Search • The Tavern

Roguelikes need to rethink traps. What they're meant to accomplish, how they should be dealt with. They end up as a random event that harms you out of the blue. As if someone once read a story with dungeons and traps, and thought "wouldn't it be cool if the game had traps!" but not going b...

You might be unaware, but capybaras are currently a meme. They are cute and impressively laid back. As for the crocodile, it's simply not a big enough threat. I recently watched the animal documentary series "Our Planet" and capybaras are actually very wary of jaguars. A short bark and a j...

I think most local forums more or less died. Internet is getting centralized into silos. You have a forum either on Steam or on Reddit. Boardgamegeek has forums for all board games. It's not specific to Tavern. It's the death of small internet communities. Corporations give people a place to talk, t...

In practice settings that strive to be original end up reinventing orcs and elves. It typically becomes a renaming project. Githyanki instead of elves, infected for zombies, ogres instead of trolls. It would be a completely different story if the world was based on a different princinple. For exampl...

Capybara slowly walks around, and has a calming presence on nearby monsters. Except on totally lifeless ones. Capybara knows how to chill. http://myfunnymemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Capybara-Sleeping-Around-With-His-Turtle-Duck-Family-Keeping-Guard_408x408.jpg https://www.oddee.com/wp-conten...

I don't think meta-progression is inherently that different from normal progression in terms of triggering pleasure rewards from your brain. Early game in DCSS you get your rewards all the time - new gear, more impactful skill points, faster levelling, late game progression slows down and game beco...

It's interesting how the word "roguelike" comes to mean the opposite it once meant. It used to be about generating unique and crazy games, now it's understood as delivering a steady stream of rewards over time. We're not far from calling Call of Duty a roguelike: permadeath - check, meta p...

There's a new definition of roguelike in the town: When does the roguelike stuff kick in? I bought the game today, and have died a couple times so far - but it seems like I'm resetting to a new game each time I die, with nothing (except the list of enemies I've seen) carrying over... What should I b...

Another game which doesn't just introduce stronger enemies is Into The Breach . It has a class of psion monsters, which have no attack whatsover but boost other enemies. In the game you control 3 units. When a psion appears, usually it's becomes an uphill battle and you need to kill it first. And I ...

Have you seen Staff of Entrancement in Brogue? I think it could be interesting. As I understand, Enslavement was removed from DCSS because it was too powerful. If it works, it not only adds a body, but it takes away one enemy and adds an ally, so you're roughly 2 monsters ahead. Entrancement in Brog...

Mutopolis is pretty cute and descriptive.

I don't like unnecessary exposition.

I think Shtopit meant damage type as in slicing, crushing, piercing. Hydras are thematic and there are plenty of monsters inspired by Greek mythology, especially since Shoals were added. I think Hydras are strategically interesting because it's a monster you may just need to run away from, at least ...

The best use of Hailstorm is probably when you're fighting monsters in a doorway. Find a room with monsters. Retreat 1 square, so monsters can come at you 1 at a time. Wait until other monsters get close to you. You will hit all but 1 monster, unless there are enough to form 3+ rows perpendicular to...

....aaaand my first win.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brogueforum/co ... njuration/

So you'd rather have less varied and unique game mechanics and a more vertical power curve? Then you can give the Orc Knight treatment to other support monsters. By the time you meet gnoll shamans, plain gnolls are pushovers. Remove plain gnolls, add an Ubergnoll.

For most characters wall jump is probably just a way to avoid getting cornered, but it shines in small rooms. It lets you front load a heap of damage, and it doesn't matter much that it takes a lot of time because half of them will be dead. But at times it feels a bit like a "win more" but...

(I didn't notice this was Crazy Yiuf Corner and not a serious proposal)

On the other hand, no other character benefits so much from a weapon of... protection. It lets you stay in contact with several enemies (whirlwind/wall jump). Vampiric weapons are even better as long as you're facing natural enemies. For lunge, I'd rather use a big weapon. Normally these weapons are...

Okay, but I think we can agree that multiple defensive skills work much better than multiple offenses because they stack. It's a lot trickier with offenses, because ultimately you need to kill big tough brutes either in melee or from a distance. So-so attack ranged attacks only works against glass c...

An unorthodox but very effective god for trolls is Dithmenos. You get to choose your fights and your regeneration is rarely overwhelmed. You get passive bonus damage, stealth and mobility. And stabbing trolls are just overkill. It's like that guy on reddit who figured out kobolds are among the best ...

If orc knight/warlord battlecry was meant to strengthen lesser orcs, I think it's safe to say it's a failure. By the time you're fighting orc knights, plain orcs are just place holders (literally), and even frienzied warriors aren't especially deadly. Frenzy is most dangerous when two peer orcs boos...

To the list Brogue (and Rogue) doesn't have:
- resistances (only one: fire resistance)
- corpse eating. Which one introduced that? Nethack and A.D.O.M. heavily use it.

Fascinating game.

You know, I have doubts about the positional spell system for DCSS as a whole. In Brogue, Staff of Lightning works like the most straightforward DCSS bolt spell. Nothing is immune. And it's likely one of the worse staves. It's just that Brogue doesn't have many monster-swamped corridors. Monsters ar...

About bigger chunks - what if a skill reduces armour EV penalty by 4.8? If you wear gloves of strength it might just push you over the edge. In the Crawl system, there's no way to know. Or something temporarily drains your Int. If you were at 4.8 bonus, you may be fine, but if you were at 4.1 you'll...

Add stealth range, lava/bog/water and possibly some gas and making sense out of it is like reading a vomit-drenched page. I like the later levels with luminescent mushrooms and crystal formations though. Unlike DCSS, Brogue keeps me awake! Whenever I die in DCSS, I'm angry at myself because I've alr...

