To preempt any complaints, these suggestions only apply to GR difficulty, which is supposedly suitable for hardcore gamers. 1. Let monsters spawn in shops All well balanced roguelikes have some incentive to keep you moving, eg. the traditional food counter in most of them, ADOM's corruption meter, Larn's time limit for finding the cure, Nethack's Wizard of Yendor respawning tougher each time, etc. DoD allows you to retreat to a shop, pick up an item so Brax blocks the door, and then heal to maximum at no penalty. You can even lure in individual monsters one at a time. More monsters spawn outside, but they're not draining your consumables so it's just free experience. Easy fix is to let monsters spawn in the shop. Also increase the spawn rate and let tougher monsters spawn over time. 2. Give monsters a chance to see invisible Invisibility is currently a 100% defense, even against the end boss. Considering anybody with Alchemy can easily get 20+ invisibility potions by the end of the game, and Fungal Arts can get unlimited Inky Hoglanterns, you really have to be an idiot to lose against Lord Dredmor. Monsters should sometimes see you when you're invisible, especially stronger ones. 3. Make monsters aware of traps (including runes/pyres) You can currently walk back and forth repeatedly luring a monster over a trap. It looks ridiculous and lets you kill at zero risk. No monster should ever be hit by the same trap twice, and sometimes not even once. 4. Let monsters cast through other monsters/pets Summoning a correctly positioned pet works as a perfect defense against casters. Seeing as a Wizard should never engage in melee, this removes the only possible threat. It's pretty much gamebreaking. 5. Let monsters attack diagonally. A single monster is never a threat, because you can always move so you're not orthogonally adjacent to them. Giving monsters (but not the player) a diagonal attack fixes this. 6. Don't make pets draw aggro. Pets work as perfect monster herding because they always draw aggro from adjacent monsters. A correctly positioned pet can hold off an entire zoo for a stupidly long time. Pets should only draw aggro if they actually attack sometime, and even then only for a limited time. 7. Give Blood Magic a drawback. Blood Magic is a no-brainer choice for any Wizard build. Easy decisions are boring decisions, so give it some drawback. I suggest making it drain HP whenever it gives mana (1:1 ratio). Convert it to a dismissable short cooldown buff so you have to decide when to use it. 8. Let high level enemy casters use AoEs on your last known position. Just to make them a bit less dumb. Combined with suggestions 4 and 6 you might actually have some use for magic defense items.
@ 7: I like strong skills having drawbacks. It's what makes necronomiconomics fun/interesting until one has dealt with necropain. Wouldn't the best solution for most of the exploits be to just not do many of the exploits that you mentioned? The only person we're really competing against is ourself and the constraints we place on the game. Take fungal arts or burglary and don't tithe them to the lutefisk god.
I did suggest a mode where you can't go up stairs, and you have a limited number of turns on each stair (once they're over, you either die or Baron Von Blubba appears)
I like the "no going back upstairs" part, that fits in with many other rogue-likes and as an option it gives us a truer experience. As for having Blood Mage cost you health for the bonus mana, I don't see why you would need to attack an enemy monster then. It's their blood that's supposed to be powering your magic. I would like to see another skill fit in there somewhere though (perhaps inserted before the current level 2 upgrade) which allows you to sac your own health for mana 1:1 (as a deactivatable buff/debuff perhaps, -1 health/+1 mana per turn while active).
Better than that, a fixed deadline for reaching each floor. Otherwise you have an incentive to stay on a floor so as not to waste your remaining time.
I don't believe rushing someone through the game is the answer. But ensuring that when they do move on they can't go back makes them think. Staying on a floor for a long time doesn't win the game, and if someone wants to spend hours scouring floor 3 for random spawns, so be it.
Why try to take the developers time to implement a mode not letting them go up stairs or an enforced limited turn mode? The former can be done when the player decides they want the game to be more difficult, and the latter could be done at the player's discression With the addition of some sort of turn count indicator. This isn't a multiplayer competition where someone gaming the system ruins the fun of another. While I don't disagree these could be fun additions, I think the developers should be working on other things. With that in mind, maybe the forum community could put together a list of list of things (e.g. don't go up stairs, never close doors) that can make the game more difficult. People could look at the list, pick and choose what they think might be fun, and follow it. The game becomes more difficult for them, people who don't want to aren't forced into it, and the devs don't spend resources implementing them.
