Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?


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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 05:59

Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

This came up in ##crawl-dev, it seemed like a good thing to post here since it part of it only needs one counter-example.

Most monsters in Crawl have a variable amount of hp. For example, orc priest can have between 9-21 hp. This follows normal distribution, so orc priests are far more likely to have around 16 hp.

However, uniques have fixed hp. For example, Sigmund always has 30 hp.

The system used to give monsters the variable hp is over-complicated and should probably be changed. However, uniques have fixed hp and seem to work fine. Is variable hp desirable at all? Several other mechanics randomize how many hits are needed to kill a monster.

So, are monsters with fixed hp problematic in some way? I'm guessing Grinder would be the best example for an exploit, since Grinder both appears early and is worth killing due to the massive XP boost.

Would new problems surface if every monsters had fixed hp? |amethyst suggested that pack monsters might take such similar damage it would be possible to count exactly how many hits were needed to kill one. I'm not sure if this is true, or how much of a problem it would be if it was true.

Are there advantages to a monsters having variable hp? The"psuedo-OOD" factor on a monster which rolled high for HP might be potentially interesting, but monsters rolling low seems weird - the monster is abnormally fragile, but the player can't change tactics because the fragility is invisible.
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 06:26

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Well, monsters having fixed hps decreases the game's variability. That isn't necessarily a *bad* thing, but it's certainly a significant detraction from the way things have been.

Encountering a creature which is weaker than "normal" allows you to devote more resources to killing other creatures allowing you to win encounters you might not otherwise be able to, and similarly, encountering a creature which is stronger can sometimes force you to back off from something you otherwise expected to kill.

Having creatures with fixed hps gives the players an advantage in that they can have a much clearer idea when they are choosing to engage whether or not they're likely to win a battle. Having variation in monster max hps makes that sort of dependability (particularly for pack monsters) much less clear.

Personally I think that variation in max hps of creatures increases my personal replayability of the game, If I could, with perfect knowledge, number crunch my odds of winning every encounter, I would probably not play the game as often or for as long as I have. But that's my personal preference rather than something specifically tied to "good game design"
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 06:37

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

The whole point of Crawl combat is that it's insanely swingy and no combat is ever definitively decided in one or the other's favour until it's over. Proposals like this are equivalent to 'reduce damage variance' proposals.
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 07:40

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I also think that variable HP is good. The less there are possibilities to exactly calculate optimal fighing strategies, the better.

I wouldn't even mind if uniques had variable HP.
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 08:13

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I concur with SIegurt, and I also could enjoy less a game with much more pre-defined results
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 08:30

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I can see why one wouldn't want to do both at the same time in a given game but since this is the case in crawl already I don't think any of these methods is inherently superior to one another and also don't see how the player experience would be improved (or affected at all) in any way by giving every monster fixed or random HPs.
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 14:20

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

For what it's worth, I'm firmly in the "crawl would be better with less variance in combat" camp. I think a lot of the "which weapon should I use?" threads that plague Advice stem from the fact that there are a lot of reasons a weapon could seem good or less good (essentially, lots of sources of variance) and that the interesting parts of Crawl are tactics and the longer-term choices of skilling, religion, and adapting to loot and risks.

I'm not saying there should be no variance or even just a tiny amount, but right now, I think the amount of randomness makes crawl unnecessarily hard to learn.

Honestly, I'd say: if it's easy to try, try it. I don't have a sense of whether this would make a big difference or a small one. How common are 9HP priests relative to 16HP ones? I notice that [9,16,21] isn't symmetric, either -- are 21HP priests more common than 9HP ones?
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 14:26

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

My initial reaction was to say that variable HP is better for the sake of replayablity, as others have stated. However:
reaver wrote:Several other mechanics randomize how many hits are needed to kill a monster.

Thinking about this, I can't recall any time I could definitely say a long fight was the result of a monster rolling high on HP instead of, say, bad attack rolls. If fixed HP would be simpler in implementation, I see nothing wrong with it. I can't imagine it would break gameplay, considering the number of other randomizing factors, like you said.

