Why "it's a roguelike, it's not meant to be fair" is silly

Dredmor is, superficially, a roguelike, in how it is built. It is also a successful game. This bears consideration.

Dredmor deaths aren't as funny as deaths in other roguelikes, so losing is less fun. You won't get polymorphed into a mouse while climbing down stairs, knocked out by your own inventory, and eaten by a fox. You won't die after an enraged conservative punches one of your limbs off while you are playing a guitar. When deaths are really fun and interesting, there is a lot more to be said for allowing the RNG to screw the player over.

Dredmor is far more mainstream and predictable. A lot more people play it, including people who would get rather pissed off by dying as much as they would if they might meet a bronze collosus right after they start off with barely any useful gear.

If you want to look at another set of successful roguelike games, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon comes to mind, which is far more forgiving than Dungeons of Dredmor. Although some people (like me) really do enjoy games like Liberal Crime Squad and Nethack, the vast majority do not. Dungeons of Dredmor is already dangerously over toward the unforgiving extreme. It'll be tenuous to keep it successful if you make it much more so.

 

I'm not really sure what you're getting at Kaidelong. Are you warning against Dungeons of Dredmor becoming more like a true roguelike? Because with the addition of farmable wizardlands -- and eventually specific wizardlands you can raid for specific loot -- it's kind of going in the opposite direction. I agree with you though that DoD is just wonderful the way it is and that if people want a brutal roguelike, they'd be better served by playing a brutal roguelike.

DoD is kind of slowly becoming more of a roguelike-like (oh no, don't eat my shield!) sandbox roleplaying game, especially with the modding community that rose around it.

I think the best way to satisfy everyone would be the eventual inclusion of conducts, like in Nethack.

 

The way I see it, Dredmor is not 'pure' anything (except silly, maybe). It's a roguelike but it takes ideas and inspiration from across the whole RPG genre. It's almost like the middle ground between, say Nethack and Torchlight. In a way, I think Dredmor sits best as a sort of "Baby's First Roguelike" in that it's accessible, fun and it's easy to get into. You're not having to remember what symbols mean or anything, you've got it visually in front of you.

But even then, Dredmor is not the most transparent game. It isn't clear from the description of potions exactly what they do, and that also goes for skills. Unless you're using out-of-game resources, a lot of what's going on is not clear.

Still, I don't think it's supposed to be 'fair', but I think Gaslamp have tried to make it relatively fair - first Krong is always a 'Pleased', for example - whilst increasing the diversity of 'fair' and 'unfair' enemies with each patch and expansion. We've just had an enemy that, bugged or intentional, can take down very well-protected characters on Level 5 in no time at all, as an example. In some Wizardlands, we have levers that drop two powerful enemies that take you down in a few hits at most (at least at low levels). The previous expansion introduced caltrop traps, the single most annoying *censored* traps to date. They're not fair, either. Heck, the use of RNG is pretty unfair as well by its very nature.

 

That, just that.

Of course the words "it's a roguelike, it's not meant to be fair" are silly. And they are silly because on some level, games are supposed to be fair. Even in Nethack, which people agree isn't really "fair", is fair on some level because you can prepare for the "unfair" stuff and that makes it possible to survive. And even though the randomness of potions/scrolls/whatever isn't "fair" and the fact that you can't see whether something is cursed or not is also "unfair", the game can still be won, and there are things you can do to get around these issues. Of course there's also the possibility of getting screwed with the RNG, but let's be honest, that is a possibility in every game where RNG is allowed to do things without being chained to a wall.

If anything, the word "fair" should be changed to "easy", and what should be said is "it's a roguelike, it's not meant to be easy". Because games of that genre aren't supposed to be easy, they are meant to be challenging. How challenging are they supposed to be depends on the game; DoD is on the fairly low part of the difficulty spectrum, and it's really not that hard outside of the highest difficulty unless you either get screwed by the RNG or don't know how to play turn-based games. Yes, there are enemies that are difficult to win against if you aren't prepared for it. Yes, there are named monsters which can horribly rape you in melee if you aren't prepared to fight them off. Yes, there are traps that can kill you faster than you can say "oops". Yes, there are potions with vague descriptions that don't give you much unless you learn what stuff does.

