data delete attack) so often that the player would be guaranteed to be hit by it sooner or later and lose the game as a result. Admittedly, it's a fine line, i.e. making a really devastating monster attack too common can very easily destroy game balance, but at least the deleterious bug is sufficiently rare to make this a non-issue.
 * Another example would be the nasty traps. These traps don't reveal themselves and don't give a message when triggered, and quite a bunch of them give annoying or crippling interface screw effects. Many players say they're unbalanced, but they're not; they're unfair. The unfairness comes from the fact that certain mechanisms make it so that the player can't ever have a 100% guarantee to find them in advance, and that's by design. After all, if you can just detect all the traps before you trigger them, why even have them? We'd have ToME's "press X to not die" problem: in that game, trap detection is guaranteed to detect all traps in the radius, so if you always detect traps before entering a new area (and you can do that via rechargeable rods, spells, or the antimagic abilities) and don't play carelessly, you'll never trigger any trap, period. In ToME, that's a good thing, because traps aren't balanced there. ToME has a trap called the speed drain trap, and if you trigger it, a random piece of your equipment has its + to speed permanently reduced, even if it's an artifact, and since every artifact can be generated only once, the loss is permanent and unrecoverable. ToME also has curse weapon and curse armor traps, which will permanently transform the affected item into a worthless cursed item, even if the item used to be an artifact, meaning that this too is a permanent effect. And ToME's trap frequency system makes those three ultra-crippling traps common enough that if you don't detect traps and just suck it up when you trigger one, you will definitely end up triggering enough of these to absolutely trash all your gear to hell and beyond. SLEX's traps, on the other hand, use a similar rarity mechanism as the monsters. Let's take for example the death trap: this trap has a 1 in 20 chance of killing the player instantly when triggered, unless the player has magic resistance, is undead or otherwise resists touch of death. Very evil, and if that trap were common, it would turn the entire game into a crapshoot. But if a random trap is made and the game rolls a death trap, it has to pass an additional 1 in 100 chance to be allowed to actually make one, and as a result, the death trap is very rarely seen outside of a bunch of special levels where they're guaranteed. Those special levels also come late in the game where the player will most probably have at least one source of magic resistance anyway, and likely an amulet of life saving to boot. As a result, the death trap is well balanced since it's very rare for it to actually end the game. If it does happen that a level 5 character dies 2000 turns into the game because a random death trap was spawned and instakilled them, it's unfair, but not unbalanced. The player just had very bad luck. If death traps were so common that you'd have to search 10 times before taking every step or risk a random instadeath, that would be unbalanced. But currently, data collected from all the games that have been played suggests that death traps are fine :)

← Older revision		Revision as of 09:00, 18 September 2018
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		+	==On balance versus fairness==
		+
		+	I'm fully aware of the fact that many players consider SLEX to be unbalanced. And also some who never played it but have only read about it and played other variants will probably happily say that SLEX is unbalanced. But I think what they really mean is that SLEX is unfair. Because at least with my definition of balance, SLEX is a well-balanced game. Of course it's not perfectly balanced, and whenever I add new stuff there's a good chance it will be unbalanced at first, but that's why playtesting is required and patches are made. When I see others play my game, I always try to evaluate game balance in the progress and think about ways to improve it if I feel that it's not working correctly. But I guess I should define what makes a game "balanced" in my book.
		+
		+	* First and foremost, the game doesn't necessarily have to be winnable 100% with perfect play in order to be balanced. At least that's not the premise of SLEX. Those who consider a game where the player can lose through no fault of their own to be innately unbalanced will probably also find SLEX unbalanced no matter what, but then again they'd have to consider vanilla NetHack unbalanced too because sometimes the game just happens to make a dart trap or spiked pit and roll that it ends your game when you trigger it. Or that a random wand in Sokoban is a wand of death and a hill orc spawns on top of it and shoots you before you even have the chance of knowing that the orc is holding the wand. Or of course, that a chameleon in Sokoban decides to become an arch-lich that then teleports to you and instakills you with no warning. If the fact that there's a 1 in 40000 chance for a random trap in SLEX to be a death trap that has a 1 in 20 chance to instakill you when triggered is supposedly unbalanced (despite being extremely rare), then the above three examples in vanilla NetHack (which are all way more common than the SLEX example too) are also unbalanced :P
		+	* If the player has a bunch of options to choose from, no single option should be so powerful that it completely dwarfs all the other options in every regard. That means for example if there's 20 different weapon types the player could be using, and let's say one of them is a knife does so much damage that a player would always use it over every other weapon even if the player doesn't have the knife skill at all, something is most certainly wrong. A player doing more damage with the knife while restricted at its skill than he'd do with a long sword at master skill? Yeah, now think about what a player with master knife skill can do with the same knife. Every player would seek out that knife, and ignore all long swords or whatever other weapons there are. In a way, the crysknife and tooth of an algolian suntigers are indeed overpowered in SLEX. The former needs to be kept in the player's inventory or it may revert, requiring scrolls of enchant weapon to keep it in working condition, but it's rare to involuntarily drop the knife so this is mostly a non-issue and as a result the crysknife may be too powerful. It also used to be too easily obtainable so I lowered the drop rate of worm teeth. Currently it seems reasonably balanced though; at least I don't see it being used much at all nowadays.