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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 14:48

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I'm not sure what my thoughts are here. What we know is that variable HP in crawl works fine (unless you don't think crawl's combat works as-is, which is a possibility, but I suspect most players who think that are not going to be reading this forum). My first thought is I would prefer to keep variable HP but that could just be familiarity.

Certainly it is important (or at least I think it is important) that crawl combat retains noticeable variance in some form, at least if you want crawl combat to remain similar to what exists right now. It's quite probable that that would still be the case with fixed maxhp, but I can't say for sure (and there is of course some degree of subjectivity here).

One thing that might be relevant to bring up is: monsters decide whether to enter clouds based (at least in part) on their current hp. With fixed maxhp, this (entirely? partially? I'm not sure) removes randomness about whether a full-hp monster will enter a cloud. Personally I like that sometimes yaks enter flame clouds and sometimes they do not.

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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 15:41

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Skrybe wrote:My initial reaction was to say that variable HP is better for the sake of replayablity, as others have stated. However:
reaver wrote:Several other mechanics randomize how many hits are needed to kill a monster.

Thinking about this, I can't recall any time I could definitely say a long fight was the result of a monster rolling high on HP instead of, say, bad attack rolls. If fixed HP would be simpler in implementation, I see nothing wrong with it. I can't imagine it would break gameplay, considering the number of other randomizing factors, like you said.


You can get a general sense of how good your attack rolls are by paying attention to the messages. If I have more "good attacks" than I thin I should to kill a monster, I can say "wow that was a tough one" with some degree of accuracy. It's true, though, that you could simply randomize the attack messages (and number of !'s) and then fix hps, you'd never know how hard you were hitting, and therefore wouldn't have any ability to reconcile number of attacks to bad attacks or high monster hps.

I personally wouldn't like that.

I also like that some max-hp yaks enter clouds and some don't. It also brings up a point, are there any other behaviors that are influenced by variable max-hp? I'd hate to see variance in behavior between monsters of the same race disappear simply because the hps were no longer randomized? (Healing maybe?)

Anyway, predictibility between monsters of the same race is one reason that randomization is good, not every orc, yak, orc warrior etc. should be exactly the same fight, they're pretty similar now, and making them *more* similar rather than less, is not the way I'd prefer to go, myself.

That's also IMHO why it doesn't matter if you randomize the hps of uniques, there's only one of them to fight, it's *already* a not-the-usual-fight, a few (the least interesting ones) are just "the base type with a bunch more hps" but that's *still* more interesting than fighting another one of the base-type monster. Making uniques have fixed, rather than randomized hps just makes it more convenient to build them and make them the kind of fight the unique designer wanted. Randomizing the hps of base-type monsters is an attempt to make procedurally generated enemies have some variance, randomizing unique's hps just makes them more difficult to balance.

It's akin to why vaults have fixed layouts and procedurally generated layouts are random.
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 16:03

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

All I will say about this is the current way monster HP is determined is a pain in the ass if you're trying to adjust enemy HP for balance purposes. When I used to do that, it was hard to fine tune things because of how complicated the system is. I think even the IRC bots have trouble, and work around it by just generating 100 monsters and taking the average.

I'm fine with randomized HP, but the whole way it works should be streamlined.

And don't get me started about how monster EXP value is determined...
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 16:28

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Hmm, interesting points.

Some graphs:

orc priest hp distribution

yak hp distribution

ancient lich hp distribution

(Monster random hp is just a normal distribution roughly replicated by "dice". An orc priest is equally likely to have 16 or 17 hp)

Patashu wrote:The whole point of Crawl combat is that it's insanely swingy and no combat is ever definitively decided in one or the other's favour until it's over. Proposals like this are equivalent to 'reduce damage variance' proposals.
A bit off topic but I've heard people praise high variance in Crawl combat before - can you articulate the reasons you feel high variance in combat works well?
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 16:42

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I'll look at variance by instead looking at the zero-variance case (with made-up numbers, for illustration).