On the whole, I think many of your complaints are legitimate and need to be addressed. However: You'd have a hard time changing the rules of the game this much for just a single difficulty. Also, you would create an enormous strategy gap between DM and GR, making the transition between the two much harsher than it is now and thus meaning fewer people would try it. Firstly, healing in shops isn't such a problem because it's ridiculously tedious due to the low health regen, so few people will use it consistently. Secondly, you still have to face all those monsters when you finally leave, and they're all there at the same time rather than spawning one by one in the shop. Thirdly, your model is just begging for an exploit where someone walks in a shop, puts on the best equipment on sale, then waits for helpless monsters to spawn and be splattered, resulting in an effective XP farm. Fourthly, fighting inside shops is very dangerous for some builds (e.g. AoE users), and a rule that penalises some builds but not others arbitrarily is a bad idea.[/quote] In DoD, invisibility is the last-resort panic button which ensures that you have a chance to survive and retreat to fight another day (or at least make use of all those consumables you've been saving up). A panic button that sometimes doesn't work is a disastrously bad idea, because no-one will use a last resort that might fail when they could use another skill or item instead with their last remaining turn(s). Compare Five-Finger Discount, a skill that only an idiot would ever use on Permadeath because it has a fixed chance of angering Brax (= certain death at low levels, the floor being obstructed by Dread Collector swarms otherwise). I approve of anything that makes this much in-character sense (that a monster which has fallen for the trap once will then know it's there), but it would require considerable re-balancing of the skills, since the whole point of a DoT is that the T is fairly reliable. A lot of abilities that generate environmental hazards will be useless if they only work once per monster (or worse, one per group of monsters within LoS of the trap, if you really want to be realistic). Also, you're going to have AI difficulties when the only route to the player lies through a trap. The problem is that wizards don't really have any other way of defending against casters. They have low HP, and resistance-boosting abilities are few and far between. If casters are free to attack them at will, wizards will go down quickly in a toe-to-toe fight (the ability to avoid which combat type is the entire draw of not being a warrior). Giving all monsters such vastly enhanced capabilities which players don't have seems excessively unfair. Also, this will hugely penalise melee fighters, who will be taking three times more damage than before in a three-on-one scenario. Having to conduct *all* melee combat in 1x width corridors sounds unbearably tedious. Pets just have balance issues where they don't scale and therefore start out too strong before becoming too weak. In the former case, it doesn't really matter if they draw aggro or not, because they slaughter everything. In the latter case, being aggro magnets is the only thing they *can* do. I wouldn't say it's a no-brainer choice. Alchemy (potions and/or orbs), Fungal Arts and even Smithing (2x Mana Torus = +4 Mana Regen) are all viable ways of restoring magic. Also, realistically, wizard spells are too expensive and their HP too low for your proposed solution to be cost-effective until Magic Power is high enough that none of this matters anyway. That sounds wonderfully exploitable to make casters rain down doom upon their fellow monsters. Also, surely it is easy to evade because you just have to take a couple of steps away after ducking out of sight?
What a nice thread with a lot of good points! I definitely like the 'no going upstairs' idea, I'll incorporate it in my next games. Would be fun if it was a checkbox, but indeed we can do it ourselves. The problem with certain skills being OP-ed is for me quite limited as I usually play with random skill builds: they offer a nice challenge usually. I have been busy with other things (has to happen sometimes), so I haven't really checked blood magic lately, can't really comment. I do agree Dredmor and one other monster should be able to see through invisibility, not more. Like this, I don't think the panic button is ruined at all, it's just like the magicky golem and kleptoblobby: pay heed to what you're fighting. I really do not like the idea of a deadline in number of turns, as this would seem very deus ex machina to me and pretty pointless. The monster spawn should take care of that. Maybe crank that up on lower levels? Although I think it's pretty much perfect now, the parts you have cleared feel empty enough to get that nice 'completion' feeling and yet are still just populated enough that you wouldn't want to just rush thorugh those parts without looking. I am also not in favour of the diagonal attacks. I do know many roguelikes have this but this game hasn't and I think it's pretty elementary for this game to not have it. The traps, yeah... somehow it's part of the charm and it can become a small puzzle-like element to make them walk over it. I say keep it. Make difficulty harder by: -not going up levels -random builds -not closing doors -no shop purchases -no purchases at all -only use the weapons you have the skill for Probably more good ideas waiting to be written down. As for what the devs could do (besides putting back in bad weapons penalty, removing the gold-hoover effect, removing the minimap showing of quest objectives (alright sorry ))? Hmmmm. Dunno atm
If "possible exploits" keep the game from being enough of a challenge for you, I agree with Loren's comment: just avoid doing those things. This seriously sounds like the old joke: Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do *this*. (makes odd/contorted motion) Doctor: So stop doing it. It's not like leaderboards are the beginning and end of the world. Most of the changes you suggest would seriously impair a lot of folks' enjoyment of the game. Having monsters but not the player be able to attack diagonally sounds especially bad; as Velorien said, they'd have to rebalance the whole game just to keep it playable for the average melee player. I do think that having monsters' pathfinding try to avoid traps they're aware of (esp. if they've already triggered them before) could be a good idea. If the path-finding algorithm can't find a trap-free path to the player, however, the monster should go ahead and proceed through the trap (their main characteristic is aggression, not self-preservation).
