Ever since I've hopped on the forums I've seen a sort of dichotomy when dealing with some skills. Much of this boils down to "This skill is good, unless you're on NTTG" and it seems to have been shrugged off; most either play Full Scale Floors (FSF) or just don't use the skill. But I'm not satisfied with this, and I feel we can do better. Discussion on NTTG has happened before. I won't deny this. It usually results in something like "Well, you have less named monsters, so NTTG is balanced." At most it's "NTTG is slightly harder, but that just makes it more challenging, and that's alright." But have Dredmor players become too content with the state of affairs? Is this a symptom of unnecessary conservatism? Or can the mode be improved? This thread has multiple purposes: I want to first highlight the issues with NTTG, and open a discussion about what these issues are, how severe they are, if they're worth solving, and how to do it. I also want to forward some suggestions of my own, as well as my perception of what's wrong with the game mode. Firstly, and perhaps the most obviously, all crafting skills suffer from the use of NTTG. "Smaller floors, same XP." But is it the same loot? No. Should it be the same loot? Can we use differing algorithms to make more important loot more likely to spawn? What is considered important? As a counterpoint, crafting also allows the player to compensate for the relative lack of equipment by crafting the gear you need, and thus crafting's value goes up. But does this counterpoint account for the aforementioned negatives of crafting? Secondly, any skill that gives you items based on procs, mostly on kill. These include Piracy, Fungal Arts, Perception, Rogue Scientist, Clockwork Knight, and to a much lesser degree, Big Game Hunter. There are less monsters to fight, and thus less opportunities to proc these skills and get the associated loot. Could we instate a "Loot Coefficient" for FSF and NTTG, to make the loot more likely to spawn on NTTG so as to afford the player the same amount of loot drops in this mode? As an example, Perception's first skill gives you 5% to proc a "Lucky Find." If NTTG spawned half the monsters, it would make sense to give Perception 10% instead, no? A flag could be created to identify a spell as a "Loot" spell. This way, abilities such as Chemic Pilferer would enjoy an increased percentage, while other procs like Clockwork Threshing would not receive increased percentage to activate. A similar counterpoint to the first issue, these skills allow one to compensate for the comparatively low amount of materials needed for crafting. Fungal Arts, in similar to the above, procs less, so you get mushrooms. But with less monsters, you need mushrooms less often. Could we exclude Fungal Arts from the "Loot" flag suggestion, given this? Or is having fewer mushrooms still unacceptable to the point of excluding it from your build on NTTG? What you might be thinking is, "Given these counterpoints, your suggestions are unnecessary." And it may be true. But do you ever factor in playing NTTG into your skill choice? Did you pick NTTG and say to yourself, "Well, I'm playing NTTG, so I shouldn't take Smithing." If so, I feel something needs to change. To summarize, NTTG's lower amount of loot results in lower materials, which lowers the value of crafting, but its lower amount of gear increases its value. But does the rise in value from the latter compensate enough for the former? NTTG's lower amount of monsters results in less loot procs, which lowers the value of these skills, and yet these help compensate for NTTG's lack of loot. So again, do we break even? When you take Tinkering on NTTG, are you compelled to take Perception? Is it any different on FSF? If crafting on NTTG necessitates support skills like Perception, is that really how we want things to go? Do you ever change from Fungal Arts to something else based on your floor choice? The floor is yours, ladies, gentlemen, transladies, transgentlemen and androgyns!
I think the first, most important thing to nail down is "Should playing NTTG have an effect on the game, beyond simply making it shorter?" Simply cutting the number of elements in half, and then doubling their value, will always have the effect of doubling the variance from baseline, because fewer data points means a greater chance of weird outlier data points. For this reason, if we agree that NTTG should have as small an effect on gameplay as possible, I think it essential that we double on-hit-procs, as Nikolai suggests, simply to combat the above statistical truth. In the case of craftable gear, I feel that the chief concern of a player is not how many copies of gear X, but rather can you make gear X at all? This, again, makes the case that we should double item collection whenever possible, to provide NTTG players with the same chance to find any given piece of gear / crafting loot.
To be honest, this should really be a moot point with wizardlands, which can be farmed over and over again to your heart's content.
I'd like to clarify that when I suggested doubling on-hit procs, I meant for "Loot" procs only. If we double it for other procs (or even increase it by 50%) it would make things more consistent that don't need to be so. Because then, your Threshing proc will likely be more consistent when you need it. That will add unnecessary power to proc-based skills on NTTG, and likely exacerbate the problem. "If I'm playing NTTG, I should take CK, because Threshing will proc more often!" Even if this were true, unlike FSF, this necessitates farming Wizardlands, which are notably riskier than the base floor. So, while you have a point, I don't feel it renders the original point quite moot. It's called No Time To Grind. To get to where I should be, why should I have to grind the wizardlands? Playing one or two Wizardlands per floor on a character is fine, but I don't want to have to go through tons, because that renders moot the point of playing on NTTG.