I'm a hufi with a falchion. Let's say falchion deals 10 damage per-hit before AC. I'm fighting an ogre. I'll assume that I hit 2/3 of attacks--or, in fact, that I hit two attacks and then the third misses, and this pattern repeats (I don't know how to properly handle zero-variance EV but this seems kind of reasonable). Ogre has 1 AC, I'll pretend it has 2 instead, so I'm going to hit for 9 damage every time I attack it. If this ogre has 25 hp, I know it will take me precisely 4 attacks to kill the ogre (hit hit miss hit). I can do the same math to figure out how much damage the ogre will deal to my character.

So you can see what combat turns into here, and this is not what combat is in current crawl. The danger in reducing variance is making crawl too deterministic like this is not interesting.

Of course the other way (too much variance) is not interesting either, of course: in the extreme there, you just on the first hit either kill the monster or you die.

It is possible, and maybe even likely, that changing monster hp to a fixed value would not appreciably change the amount of variance in combat, but I can't say for sure without trying it. How much variance is best is also debatable, but the assumption here is that crawl is enjoyable to its playerbase by being what it is, so it is probably preferable to not stray too far from the status quo. Games with little/no variance in combat can certainly work (Crypt of the Necrodancer comes to mind) but crawl is not one of those games right now so I do not think it should try to be one in the future either.

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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 16:55

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Wow, I never knew monsters had variable HP. Or that a low HP orc priest has just over 1/3 the hp of a high HP orc priest.

This is a great way to make sure the player is as confused as possible about the effectiveness of their attacks. "Well, I was able to kill the last 3 orc priests with very little trouble, so I should be able to kill this one... what the hell? I'm barely making a dent?!?"
If crawl is supposed to be more understandable by seeing the results of your actions, variable monster HP goes against that goal. Since we already have variable attack damage, I don't see why we need variable HP.

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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 17:03

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Too much dice rolling and deviation.

Calculate out all the average values for all monsters and lock it in as base HP. (Example: 100 HP)

Then take 20% of base as Variance and roll 1dVariance to get Modifier. (Example: 20% of 100 HP would be 1d20; let's say 15 is rolled).
Subtract half of Variance from Modifier (10 is half of 20; 15 - 10 = 5) to get True Modifier.
Add True Modifier to base. (Monster has 105 HP).

This will allow any monster HP to vary from base by approximately +/- 10% with no hill. Adjust your 20% Variance accordingly.
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 17:12

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Orc Priest has 9-21 HP. If you deal 9 damage max, you may need 2-5 attacks on AVERAGE, 1-3 with max damage rolls. I think it could be better if monster would have something like 90-110% of its average HP, not 60-140%.

Edit. Fixed HP does not remove variance, you still can deal 0 damage 5 times in a row and die to 9 HP Orc Priest. It just makes variance less crazy.
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 17:30

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Sandman25 wrote:Edit. Fixed HP does not remove variance, you still can deal 0 damage 5 times in a row and die to 9 HP Orc Priest. It just makes variance less crazy.


Right. Variance is nice, but too much variance is crazy. My proposal would allow a developer actually eyeball an average number.

If you want it to vary by ~10% with a nicer average distribution and slightly higher HP, using my prior formula,

- take the Variance value (20), divide it by flat value of 10% of itself + 1 as NUM_DICE (3 in this case)
- divide Variance by NUM_DICE rounded up as DIE_COUNT (7)
- roll NUM_DICE d DIE_COUNT as the value of Modifier (3 - 21)
- Instead of subtracting half of Variance, subtract ((NUM_DICE * DIE_COUNT) + NUM_DICE) / 2, rounded up (12) from Modifier (3 - 21) to get True Modifier (-9 - +9).
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 18:17

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I'm also in camp "There's too much variance" currently. Look at the distributions reaver posted: It is possible for a yak and an ancient lich to have the same 54 hp. That's insane. Granted it's more or less a 1 in 100,000* or so chance, but hey, why is there anything in crawl that happens 1 in 100000ish times anyways? You could keep random hp and just have the total range be reduced. Instead of an ancient lich going from 54 to 162, a range like 88-128 still gives you a rather large range.

I made a similar proposal about monster damage being a shorter range than it is currently, but I don't think there's much support for that. I'd still like it, though.