But DoD still isn't "unfair", it merely isn't the easiest nor the most intuitive game in the world, and the words "it's a roguelike, it's not meant to be fair" are said in response to people who say that the game is unfair when they experience a slight bump in difficulty.
Rutabagas and other such monsters can wreck a character in just one attack? They are getting changed to stop being an issue, and even with that it's still possible never to get hit by one (I would know because I never was).
Some potions being detrimental to your character and it not being marked? At least they stay consistent, it's not difficult to remember which potions do bad things to you, and with most of them you don't even have to try to know they are bad if you have an elementary knowledge of either Latin or chemistry (I don't know about the rest of you, but for me that was covered in middle school).
Levers in the wizardlands spawn evil clones that destroy your character in short order? With almost every single lever doing that, it's clear that the next one will be the same, so just heal and buff yourself before pulling that lever, or just don't pull them - it's not like you can't get that experience later with some safer enemies.
Self-replicating traps utterly wreck characters and/or zoos? They're getting changed precisely because of that, so it wasn't intended.
There is a cursed weapon that inflicts bad stuff on you? You can unequip it freely, so why the heck do you insist on using it when you know it will do that.
Named monsters maim you in two hits? Stop trying to engage them in melee and make some use of all those bolts, knifes, wands, and other stuff, laying around the floors.
Etc., etc..

The point is, when people are stupidly complaining about things being "unfair" when it's just them who don't think, they will get the answer you deemed as "silly", Kaidelong. Because their complaints were silly and unfounded in the first place. Of course, there are also situations when they complain about something that really is unbalanced and subject to change, or about their general situation when the RNG is screwing them massively, but they are told either that it is something that will be fixed, or that the RNG is making fun out of them, when they do that. And there are also situations when they really discover something genuinely unbalanced that nobody had ever noticed before (it does raise the question of whether it was so terribly unbalanced before if nobody had noticed it before, but genuine balance issues are genuine balance issues, no matter how big or small), in which case it either starts a brainstorming discussion or Nicholas (and slightly less often David) shows up and declared that they'll work on it.

Now, whether DoD is too challenging for some players is another issue, but really, some players do have to learn to differentiate between "unfair" and "challenging"/"dificult".

 

Ugh, did you have to write that just before I go to work? Argh. I'll read it later and see how much we agree

 

Yes, I did have to. It's revenge for all those times when the lot of you wrote stuff before I had to go to work.

 

Seem he's talking more about the manner of the deaths, not the fairness or difficulity in reaching it.

I agree it could be funnier. Maybe a death screen animation where a Parade of Diggies marches by, holding up signs and shouting "HUZZAH", "My Eggs are safe!", "The Eyebrowed One is dead!", etc.

As for difficulty itself, DoD is a lot easier (at least on DM, which is what I play currently) than many others of it's stripe.

 

So basically you just said "This game isn't as fun as Nethack - it's too hard and dying isn't funny. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon was better."
Yes?
Unless I'm getting something wrong, that sounds pretty spoiled.

 

Not really.
He's saying that "it's a roguelike, it's not meant to be fair" is not a valid response to people complaining about supposed unfairness of some of the game's elements, and about the fact that in this game dying is not as "varied" as in some roguelikes, so people are less likely to find repeatedly dying for whatever reason fun and thus this game should not be as unfair as some other roguelikes. And in a way, he does have a point - even though this game is a roguelike, belonging to a genre with a lot of challenging games does not mean the game has to be challenging itself, and belonging to a genre games of which aren't fair towards the player does not mean the game has to be unfair as well. That being said, there is the fact that some people who complain about things being "unfair" really complain about things that are simply challenging or about things that aren't unfair if you think, but this is another issue.

 

This is definitely not what I said. I was more addressing people who respond to other people by saying "it's a roguelike, it's not meant to be fair". I don't think dredmor was designed with that in mind as much as some other roguelikes, so in a sense, things are meant to be fair, or more fair, anyway. So it's a silly response.

Of course, perhaps the actual developers would like to correct me and say they were, in fact, intending the game to be just as unfair as the classics. I somehow doubt this is how they feel though, or what their goal was.

One way to look at it would be that losing is still fun, but losing is no longer the whole point of the game, and you can even consistently win it.

 

It's a roguelike, the goal is to keep trying and measure your success by how far you get rather than by whether you've beaten the game or not.

I hope this description makes everyone feel better.

