User:Chris/game resources

When designing new monsters for your variant, it is helpful to keep in mind the various resource pools that the character has.

Strategic Resources

Strategic resources can't be recovered very quickly, and therefore loss of one of these resources affects the player's strategy. In theory, nethack has lots of different strategic resources, though most of them are either rarely damaged, trivially fixed, or are prevented by one of the mandatory resistances.

Common Targets

• HP: The main combat resource. Most monsters reduce HP, even if they also target one of the character's other resources. At low levels, HP recovers fairly slowly, so a tough fight can leave the character injured for the next hundred turns or so. At high levels, the HP regeneration rate is so high that HP becomes more of a tactical resource.
• Energy: A major combat resource for spellcasters. Though monsters rarely target this stat directly, casting spells reduces this resource. Again, at low levels this recovers slowly enough that choosing to cast spells has strategic implications. Unlike HP regeneration, a character's intrinsic energy regen rate never becomes so fast that it totally overcomes the effects of casting spells. However, wizards obtain greatly amplified energy regeneration from their quest artifact.
• Experience level: Because the existing drain life attack is resisted by Magic cancellation, and because a single drained level is easy to recover, in practice this is not a very significant form of damage.
• Inventory items: Theft and Item destruction effects target this. Erosion-type attacks also target this, but are generally too weak after the early game.
  • Primary weapon: Loss of the primary weapon can greatly reduce a character's combat power
  • Armor: Most characters are armored to the point that they take very little damage from the average attack. Loss of their best armor can make them many times more fragile in combat.
  • Escape_items: If one of these items is stolen, this can create a situation where the player must carefully kill the thief before they waste the item.
  • Destroy-able items: Potions, scrolls, wands, and even rings are vulnerable to destruction. In vanilla potions and scrolls are unreliable in the late game due to the prevalence of attacks that destroy them. In vanilla wands and rings are more secure due to the relative scarcity of shock damage that bypasses reflection, but they are still risky to rely on.
• Ability scores: Note that ability score damage can be trivially fixed with a unicorn horn (for this reason, some variants remove this power from unicorn horns). In theory, many vanilla monsters target ability scores. However, most such attacks are poison attacks, and poison resistance is mandatory due to the threat of poison instadeaths.
• Life saving: This is effectively the resource that instant death attacks target. Because instant death effects are more common earlier in the game (poison, death magic before MR is acquired), most instant death effects hit characters without Life Saving. Late in the game, not all players choose to equip LS amulets, and since amulets are the only source of Life Saving, making instant death attacks more frequent would further constrain the ascension kit.
• BCU of gear: This is one of the main late-game clocks. The player has a (moderately) finite supply of holy water, after which the character's weapon, luckstone, and bag of holding become liabilities.
• Erosion of gear: Because this is capped at -3, and because late-game gear tends to be naturally resistant, erosion is not really a factor in the late-game.
• To-hit: The ability to hit targets is an important resource. In vanilla this is primarily conferred by weapon enchantment, skill, level, and luck. Many of these resources are attacked in one form or another. However, both luck and level may reach extremely high levels relative to typical monster ACs.
• Damage: The ability to do significant amounts of damage to targets after hitting them is likewise important. In vanilla this is primarily conferred by weapon (base damage, enchantment, and skill). 2x damage artifact weapons have a large effect on this.

Uncommon Targets

• Max HP
• Enchantment of gear
• Character memory
• Grease on gear: Because this protects against YASD from drowning attacks and brainless-ness, many players consider grease extremely important.
• Lizard corpses/Potions of acid
• Nutrition
• Intrinsics: Gremlin attacks target this resource. Since many resistances offer 100% immunity to dangerous attacks, obtaining them is an important part of the game. Other intrinsic like Speed are also extremely powerful.

Unused Targets

These resources exist, and at least some of them could be targeted by attacks, but no vanilla monster directly targets them.