*fun fact: Since it rolls 27d5, the chances of exactly 54 hp would be .2^27, which I tried to calculate on my calculator here, but it just answers "0". Bad calculator. I randomly pulled 100,000 out of the air and this is wrong.
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 18:43

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

My methods in Javarahaahahahaahaha

  Code:
public class TestiCrawl {
   
   public static void main(String args[]) {
      
      for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
         System.out.println(calcStandardValue(100, .25));
      }

      System.out.println("===========================================");

      for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
         System.out.println(calcDeviatedValue(100, .25));
      }
   }

   public static int calcStandardValue(int hp, double percent) {

      int variance = (int)Math.ceil((hp * percent)) * 2;
      int modifier = (int)Math.ceil(Math.random() * variance);
      int trueModifier = modifier - (variance / 2);
      
      return hp + trueModifier;
   }

   public static int calcDeviatedValue(int hp, double percent) {

      int variance = (int)Math.ceil((hp * percent)) * 2;
      int numberDice = (int)Math.floor(0.1 * variance) + 1;
      int dieCount = (int)Math.ceil(variance / numberDice);
      
      int modifier = 0;
      
      for (int i = 0; i < numberDice; i++) {
      
         modifier += (int)Math.ceil(Math.random() * dieCount);
      }

      int trueModifier = modifier - (int)Math.ceil((Math.ceil(numberDice * dieCount) + numberDice) / 2);
      
      return hp + trueModifier;
   }
}
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 18:51

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

It might be fun if some branches featured wildly varying HP creatures and others featured consistent creatures.

It could also create some tension and opportunity for decisions if speciens with abnormal properties were labeled "big orc priest" or "small stone giant."

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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 19:11

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

If combat needs to be more variable, increasing the variance of player damage (and pacification) is basically the same as increasing variance of monster HP. There are a few possibly-impactful exceptions I can think of:
- Variance in player damage affects players damaging themselves, variance in monster HP does not (it's similar for monsters damaging themselves but this isn't really ever relevant).
- Variable monster HP means that players can damage (or attempt to pacify) a monster and estimate its max HP from the result; with fixed max HP you obviously know it from the start.
- The cloud thing crate pointed out and whatever other weird HP-based rules that crawl AI has.
I am not really convinced that these impacts are desirable or large enough to worry about, let alone both. Of course if you want to retain the existing balance by adjusting player damage, you probably need to make a bunch of damage formulas a lot more complicated, probably just as bad as the current monster HP formula.

Also, I think it's completely stupid and bizarre that some monsters have fixed HP and some don't. Surely all monsters should be either one or the other, nothing useful is accomplished by giving orbs of fire 150 HP and Killer Klowns 126-178 HP. (Okay, I guess it's reasonable that player ghosts have fixed HP, at least if you believe player ghosts should exist at all, but you get the point.)

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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 22:42

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I don't think combat variance needs to be changed, but as far as I can tell HP variance does little other than confusing the player (due to the fact that HP values are hidden). For instance, I think it's rather absurd that a heavily wounded Orc Priest can be in better shape than an undamaged one.

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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 23:21

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I'm in the same boat as Damiac, I had no idea HP could vary. For an unspoiled player figuring out how much damage you are doing between different weapons is one of the hardest things to really get a handle on. Having a variable that is completely hidden and can vary largely seems to make it far more complicated.

The argument that fixed HP would allow you to calculate battle before they happen doesn't make much sense to me. Even if they don't always roll it monsters have a fixed max HP, so wouldn't you engage them assuming they have that max HP.
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Post Monday, 11th August 2014, 23:44

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

duvessa wrote:If combat needs to be more variable, increasing the variance of player damage (and pacification) is basically the same as increasing variance of monster HP.


Player damage for melee and ranged weapons is already at max variance (You have an even shot of rolling any amount of damage between 0 and the maximum) discounting the the slighty reduction of variance from rolling slaying as your second roll.