		+	* No role or race that the player can pick should be so strong that it makes the game too easy. Otherwise, everyone who's "playing to win" would pick that one, making all the hard work I've put into the remaining ones go to waste as they never get played. The monk role and angel race are somewhat guilty in that regard, but as of right now they far from guarantee a win and while the monk may be ultra strong in melee and good at magic, he does lack versatility a bit and may have trouble in certain situations. Angels have been receiving subtle downsides but those don't seem to be crippling enough; some upcoming global changes in the next couple versions may affect the angel race in a way that tones down its overpoweredness though, which would be a good thing, and they're not completely game-breakingly powerful anyway.
		+	* "Difficulty elements" (for lack of a better term) should have a mechanism that scales their frequency of appearing by the expected effect on game difficulty. That means, the more unfairly difficult a monster is, or the more crippling a trap is on the player's game when triggered, the more rare it should be. For example, let's say we have two level 0 monsters, one of them has a 1d1 shock attack and the other has a 1d1 data delete attack. Shock attacks are slightly annoying, as they will deal damage to a player who doesn't resist shock (or with a low chance, bypass the resistance and damage a resistant player anyway) and have a slight chance of destroying a ring or wand in the player's inventory. Nothing too terribly dangerous. So that monster ("grid bug") is giving a spawn frequency of 20, and will therefore be a common sight in the dungeon. The data delete attack, on the other hand, is the most dangerous and detrimental attack in the entire game; a single hit from it may randomly destroy items from the player's inventory (including stuff like a +7 rustproof Excalibur or a stack of +12 darts, i.e. stuff that can't be replaced), make the player unable to pray for the entire remaining game, reset the player's experience level to 1 and reduce the max HP/Pw by a few hundred in the process, and more similarly game-crippling effects. Being hit by the data delete effect even once can be enough to completely ruin an otherwise promising game, and if it were as common as the previously mentioned shock damage, it would be completely unbalanced. As a result, the monster with the data delete attack ("deleterious bug" - stat-wise completely equivalent to the grid bug but with a data delete attack instead of the shock attack) only has a regular spawn frequency of 1 and also received the uncommon by 2, 3, 5 and 10 flags. This means that not only is the deleterious bug 20 times less likely to be selected compared to the grid bug, it also has to pass a 1 in 2, 1 in 3, 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 chance or it won't be allowed to spawn. In total, it's thus 6000 times less likely to spawn than a grid bug. And that makes it balanced, because while it can still happen that the RNG spawns one, most of the time it won't and the player is thus not constantly in high danger. If one does spawn and hits the player with the attack, it will still be exactly as detrimental, but that's because SLEX is unfair, not unbalanced. Unfair because there's things that can screw over the player through no fault of his own (the deleterious bug could have lurked outside the player's line of sight and gottne a turn when the player rounded a corner). Unbalanced would mean spawning the deleterious bug (and other monsters with the data delete attack) so often that the player would be guaranteed to be hit by it sooner or later and lose the game as a result. Admittedly, it's a fine line, i.e. making a really devastating monster attack too common can very easily destroy game balance, but at least the deleterious bug is sufficiently rare to make this a non-issue.