I gave it more time, and it IS a very good game very much in the spirit of Rogue, but a lot better. Even more, it turns out several of its design decisions are ones I had floating around for my roguelike (which never happened). I got a bit used to the busy visuals, but only because "color mode ...

I nearly died when I stayed in the middle as a formicid of Wu Jian wearing the armour of the Dragon King (+MR GDA). I ended up running to a corridor. If you use Heavenly Storm, you want to skitter around the edge (whirlwind) with a vampiric/protection weapon or regeneration. I suppose Uskayaw would ...

What has been working very well for me with tanky characters is quickly blinking/punching through to the most cramped of the 4 vaults. Then you fight in a corridor or - preferably - around a corner. The one with diagonal walls is perfect. This works really well in heavy armor with regeneration. An o...

The item-ID system of DCSS received very little *additions*.Changes were almost entirely on a per-item basis: some items/scrolls were removed, some were changed or merged, some were added. Some evokables were pulled entirely out of the ID game: decks, orbs (there used to be fixation and seeing). Tha...

If someone were to take the derivative of ID game in DCSS, he would see the value is negative. Meaning, various parts of ID system have were systematically removed. You can't throw potions at monsters, and I think you couldn't in Linley's Dungeon Crawl. When you can't, harmful potions make little se...

I'm not saying the article makes a good point why ID game makes sense in DCSS. Quite the opposite. The item-based system of Rogue has been painted over with several other systems : races, gods, classes, skills, castable spells. To reach the Rogue "ideal" would require significant effort an...

By the way, this is how brogue handles character advancement: The staff of lightning has a maximum of 2 charges, and recovers a charge in approximately 250 turns. This staff deals damage to every creature in its line of fire, nothing is immune. (If the staff is enchanted, its average damage will inc...

Recently I've been playing Rogue, and I was surprised to find the game has no: skills, races, classes, castable spells, or gods. But it remains quite fun. I started wondering why. Then I found this article. An interesting point of view. Rogue is probably the most tightly-designed computer game I kno...

By the way, the combat outcome estimate messages I talked about are found in Brogue. I must have tried it at some point and bounced off. When you examine a monster (mouse only, because keyboard is for cavemen) you get these: The kobold has a 50% chance to hit you, typically hits for 8% of your curre...

Brogue is not as pretty as it thinks it is. It's very unreadable, especially when large bodies of water or lava are involved. Everything blends in, and I need much longer than usual to process what's happening. And these are the early levels. I'm also annoyed by its mistreatment of keyboard (for exa...

A small note, I like the idea of having a very powerful, very short-ranged spell. It's not clear that Confusing Touch should be it. It's just that I don't think any other spell feels that niche.

Brogue is very consciously designed to be "a better Rogue". Most of the things you describe in Rogue are also features in Brogue; for instance: the absence of classes, spells and skills, and the fairly tight food clock (reducing backtracking). Yup, the same train of thought led me to read...

Yup, I thought the armor lineup sounded very much like D&D. Also a notable absence is lack of any player races. Player starts with a mace, a bow, 30 arrows, and a ring mail. Even today, I enjoy playing Rogue. True, it's not as sophisticated as DCSS, but the simplicity has its own charm. There's ...

In another thread, I wanted to lecture people about what roguelike is and isn't. So I figured out I may as well finally play *the* Rogue, so I know what I'm talking about. These days you can play it in browser, no registration or other crap: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Rogue_1983 (You can use ...

The way I see it summons are at its worst when you keep summoning creatures, "spam" them. Because multiple allies are inherently time-consuming to manage (including estimating if they can last another round). Summoned creatures usually make player very safe, at the price of boredom and hav...

Some characters are resistant to arrows, for example anyone wearing a large shield, especially with a scarf of repulsion. You can literally just stand there and let yaktaurs shoot you. In principle, I think it would be a nice change, but it would slightly affect monster behavior. Finite ammo only ma...

The 3 "good" gods would benefit from a clarity of definition. If I were to redesign from cratch, I would divide them as such: The Shining One: evil is innate. Vampires are evil, dragons are evil, orcs are evil, undead are evil. etc. Mutations is not something he really understands. Zin: Ev...

Make player summons incorporeal. They are still sort of "there", but they don't stop monsters from advancing and monsters don't attack them. This means summons would serve as a source of extra damage, but the whole playstyle of using meatshields is gone. ~~~ OR ~~~ The opposite. S...

Oops, should be Scott Adams. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. He was poor man's Robert Sheckley.

nago wrote:this is some serious necroposting

So what?

We don't owe capitalists anything here. The original Rogue was freely distributed, and only later on commercial versions appeared. The most notable games in the genre were free - or maybe it was the other way around, they became popular because they were free. Roguelike games will remain, and the ne...

I argued with the Catacomb Kids developers about marketing their game as a roguelike. It's just a dungeon-themed action platformer, therefore lacking the two most defining attributes of roguelikes: turn-basedness & item destruction. I'm not so sure about that second one, but gammafunk insists. ...

I'm no good at storytelling. But I frequently wondered - what happened afterward, when the character I'm playing escaped to the surface with an enormously powerful (or just valuable) item? Presumably the orb loses at least some of its power on the surface, otherwise the protagonist would spend the r...

The thing that surely can be removed with no regrets is weighted split of xp on the 'm' screen. I can press a skill letter once to enable training it, second time to make a bigger portion of xp go to it. But if I enable two skills they tend not to get 50% xp each, but some different fraction based o...

Code:: The amulet "Gaupho" {MR+ Regen+ Int-3 SInv Stlth+}

What a lovely amulet to troll people with! Especially that it seems to be named after a lost Marx brother.

Search found 124 matches