Spell damage currently has a set variance, which is set on a per-spell basis, but always has a minimum of 0 and some maximum based on the type of spell (And it's always a bell curve distribution, similar to monster HP)
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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 02:49

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

reaver wrote: A bit off topic but I've heard people praise high variance in Crawl combat before - can you articulate the reasons you feel high variance in combat works well?


Because it forces me to anticipate the multiple directions combat with an enemy can take. If combat had low variance, I would just know whether my character could or could not take on X enemy (or, with some more calculation, Y group of enemies). With high variance, I'm forced to think at the start of combat whether or not I have a solution (and what that solution is) if my hp suddenly drops to 75% or 50% or whatever due to swinginess. Do I have a way to disengage easily? At what point do I so? What buffs do I have and when do I trigger them?

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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 13:14

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

all before wrote:
reaver wrote: A bit off topic but I've heard people praise high variance in Crawl combat before - can you articulate the reasons you feel high variance in combat works well?


Because it forces me to anticipate the multiple directions combat with an enemy can take. If combat had low variance, I would just know whether my character could or could not take on X enemy (or, with some more calculation, Y group of enemies). With high variance, I'm forced to think at the start of combat whether or not I have a solution (and what that solution is) if my hp suddenly drops to 75% or 50% or whatever due to swinginess. Do I have a way to disengage easily? At what point do I so? What buffs do I have and when do I trigger them?


There is no such thing as "I will kill the monster in N turns no matter what" possible in crawl because of the way damage rolls work. You can deal 0 damage to a goblin 20 times in a row with Executioner's Axe with 27 Fighting and 27 Axes and goblin's max HP is irrelevant here. The outcome is very unlikely but it sounds like some players love such variance :shock:
Also it means you should always have a way to escape.

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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 14:05

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

In my own limited experience, the high variability of monster HP and player attack damage combined leads to complete unpredictability and confusion. For the most pedestrian example, a wizard starting out on D:1 can either kill a giant cockroach with one shot, or cannot even come close to killing it with ten shots, instead being killed by it because he can't outrun it. IMO, if there is that much range in the possible outcomes of the simplest encounter, then that is just too much variability. Skill becomes less important than ordinary randomness, and that is not so fun, really.

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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 14:28

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

High variance hp is very confusing and makes strategy matter less. Always being extremely cautious is not an interesting strategy.
However, lower variance hp will definitely make the game easier and less replayable.

Therefore, if we're to lower the hp variance, we should raise the hp/damage average of monsters too.
This way we can maintain the current difficulty level, and make strategy mean much more.
This way knowledge and strategic decisions will matter more, and the game will be more interesting.

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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 14:32

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Nothing is going to change "being cautious" as the right(ie most likely to make you win) way to play a game with permadeath.
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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 15:57

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

One thing Crawl could do if combat had a bit less variance is show "You could kill this monster in as few as X or as many as Y hits" descriptions. I think those messages are really good at teaching how combat works, while still obviously allowing a bunch of randomness.
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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 16:38

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

njvack wrote:One thing Crawl could do if combat had a bit less variance is show "You could kill this monster in as few as X or as many as Y hits" descriptions. I think those messages are really good at teaching how combat works, while still obviously allowing a bunch of randomness.


Or possibly "You can kill the Stone Giant in 3.4 turns, the Stone Giant can kill you in 2.8 turns". Using current weapon of course.

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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 17:05

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

njvack wrote:One thing Crawl could do if combat had a bit less variance is show "You could kill this monster in as few as X or as many as Y hits" descriptions. I think those messages are really good at teaching how combat works, while still obviously allowing a bunch of randomness.

All of the messages would be "or as many as infinity hits". Hits aren't guaranteed to do damage, and even hits that do damage could be hits that do 1 damage and land infrequently enough that the monster heals up between them.
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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 17:30

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Lasty wrote:All of the messages would be "or as many as infinity hits". Hits aren't guaranteed to do damage, and even hits that do damage could be hits that do 1 damage and land infrequently enough that the monster heals up between them.

As I said, this is only something that could work if there were less variance in crawl's combat. Changing this may not be practical, but I don't think "any combat could conceivably last infinity rounds" is particularly compelling.
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Post Tuesday, 12th August 2014, 18:32

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

We could help raise a new generation of scientists by introducing p-values!