		+	* Another example would be the nasty traps. These traps don't reveal themselves and don't give a message when triggered, and quite a bunch of them give annoying or crippling interface screw effects. Many players say they're unbalanced, but they're not; they're unfair. The unfairness comes from the fact that certain mechanisms make it so that the player can't ever have a 100% guarantee to find them in advance, and that's by design. After all, if you can just detect all the traps before you trigger them, why even have them? We'd have ToME's "press X to not die" problem: in that game, trap detection is guaranteed to detect all traps in the radius, so if you always detect traps before entering a new area (and you can do that via rechargeable rods, spells, or the antimagic abilities) and don't play carelessly, you'll never trigger any trap, period. In ToME, that's a good thing, because traps aren't balanced there. ToME has a trap called the speed drain trap, and if you trigger it, a random piece of your equipment has its + to speed permanently reduced, even if it's an artifact, and since every artifact can be generated only once, the loss is permanent and unrecoverable. ToME also has curse weapon and curse armor traps, which will permanently transform the affected item into a worthless cursed item, even if the item used to be an artifact, meaning that this too is a permanent effect. And ToME's trap frequency system makes those three ultra-crippling traps common enough that if you don't detect traps and just suck it up when you trigger one, you will definitely end up triggering enough of these to absolutely trash all your gear to hell and beyond. SLEX's traps, on the other hand, use a similar rarity mechanism as the monsters. Let's take for example the death trap: this trap has a 1 in 20 chance of killing the player instantly when triggered, unless the player has magic resistance, is undead or otherwise resists touch of death. Very evil, and if that trap were common, it would turn the entire game into a crapshoot. But if a random trap is made and the game rolls a death trap, it has to pass an additional 1 in 100 chance to be allowed to actually make one, and as a result, the death trap is very rarely seen outside of a bunch of special levels where they're guaranteed. Those special levels also come late in the game where the player will most probably have at least one source of magic resistance anyway, and likely an amulet of life saving to boot. As a result, the death trap is well balanced since it's very rare for it to actually end the game. If it does happen that a level 5 character dies 2000 turns into the game because a random death trap was spawned and instakilled them, it's unfair, but not unbalanced. The player just had very bad luck. If death traps were so common that you'd have to search 10 times before taking every step or risk a random instadeath, that would be unbalanced. But currently, data collected from all the games that have been played suggests that death traps are fine :)
		+
		+	There could probably be more stuff added to this paragraph but that's all I can think of for now.
		+
	==Design principles==		==Design principles==

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 '''No 100% guarantee to win''' - If it's possible for a sufficiently skilled player to reach a point where they can be pretty sure they'll win most of the time, we have to fix that by making a bunch of random game-ending things that can happen to them unpredictably and entirely without warning, so that they never know whether they can win or not, no matter how good at the game they are. (Credits go to jonadab for saying this, and it's actually entirely true.)
 * There should always be monsters capable of harming the player in nasty ways; full immunity to the most dangerous monster attacks should be unattainable.
-* There should never be a 100% guarantee to avoid nasty traps; this is achieved by making it so that traps can generate invisible in a way that cannot be made visible no matter what, so if there is an inventoryless trap on a square that randomly happens to be invisible and undetectable, there is no way for the player to avoid it other than dumb luck (i.e. randomly deciding not to step on that square).
+* There should never be a 100% guarantee to avoid nasty traps; this is achieved by making it so that traps can generate invisible in a way that cannot be made visible no matter what, so if there is an inventoryless trap on a square that randomly happens to be invisible and undetectable, there is no way for the player to avoid it other than dumb luck (i.e. randomly deciding not to step on that square). Also, traps have a difficulty now that is set for each individual trap on generation; deeper in the dungeon this will be higher, and it affects the chances that searching or detection attempts uncover them.
 '''The Consumable/Renewable Principle''': When consumable and renewable resources provide similar effects, the effects of the consumable resources should generally be stronger. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
 * Some spells are just way too strong, e.g. identify or dig. I've weakened many spells that have wands/scrolls/potions with comparable effects, sometimes spectacularly so. And in some cases, the consumables got boosted instead, e.g. knock or wizard lock will only fiddle with locks while the wands of opening and locking can raze or create wall tiles, respectively.
 '''The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything''': Provide non-standard behavior in every conceivable situation where the player might expect non-standard behavior. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
 '''Not Too Many Unfair Deaths''': Instadeath from poison attacks/spikes/what have you should be so rare that you can theoretically play through the entire game and win without having the appropriate resistance. These instadeaths should not be eliminated completely though, so as to keep the incentive to gain the resistance.