• Luck
• Prayer timeout
• Wishes: This is more of a meta-resource, and it would be hard to target directly, but leftover wishes can be an important source of flexibility for a late-game character.
• Intrinsic AC
• Intrinsic to-hit
• Intrinsic damage
• Encumbrance
• Spell memory: Spellbooks and magic markers are common enough that this is not usually a problem. However, if attacks against this became more common it might prove an important strategic resource.

dNethack-specific resources

• Sanity: In the current dev build, mainly decreases when first engaging certain monsters in melee. However, two dedicated monsters exist which lower it: Daughters of Bedlam (via their melee attack) and Walking Deleriums (via sight). Both these monsters are on the summon nasties list.
  • Madness: In the current dev build, given when engaging certain monsters in melee. At least one madness is needed before sanity loss has any game effect. The more madnesses are contracted, the more critical maintaining high sanity becomes.
  • Drunkenness: Consuming potions of booze raises sanity while increasing a hidden stat (drunkenness). High levels of drunkenness allow monks to practice drunken boxing and serve as the prerequisite for a Binder spirit (Naberius). However, once drunkenness is capped out (at 3 booze per character level) drinking booze can no longer raise sanity above 50%.
  • Potions of Sleeping and Potions of Restore Ability: These restore sanity.
• Insight: Gives both negative and positive effects. Only increases when first slaying certain monsters.

Tactical Resources

• Speed: The ability to take more than one step per one step of your opponent is an important tactical consideration. This enables the player to kite enemies, greatly reducing the damage taken in combat. Monsters that reduce speed target this resource, though few (no?) monsters do this effectively.
• Choke points: Fighting enemies at choke points is another important tactic. Monsters that dig through walls and doors target this resource.
• Cleared rooms: Retreating towards safe territory is another important tactic. Teleportation and level-changing effects target this resource, as does the gradual restocking of the dungeon (avg. 1/70, 1/50, or 1/25).
• Free squares: In order to retreat towards cleared rooms or kite enemies, the character requires clear spaces around them. Summoners (and to a lesser extent, enemies that travel in packs) target this resource.
• Spirit powers: In dNethack, spirit powers are an important tactical resource, and properly managing their cooldowns and deploying each power for maximum effect are important parts of Binder gameplay.
• Pet position: The relative positions of you and your pet are an important tactical consideration for players attempting to make use of their pet. Reloctation traps target this, as do monsters able to temporarily (or permanently?) take a pet out of the fight.
• Visible squares: It is quite important to be able to see enemies coming. Monsters that spread darkened squares target this resource.
• Sneak attacks: Using a Rogue's Backstab attack requires special circumstances. In dnethack at least, this can include traps, darkness, confusion, as well as frightened monsters.
• Monster knowledge of the PC's position: Outside of certain effects (such as Displacement) monsters in vanilla nethack have perfect knowledge of the PCs location.

Dominant Strategies

• Killing monsters: The dominant strategy is to kill every monster the PC encounters. This is driven by multiple considerations:
  • The PC is overwhelmingly strong compared to most monsters, against such monsters combat is not risky.
  • Groups of monsters pose a danger to the PC. If the player fails to kill a monster one on one, they risk the monster attacking later as part of a group.
  • The player may need to retreat from one of the rarer monsters that pose a threat one-on-one. If the player fails to kill weaker monsters, they may find these monsters blocking their retreat, 'waiting' to gang up on them, or 'waiting' to take advantage of their weakened state.
  • Monsters spawn slowly (~1/70, 1/50, or 1/25 turns). Killing them has a meaningful impact on the above.
  • Despite the above, monsters spawn quickly enough that the player will frequently find monsters they failed to kill receive "reinforcements," creating more-dangerous groups of monsters.
  • The PC recovers HP relatively quickly, so any damage the PC takes from a weak monster is unlikely to be strategically meaningful.
  • Monsters are relatively difficult to disengage from and/or avoid; resources for doing so are limited. Use of such resources to 'escape' a weak monster IS likely to be strategically meaningful, such resources should be conserved for use disengaging from strong monsters. Once disengaged from, monsters are relatively likely to seek out the PC as they typically have perfect knowledge of the PC's location.
  • The weaker a PC is, the more important the above concerns become. It is more important to kill the vast majority of monsters, because unkilled monsters are more likely to return in a meaningful way, opportunities for them to do so are more frequent because of the greater number of monsters that must be handled with care, and escape items are more precious because the PC will more frequently be forced to rely on them.

Dominant Resources

• Resistances: Because combat is frequent, and because resistances are extremely powerful, players seek as many resistances as possible to make the PC overwhelmingly powerful vs. as many different monsters as possible.
• Combat damage: Because combat is frequent and to-hit is usually not a problem, high-damage weapons and artifacts are a crucially important resource. The game's balance tends to be dominated by the strongest available weapon.