  Code:
You can kill the stone giant within 6 rounds (p=.05). 
You can kill the stone giant within 8 rounds (p=.01).


All problems solved. You're welcome.

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Post Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 00:20

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Sandman25 wrote:
all before wrote:
reaver wrote: A bit off topic but I've heard people praise high variance in Crawl combat before - can you articulate the reasons you feel high variance in combat works well?


Because it forces me to anticipate the multiple directions combat with an enemy can take. If combat had low variance, I would just know whether my character could or could not take on X enemy (or, with some more calculation, Y group of enemies). With high variance, I'm forced to think at the start of combat whether or not I have a solution (and what that solution is) if my hp suddenly drops to 75% or 50% or whatever due to swinginess. Do I have a way to disengage easily? At what point do I so? What buffs do I have and when do I trigger them?


There is no such thing as "I will kill the monster in N turns no matter what" possible in crawl because of the way damage rolls work. You can deal 0 damage to a goblin 20 times in a row with Executioner's Axe with 27 Fighting and 27 Axes and goblin's max HP is irrelevant here. The outcome is very unlikely but it sounds like some players love such variance :shock:
Also it means you should always have a way to escape.


Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. One always needs to have a way to escape precisely because one can roll 0 damage several turns in a row (or similar swinginess). If variance were restricted to the point where the chances of this outcome are negligible, I wouldn't need to take it into account.
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Post Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 18:00

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

less swingieness = good

variable hp just makes it more likely you'll die from seemingly reasonable threats
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Post Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 18:22

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

As discussed, swinginess is actually the core of why a game is replayable, at one end of the spectrum, if a set of outcomes is always exactly the same, it stops being a game and is a simple mathmatical puzzle, and once you've solved it, there's no point in doing so again (it completely lacks replayability, although it may still be interesting to do once), at the opposite end of the spectrum, you have no control or predictability at all, and it's a simple exercise in rolling a random number and seeing if you win, which is not interesting (although it has replayability, see slot machines)

Now I think Crawl has just the right amount and moving in either direction will make the game either less interesting or less replayable.

More or less monster Hp doesn't make you die more often, (unless monsters start attacking you with their Hps, that will not be true) lack of escape options when you need them makes you die, more monster hps *might* make you need them more often.

What would be kinda nice is if monsters got a 'tough' or 'fragile' descriptor if they're significantly higher or lower on the hps scale, this retains the diversity of challenge, while removing the weird surprise factor.
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Post Wednesday, 13th August 2014, 23:40

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

The formula for monster HP (basically 3d(X)) is very old and has, as far as I can remember, never been discussed within DCSS. I don't think any change is urgent, and I do think that a change should be considered very carefully (it could lead to many subsequent modifications with little actual gain).

1. I don't think think that the randomness in monster HP is very relevant (and with three dice rolls I wouldn't call the variance of the distribution "high", but that's a subjective matter, obviously) and I believe that if you want to reduce swinginess in Crawl's combat, then monster HP is a pretty bad target. I could imagine fixed HP having an impact on my games when it comes to orc priests: being able to better calculate how useful wand of flame charges are (as an example, and one I wouldn't like).

2. I don't understand why so much of the discussion is about "fixed or variable" max HP. The formula for max HP is not god-given; we can change it in any way we want, and no randomness is just one option. For example (I think this has been mentioned), we could compute a smaller HP interval from a monster's expected HP, and choose actual HP flatly in there (linear function; just one die).

3. If we feel like it, we could announce particularly (un)lucky monsters as "weak/strong orc" (say, 25th and 75th percentiles).

4. I wouldn't mind randomising max HP of uniques.

5. Brogue-style combat descriptions ("With your current weapon, you could at best kill the orc in 4 turns.") are not really feasible for Crawl. (Note that Brogue was designed with this level of clarity in mind.) Unrandomising monster HP wouldn't help there much, so shouldn't be brought up in this discussion.