 '''No Interface Screw Deaths''': The player should not get instakilled by a single typo (note that deaths related to actual interface screw traps are fully intentional and do not fall under this rule).
@@ Line 21: / Line 24: @@
 '''No Cyanide Rule''': No item should, if use-tested in reasonable circumstances, be game-ending. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
 * The actual potion of cyanide, imported from Nethack TNG, would make quaff-testing potions a crapshoot, since it would instakill you. I made it do severe HP damage and drain strength instead, so it's still very bad to get this one when testing potions but at least the player can recover from the ill effects.
-* There is a cloak of death, and it can kill the player when being put on, but it's so rare and the instadeath only triggers 5% of the time, meaning that no player would cite that particular cloak as the reason why wear-testing cloaks is dangerous in SLEX. It is dangerous to wear-test them due to the existence of certain other cloak types, but those other types don't instantly end the game when worn.
+* There is a cloak of death, and it can kill the player when being put on, but it's so rare and the instadeath only triggers 5% of the time, meaning that no player would cite that particular cloak as the reason why wear-testing cloaks is dangerous in SLEX. It is dangerous to wear-test them due to the existence of certain other cloak types, but those other types don't instantly end the game when worn. Granted, the cloak of death does directly violate the no cyanide rule, but a magic resistant or undead or otherwise death-resistant player will survive.
 '''No Stalling''': The player should not be able to keep taking turns indefinitely without making progress in the game. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
 * Several in-game clocks neatly accomplish this. Monster spawn frequency slowly goes up as time passes, and the minimum level difficulty also goes up over time, so if the player is still procrastinating on dungeon level 1 after 100 000 turns, the effective level difficulty will be 30, i.e. a value that would be about the average level difficulty you'd get when entering Gehennom. This means that the player who farms the first few dungeon levels will eventually see the same high-level monsters that would normally be encountered much deeper in the dungeon.
 * There's a randomized amount of turns for the "ascension turn limit". Going over that limit causes random bad stuff to happen every once in a while, usually annoying status effects like stun or hallu but culminating with random disintegration and destroy armor/weapon effects. And the longer the player procrastinates, the more frequently those bad effects will occur. This means that the player should work towards their goal (i.e. ascension) from the outset, since altar farming for hundreds of thousands of turns may result in running out of time later.
 '''Keystroke Consistency''': Entering the same keystrokes should always do the same thing, independent of context. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
@@ Line 35: / Line 39: @@
 '''Balance through diversity''': Instead of painfully trying to fine-tune the balance of every single thing, focus on adding more variety to the game, and nerf or buff obviously unbalanced things appropriately.
 * If an item, trap, monster, artifact, playable role/race etc. turns out to be unbalanced, removing it from the game entirely is the last resort and shall never be done, except in really extreme conditions. In the case of doubt, it's always possible to salvage the idea by making changes to reign in its overpoweredness or alleviate its uselessness. Removal is the tool of the devil!
 '''No one-trick ponies''': If the player is capable of waltzing through the entire game using one single strategy on every monster in every battle, it's boring. The player should have to mix tactics and use a variety of skills, weapons, spells etc. depending on the monsters they face.
 * The monk's main strategy is to punch everything until it dies, and the monk's techniques give even more incentive to play them that way. We have a lot of monsters with dangerous passive attacks, but apart from that there's little incentive for the monk to use something other than fists. They do have a bunch of spellcasting and ranged weapon skills though, so at least it's possible to diversify if the player wants to.
