Re: CF: Direction, maps and balancing

[David Sundqvist <>]

On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Peter Mardahl wrote:

> > On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Mark Wedel wrote:
> 
> 
> There've been a lot of objections to the imbalance between monsters
> and player characters, with talk of bringing players and monsters
> to more of a parity level.

Well, there are two parts to this.

The first is the question of having a parity between the actual variables.
This is something I think we should do either way. Monsters and players
should have the same variables and abilities for hp, sp, regeneration,
etc, and they should be used the same way. This is mainly for code
simplicity and archetype readability, to avoid bugs caused by different
behaviour. In the cases where the needed abilities do not overlap,
separate variables should be used, and reuse avoided.

The other part is the actual contents of the variables. This depends on
the direction we want to take. The current system could be emulated well
enough within a corrected variable framework.

> I actually prefer the current system:
> 
> 1)  It would be very frustrating for me to play with characters who move
>     slowly all the time.  When I press a key, I pretty much want my
>     character to move right then.  I don't want to:
>     press a key
>     wait
>     character moves
>     press a key again
>     wait....
> 
>     This doesn't strike me as fun.  Play with a character which is
>     heavily loaded:  it's very frustrating.
>
> 2)  Monsters which can move as fast as a player could POTENTIALLY move
>     are too fast for a human to react reasonably to.  Anyone been up against
>     a speed 1.0 monster which moves does run-hit?  They're damned hard to
>     fight.  By the time you can react, they've dodged....  you end up
>     flailing about uselessly.

Well, think about how the poor monsters must feel :). But I agree, a too
slow response time isnt wanted. Too fast isnt that good either tho. I
rather agree with Marks assessment with speed 1.0 on an unencumbered
normal human. It could be a little bit slower during combat and a bit
faster during travel, if there was a good way to do that, like a real
'run' capability that will make the character move faster but unarmed or
something.

On the topic of fast monsters I sorta like those fast hit'n'run types
since they're sortof a challange. 

But the problem isnt really in the movement speed. It should be a bit more
in parity, imo, but the average unencumbered player should probably be a
little bit faster than the average monster. The problem lies mainly in
attack speed. A good player can, for example, take out a hill giant at a
pretty low level by waiting 'til it moves, run-hit-run, wait 'til it
moves, run-hit-run, etc.
 
> It doesn't bother me that a strong player can dogmeatize kobolds:  that
> same player gets little to no reward for doing that, so I believe it
> is balanced.

Experiencewise that is, yes. When a player gets up to the point where he
can kill a bit larger monsters without a problem, it does become a balance
problem, because those monsters have inventory. A nice way to get money is
by finding a place with a lot of skeletons and generators (raffle_1, for
example). Run around for an hour or two killing skeletons and you can
easily collect several thousand platinum in treasure (money isnt a
serious problem for any experienced player after getting to a reasonable
level 10). This in turn leads to money being rather worthless as actual
reward for completing dungeons or quests, and instead we get artifact
inflation. The ease of obtaining money also leads to the ability to go on
shopping sprees, and rapidly improving the characters ac, armour, spell
knowledge and ability scores, and 'treasure' in stores has to be balanced
through rarity rather than pricing, which in turn leads to annoyance by
having to run around looking for items you want.

So, by way of a connected chain of events, the ease of dogmeatizing
monsters lead to a balance problem, and a lack of control over pricing and
one of the possible reward types becomes useless and difficult to balance.

It also leads to a difficulty in creating balanced maps; I'm sure the
creator of the raffle maps didnt have the slightest idea that the best
treasure in the map would actually be the large number of skeletons and
zombies (giants are also fairly nice if you can kill many of them. Lots of
experience points and gold (a priest of mostrai can easily go from level 7
to level 16 with lots of money with just holy word and holy orb with a
couple of hours on the giants level)).

Things would be a lot easier to balance if monsters were more on par with
players.

> How about a slight mod allowing for a monster to instantly try to hit a player
> who steps into a square next to them, say, perhaps if they have more than
> half their speed?

That would definitely be an improvement (and just that would probably make
monsters several times more dangerous than they are currently). I'd prefer
a separate weapon and movement speed for monsters too tho, since it would
be easier to tune to balance.

> Well, players CAN survive a few blows right now.  When I'm using a new char,
> I go up against kobolds, and I can usually manage to not get killed, even
> using a wizard in dagger-slash mode.

Well, from kobolds, yes. From a monster with a weapon, unlikely. This
again ties into wether or not we change movement speed a bit and weapon
speed more. As you say, reaction time is a factor. A player should have
time enough to realize that 'Argh, this is tougher than me' and run
away, rather than 'Argh, I died.'. 
 
> I disagree strongly with this.  Swords are MUCH more effective weapons
> overall than daggers:  damage/time should be higher, reflecting this fact.
> Otherwise, I'll use my +4 dagger of rule instead of a sword.

Yes, of course there should be a difference. A sword will be much more
effective (probably around 2 times the damage/time ratio of a dagger),
but the speed difference should also be noticable. 

/David

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