 

I've seen people write off legitimate criticisms with this before. "It's a roguelike!!! deal with it!!!1111" basically. It actually happens less here than I've seen for other Roguelikes, but it is still a problem. It's usually from those players who think that because they've beaten the game or gotten to X point, their opinions are somehow more important than Average Gamer Jane who just picked up the game for the first time. Sometimes the criticisms really can be solved by simply playing the game more and learning how it works, or getting used to the genre. Other times, the criticisms are legitimate (such as the Diggle Dagger having borked self-targeting effects) and they should be considered. But "fairness" is absolutely different from "experience", and the two should not be confused with one another.

 

It isn't THAT unforgiving, in fact, it is quite intuitive even on the hardest difficulty. The devs even nerfed the first floor because people said it was getting too hard. There's something called 'strategy' which people don't even think of using. They stupidly engage magic golems in melee and get corrupted. That's called a dumb decision unless you have no other choice. You don't even have an item ID metagame like in Nethack, if you know what something does, it does what it says on the tin. If you drink acid, it's your own dumb fault and don't act like you didn't learn anything in high school chemistry. You use a lot of simple logic in Dredmor to succeed. I've played about a dozen characters and have beaten Dredmor on every single run save the very first (where I got as far as floor 10.) If you play on Going Rogue and say it's too hard, well, too bad, it's hard mode. Sometimes, I swear that a lot of the people who say Dredmor is too hard for its premise probably go on about how intuitive Nethack, ADOM, or Angband are. AKA, they're hypocrites who think that the game, for what it is, should be stupidly easy compared to other Roguelikes (which by comparison it is, strictly speaking.) To sum up, this is pretty much what I think when people complain about the game being too hard when it's their own fault:

 

I agree with you, Kaidelong.
What more can I say, that has not already been said?

Hans...there is no possible way you could have gotten that from what Kaidelong said. Ever. That's just about the complete opposite of what he said. I'm almost speechless at how you could have gotten that from what he said.

 

I'd also like to add that I don't think it would necessarily be a good thing if Dungeons of Dredmor were more similar to other roguelikes. Notable roguelikes are notable because they do something to stand out. I think Dredmor is quite notable because it sit in the middle of the road between hardcore stuff like Nethack and simple-but-fun Chunsoft stuff like Shiiren the Wanderer and the various Insert-Franchise-Here Mystery Dungeon games. (Anyone else played Azure Dreams on the Playstation 1? Was it just me?)

What does that mean for the gameplay? It means that DoD has elements of both. It has cheap ways of dying for seemingly innocuous mistakes, but it has fewer means of being cheated by the RNG and they let you grind without anything like a hunger system or time limit. And your inevitable first deaths are not always "fair", either, in terms of your ability to initially prepare for them. Try playing a weaponless vampire from the beginning of the game without carefully watching every step you take. Indeed, watch any DoD newbie plunge headfirst into a series of first floor traps and die two or three times. A more recent example is pretty much anyone who doesn't know about Diggle Hell and puts in their first name into the wizard portal.

I'd say DoD has just enough cheap deaths to prepare one for a future Nethack career, while also being remarkably fair and well-balanced for people who just want to love the game on its own merits.

 

I'm sorry for missing the point entirely. fI:

 

It's okay, Hanz, we all make mistakes. No one is going to beat you up over it.

 

Y-Yeah. No-one. Get under the rug, you stupid blowtorch.

 

Yeah, pretty much. I think this is where the accessibility thing comes in. DoD is accessible. Anyone can pick it up and, with a couple of hours of game play, quickly get the idea. Add a few more hours, and you're learning. The tutorial, which doesn't go into as much detail as it probably could now, goes a long way to get at least the basics sorted.

It has a steep learning curve, definitely. Unless you're either really lucky or a genius, you're not gonna fell Dredmor on your first try. Heck, chances are you won't even get close to Dredmor. Don't forget that each expansion release, and each patch, arguably makes it more difficult or complex to do. New enemies are constantly being added, this year alone I think we've had another 10 skills added (at least) along with new tiers for existing ons and so on.

It's enough to get you going to be able to have the mindset to try harder roguelikes, but it has enough depth and randomness to keep people going almost indefinitely. I'm almost on 78hrs of Dredmor, according to Steam. That puts it fifth on my Steam list, and just 25 hours shy (roughly) of second place. I think when you can get that much out of a game and still want more, it shows how good it is.