 ==Dungeon overhaul for SLEX==

← Older revision		Revision as of 07:55, 23 March 2018
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	Note from Riker, '''NOT''' from amy: elder priest now has some stupid reflection + magic resistance + half phys cloak or something weird and powerful like that. unfortunately, the elder priest has been slexified and now is like 99% gonna crash yer game when he kills you (multiple times). So, yeah, don't do that. --[[User:EasterlyIrk\|EasterlyIrk]] ([[User talk:EasterlyIrk\|talk]]) 19:48, 22 March 2018 (UTC)		Note from Riker, '''NOT''' from amy: elder priest now has some stupid reflection + magic resistance + half phys cloak or something weird and powerful like that. unfortunately, the elder priest has been slexified and now is like 99% gonna crash yer game when he kills you (multiple times). So, yeah, don't do that. --[[User:EasterlyIrk\|EasterlyIrk]] ([[User talk:EasterlyIrk\|talk]]) 19:48, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
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		+	Comment from Amy: It's true that the elder priest will screw you over even if you have a full ascension kit, at least if you allow him to melee you, but the game should not crash. If it does, REPORT THE ERROR!!! The worst thing you can do is get a crash bug and keep it to yourself, because that way it might never get fixed. GUYS, REPORT CRASH BUGS TO ME --[[User:Bluescreenofdeath\|Bluescreenofdeath]] ([[User talk:Bluescreenofdeath\|talk]]) 07:55, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

	=== Extra dungeon branches ===		=== Extra dungeon branches ===

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:48, 22 March 2018
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	Imbuing the amulet should also be a junethack achievement, but imbuing the bell should probably not be one since it's not all that much more work compared to getting the bell in the first place. However, defeating the elder priest should be an achievement. When the player picks up the Amulet of Yendor for the first time and has never lifesaved up to that point, they should be given a 1-up, and imbuing the amulet should give a 1-up as long as the player lifesaved at most once up to that point.		Imbuing the amulet should also be a junethack achievement, but imbuing the bell should probably not be one since it's not all that much more work compared to getting the bell in the first place. However, defeating the elder priest should be an achievement. When the player picks up the Amulet of Yendor for the first time and has never lifesaved up to that point, they should be given a 1-up, and imbuing the amulet should give a 1-up as long as the player lifesaved at most once up to that point.
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		+
		+	Note from Riker, '''NOT''' from amy: elder priest now has some stupid reflection + magic resistance + half phys cloak or something weird and powerful like that. unfortunately, the elder priest has been slexified and now is like 99% gonna crash yer game when he kills you (multiple times). So, yeah, don't do that. --[[User:EasterlyIrk\|EasterlyIrk]] ([[User talk:EasterlyIrk\|talk]]) 19:48, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

	=== Extra dungeon branches ===		=== Extra dungeon branches ===

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:41, 9 March 2018
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		+	==Design principles==
		+
		+	Yes, they do actually exist in [[SLASH'EM Extended]] - contrary to popular belief, this variant doesn't simply implement every patch that will run, and Amy doesn't put every idea anyone has ever had into the game.
		+
		+	'''No 100% guarantee to win''' - If it's possible for a sufficiently skilled player to reach a point where they can be pretty sure they'll win most of the time, we have to fix that by making a bunch of random game-ending things that can happen to them unpredictably and entirely without warning, so that they never know whether they can win or not, no matter how good at the game they are. (Credits go to jonadab for saying this, and it's actually entirely true.)
		+	* There should always be monsters capable of harming the player in nasty ways; full immunity to the most dangerous monster attacks should be unattainable.
		+	* There should never be a 100% guarantee to avoid nasty traps; this is achieved by making it so that traps can generate invisible in a way that cannot be made visible no matter what, so if there is an inventoryless trap on a square that randomly happens to be invisible and undetectable, there is no way for the player to avoid it other than dumb luck (i.e. ranodmly deciding not to step on that square).
		+
		+	'''The Consumable/Renewable Principle''': When consumable and renewable resources provide similar effects, the effects of the consumable resources should generally be stronger. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
		+	* Some spells are just way too strong, e.g. identify or dig. I've weakened many spells that have wands/scrolls/potions with comparable effects, sometimes spectacularly so. And in some cases, the consumables got boosted instead, e.g. knock or wizard lock will only fiddle with locks while the wands of opening and locking can raze or create wall tiles, respectively.
		+
		+	'''The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything''': Provide non-standard behavior in every conceivable situation where the player might expect non-standard behavior. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
		+
		+	'''Not Too Many Unfair Deaths''': Instadeath from poison attacks/spikes/what have you should be so rare that you can theoretically play through the entire game and win without having the appropriate resistance. These instadeaths should not be eliminated completely though, so as to keep the incentive to gain the resistance.
		+
		+	'''No Interface Screw Deaths''': The player should not get instakilled by a single typo (note that deaths related to actual interface screw traps are fully intentional and do not fall under this rule).
		+	* Accidentally spacebaring out of the prompt when you selected finger of death as the spell you want to cast will never make the spell go in . direction even if that was the one used last.
		+	* Lava and other perilous types of terrain require a full "yes" to step into. Also, falling into lava without fire resistance is no longer an instadeath unless the player's max HP is very low.