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Post Thursday, 14th August 2014, 01:14

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Lowering variance – but not removing it entirely – would probably be the best solution here. Without any indication of the HP value rolled, it's a bit hard to gauge the threat level of most early-to-midgame monsters beyond a rough idea. I can say "okay, this is an orc priest, and smite is dangerous." But I currently can't fully answer "can I kill it before it kills me; do I at least have a good chance of that happening?" The balance between the challenge that the monster represents vs. the potential reward from killing it is currently not as clear as it could be, and having it vary significantly from monster to monster of the same species is rather unintuitive.

Looking at the philosophy in the manual:

Major design goals

challenging and random gameplay, with skill making a real difference
meaningful decisions (no no-brainers)
avoidance of grinding (no scumming)
gameplay supporting painless interface and newbie support

Minor design goals

clarity (playability without need for spoilers)
internal consistency
replayability (using branches, species, playing styles and gods)
proper use of out of depth monsters


Large variance in enemy HP certainly increases the randomness of the gameplay. Whether it increases the challenge really depends on player stress, and I personally don't think there's much skill involved in dying to something with far more HP than you would reasonably expect it to have, given other monsters of the same race's appearance beforehand. However, removing monster HP variance entirely means that there is no longer the same sense of relief and or heightened tension when a fight is going more or less easily than expected. It also removes the element of skill involved in disengaging from the confrontation, at least to some degree. Moderate or visisble variance solves both of these issues: enemy threat levels are more clear, and players can consciously decide, with a greater degree of knowledge, whether to engage or not, yet there is also the risk that a fight will go south quickly.

I don't think a relatively opaque mechanism behind enemy health generation has anything directly to do with the meaningfulness of player decision making.

Grinding is irrelevant to this topic.

Large variance in HP is both not noted in the interface and is something that new players are rather unlikely to figure out on their own, because combat from the player-damage-dealing side is also randomized. An alternative to reducing variance is, as suggested earlier, to highlight cases of extreme variance, and thereby make it clear to players that the creatures are different than the usual.

Large variance harms clarity, and the randomness on the player end (and the non-numerical visualization of damage dealt) means that there is never really any indication whether the player just hit weakly (as would be assumed) or that the monster has a greater amount of health than usual.

It's obviously internally inconsistent, as uniques exist. That's not really an issue here, since uniques are meant to be unique fights against known but powerful enemies.

Replayability seems like it would be provided for by the procedural generation, random vault-placement, random enemy spawning, random item spawning, random damage dealing, etc. I can't imagine why a more consistent (though still somewhat fluid) health value for monsters would detract markedly from replayability.

This has nothing to do with out-of-depth monsters.


Essentially, the big issue here is clarity and transparency. Two solutions that have been proposed are a prefix indicating a rough degree of the variation, or a tightening of HP values. I'd prefer the latter, mostly because I like being able to fairly easily estimate my chances against a given enemy, but those options both solve the issue here.

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Post Thursday, 14th August 2014, 09:08

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I don't think that giving monsters with high/low HP visible "fragile"/"tough" markers is a good idea. This would basically mean that every X monster type is replaced by three different monsters: "fragile X", "X" and "tough X"; I think this is unneccessary -- if we need more different enemies, design really new monsters, don't just simply modify HP and clone all other parameters. Displaying these markers would also be problematic: Will the tough orc priest be the same green 'o' as the fragile one? Will this HP change be displayed on the currently seen monster list (If yes, will the "5 orcs" be replaced by "2 fragile orcs", "2 orcs" and "a tough orc" in 3 lines, if no, it will be annoying to check the markers of the current enemies)?

I think reducing variance (in most situations, including this) would be a good change to Crawl, but even the current high variance is less problematic than always checking the "fragile"/"tough" markers.

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Post Thursday, 14th August 2014, 17:12

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

The 'fragile' and 'tough' monsters already exist, you're just not told. You could, of course, count the !!! in your attacks, and determine after a few hits roughly which end of the spectrum the monster is on, especially in the case of earlier monsters, where a 9 - 21 hp differential is going to be pretty obvious.

So to me, it's very counter to the idea that a player should be able to figure out how hard monsters are through experience. It's precisely the kind of spoilerey knowledge I thought you weren't supposed to need for crawl.