You know, now that I think about it, there problem lies not in the fact that you only get half of the loot, but rather in the fact that some higher-level consumables require a lot of rare stuff to create. Because if you want to create a few swords, you will have to kill a few more creatures, but then again on NTTG you should be getting new stuff often enough that you won't craft a full set of equipment every 10 minutes but rather wait for some hidden-recipe items that you will get any use out of. And if it comes to consumables, it's the same. You don't care that you only got 600 bolts instead of 1.200 because there aren't as many enemies. And the problem arises when dealing with "boss-killer" usable items like Bolts of Mass Destruction or The Bomb, because instead of 5~8 of them you get 0~2 because you might not get some rarer ingredients, and there's still one Dredmor, not half of it (the problem with The Bomb isn't grinding for resources, it's the fact that you might not have the necessary stuff because it's rare). Ergo, I think that if anything, something should be done with the amount of higher-level consumables you can craft from the same number of resources on NTTG, but the rest can remain the same.
Another option that would help the balance, but also make NTTG less interesting, is guaranteeing each floor will have at least one room of a certain type. For example, make every floor spawn a shop and one of the "crafting" rooms. Or perhaps even one of every crafting room.
The problem with this suggestion is that on NTTG one of every crafting room would leave very little room left for all the other rooms.
This is true. But consider this. How about we flag these rooms in such a way as they do not count towards the room count/space of the dungeon floor? So, it will be slightly bigger, but these rooms aren't exactly very big anyway. Monster count, however, would have to be accounted for. I'd rather have slightly bigger NTTG floors with more consistent crafting than elsewise.
I think the inconsistency is part of the appeal of NTTG and like it how it is. Who needs a shop every floor anyway? Unless you're robbing Brax regularly he's pretty worthless anyway. Seriously though, any calculation that adds more rooms to NTTG is pretty counter-intuitive.
On the question of Fungal Arts: I don't think it needs to be scaled at all. I recently completed a GRPD (full scale) game with it, and I had 200+ of every type by the end. It would have been 300-400 if I had been more focused on collecting absolutely everything. Note also that I didn't max the tree until much later (getting only the first two skills at the beginning), so i am sure that on NTTG you'd still have a generous surplus. With piracy's gems...i don't think scaling is necessary as I am assuming most people would use it in combination with Alchemy and/or Wand crafting. Alchemy has a transmute gem skill, and wands make use of a much wider range of the gems than Alchemy does, so i don't think it would be an issue. Something for Tinkering that we might want to consider is that a lot of the bolt recipes yield more or better bolts if you have higher (smithing does this to a lesser degree, but only for a few throwing recipes), so you are encouraged to wait until you've maxed the tree before crafting all your steel bolts or whatever. In NTTG you may be forced to do this before it's maxed in order to have enough ammo to get by. A major source of early game bolts comes from those target practice rooms, and in NTTG you'd obviously have a much lower chance of getting them. They're already relatively rare. One thing that concerns me is the way Dredmor Statues scale. Early game you can run around just hunting after those things to jack up your level. You can even go down a floor or two, kite monsters, and get tons of XP from them. They should probably not scale x2 and instead be set at x1.5 of their current amount or similar. On the other hand, minibosses spill over your bar a lot and it feels a bit frustrating losing gobs of XP. Question: are shop and vending prices reduced on NTTG? Because if they aren't that's a giant nerf for Going Rogue.
They are not. That is one of the things that makes the mode more difficult: It's very hard to empty vending machines and the like. A resource generation skill like Bankster or Piracy will help somewhat, and by the later floor its still possible to empty things wholesale. It's really only a bottleneck on the early floors for people who want to empty every vending machine. A question I'm surprised no one has brought up is, how consistent is it, really, to try to mitigate randomness in a roguelike? The appeal of NTTG is speed, if the slower, more attritional skill sets are less effective there is that really a downside? Just things to think about, since this seems more like a thread of questions than answers at the moment.
I wasn't thinking of vending machines so much as that one item that sometimes shows up in Brax's shop. And it's so good and perfect for your adventurer that to get it means you can push ahead for the next 5 floors easily. On Going Rogue, you have to save up for a few floors before you can even afford it. It would be even tougher on NTTG since it doesn't scale.
The thing about randomness, even in a roguelike, is that there is positive randomness (randomness that adds fun to the game) and negative randomness (randomness that takes away fun). In my opinion, NTTG has a lot of negative randomness. It's much easier to feel dicked by the RNG Gods in NTTG than in FSF. I should lose because I made poor play choices, not because I chose NTTG. To the latter part of your post? Yes. To me, it is a downside, because I feel as though all skills should be as equal as possible. They needn't be equivalent to FSF choices, necessarily, but they must still be equal in value, in as much frequency. Again, I personally don't want to ever be in the situation where I ought to rethink my skill build simply because I want to play on NTTG. This was intended to be a thread of questions, because I want to know how other people feel about this as well. Apparently, some people find appeal in the inconsistency of NTTG. I'm not one of them, though.