		+	* Cockatrices and other sources of petrification always give the player 7 turns to cure the condition. To compensate for this, lizard corpses are always used up when eaten, preventing the player from using the same corpse 4 or so times.
		+
		+	'''No Cyanide Rule''': No item should, if use-tested in reasonable circumstances, be game-ending. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
		+	* The actual potion of cyanide, imported from Nethack TNG, would make quaff-testing potions a crapshoot, since it would instakill you. I made it do severe HP damage and drain strength instead, so it's still very bad to get this one when testing potions but at least the player can recover from the ill effects.
		+	* There is a cloak of death, and it can kill the player when being put on, but it's so rare and the instadeath only triggers 5% of the time, meaning that no player would cite that particular cloak as the reason why wear-testing cloaks is dangerous in SLEX. It is dangerous to wear-test them due to the existence of certain other cloak types, but those other types don't instantly end the game when worn.
		+
		+	'''No Stalling''': The player should not be able to keep taking turns indefinitely without making progress in the game. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
		+	* Several in-game clocks neatly accomplish this. Monster spawn frequency slowly goes up as time passes, and the minimum level difficulty also goes up over time, so if the player is still procrastinating on dungeon level 1 after 100 000 turns, the effective level difficulty will be 30, i.e. a value that would be about the average level difficulty you'd get when entering Gehennom. This means that the player who farms the first few dungeon levels will eventually see the same high-level monsters that would normally be encountered much deeper in the dungeon.
		+	* There's a randomized amount of turns for the "ascension turn limit". Going over that limit causes random bad stuff to happen every once in a while, usually annoying status effects like stun or hallu but culminating with random disintegration and destroy armor/weapon effects. And the longer the player procrastinates, the more frequently those bad effects will occur. This means that the player should work towards their goal (i.e. ascension) from the outset, since altar farming for hundreds of thousands of turns may result in running out of time later.
		+
		+	'''Keystroke Consistency''': Entering the same keystrokes should always do the same thing, independent of context. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
		+	* When zapping a directional spell, the player expects a direction prompt and will often hit a direction button without a second thought. Vanilla's "You fail to cast the spell correctly" without a means to harmlessly dispel the direction button very egregiously violates this, since I lost count how many times I lost a turn moving into the monster I want to zap my attack spell at, or hitting . when casting healing and the game interpreting it as "wait for one turn". For that reason, a --More-- prompt has been added. It can be turned off, for those players who prefer fiddling with the MSGTYPE option instead.
		+
		+	'''High Headroom''': When the player faces a strategic problem, they are not punished heavily for picking a single suboptimal choice. (quoted from aosdict's design principles)
		+	* There are a bunch of escape items that were specifically added to the game to make sure "always prevent getting cornered at all costs" isn't the only acceptable strategy. Also, greatly reduced risk of item destruction allows the player to always have an escape item (scroll of phase door, wand of digging, potion of full healing etc.) out in the open without the near guarantee to lose it two or three levels into Gehennom due to the hundreds of fire traps (slight exaggeration but you really can't have a scroll of teleportation out in vanilla Gehennom because you WILL lose it).
		+
		+	'''Balance through diversity''': Instead of painfully trying to fine-tune the balance of every single thing, focus on adding more variety to the game, and nerf or buff obviously unbalanced things appropriately.
		+	* If an item, trap, monster, artifact, playable role/race etc. turns out to be unbalanced, removing it from the game entirely is the last resort and shall never be done, except in really extreme conditions. In the case of doubt, it's always possible to salvage the idea by making changes to reign in its overpoweredness or alleviate its uselessness. Removal is the tool of the devil!
		+
		+	'''No one-trick ponies''': If the player is capable of waltzing through the entire game using one single strategy on every monster in every battle, it's boring. The player should have to mix tactics and use a variety of skills, weapons, spells etc. depending on the monsters they face.
		+	* The monk's main strategy is to punch everything until it dies, and the monk's techniques give even more incentive to play them that way. We have a lot of monsters with dangerous passive attacks, but apart from that there's little incentive for the monk to use something other than fists. They do have a bunch of spellcasting and ranged weapon skills though, so at least it's possible to diversify if the player wants to.
		+
	==Dungeon overhaul for SLEX==		==Dungeon overhaul for SLEX==