Orc priests in particular are already extremely, ridiculously swingy, even before the HP swinginess. Maybe they'll smite you 4 turns in a row, meaning they will kill any character who stays in their LOS in the early game. Maybe they'll just make their eyes glow or walk toward you.

The only safe way to deal with orc priests is to run away, because they might be the 21 hp smite every turn kind. Running from every orc pack until I have enough HPs to deal with that theoretical super priest is boring and lame, so I just won't play it safe, because it's not fun. So occasionally, a low level character gets splatted because I didn't want to play the run away from all orcs game.

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Post Thursday, 14th August 2014, 19:16

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Yeah, past a certain point, variance just serves to randomly kill you for not playing in a highly tedious way.
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Post Thursday, 14th August 2014, 22:21

Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Regarding fragile/robust mobs, I was thinking it could be displayed in the monster description, not changing the name of the mob. For example, hitting x to select the monster tile and then 'v' for description. Imho, this would add to the game and I cannot see how this would be a bad thing.
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Post Thursday, 14th August 2014, 22:24

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

skyspire wrote:For example, hitting x to select the monster tile and then 'v' for description.

I do think encouraging player to do this for every other monster would be a bad thing, though.

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Post Thursday, 14th August 2014, 23:25

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Of course doing it every time would be tedious, even better would be to display it in the brief description, i.e. "A robust ogre entered the room, wielding a glowing giant spiked club'
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Post Friday, 15th August 2014, 00:14

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Siegurt wrote:As discussed, swinginess is actually the core of why a game is replayable...

I'm not sure I agree with this premise at all. I've won a lot of dungeon crawl, 38 games so far. What makes me want to keep playing is trying different builds, going for achievements like greatplayer, speedruns, streaks, high tournament scores, etc. There's a lot of ways you can play a character in dungeon crawl, and those builds interact with various races for better or worse, different branches for better or worse, etc.

I want to see the difference between a fighter and a mage, a fire elementalist and an earth elementalist, etc. I don't think that the thrill of finding out if I can kill a mob in 2 iron shots or 3 iron shots is what keeps the game replayable. Most variance in combat has to do with how much you are fighting - all fights against a single orc priest go about the same way, but when you have a priest + wizard, a lot more things can happen. Throw in some plain orcs which are blocking your ability to hit the casters, and now you have a very interesting encounter going on. It's another one of the reasons why I hate proper tactics - fighting only one mob ever (the ideal) prevents any fight from actually being interesting.

In short, real swinginess tends to come from your tactics, and engaging too many mobs, being in bad situations, etc. Its extremely rare to have a properly set up engagement where I'm fighting only one mob from full resources run into danger because oh no I missed 3 hits in a row and the mob happened to spawn with unusually high HP.

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Post Friday, 15th August 2014, 11:02

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

tasonir wrote:all fights against a single orc priest go about the same way

Actually on a D level when a single orc priest is a notable enemy, a fight with one could go in many, many ways, depending on terrain, rolls and consumables you have and might have to use.

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Post Friday, 15th August 2014, 18:25

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

It's technically possible that if you found an early D:3 priest on a low hp race and it rolled smite 2-3 times in a row that you'd die, sure. But that's quite rare. It's much more likely that an orc priest and wizard together will kill your D:3 character, which was my point.

Single orc priests are non-threatening 98% of the time - add a few other mobs with a priest behind them and you've got one of the most dangerous fights in the game, especially if it's two priests.

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Post Friday, 15th August 2014, 19:08

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

I'm not saying that you will necessarily die. I'm saying that those fights might go differently in that they'll require different actions from you depending on circumstances.
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Post Thursday, 4th September 2014, 08:28

Re: Should monsters have a fixed max hp or variable max hp?

Personally im strongly against variable max hp. Crawl is already random in too many aspects.
For example, once i was playing melee bruiser and killed quokka in 1 hit. Some turns later I meet another quokka and not only i couldn't kill it fast enough - it chewed off 2/3 of my HP. Feels absurd. Same monster - very different results. Must be very confusing for unspoiled players.
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