Discussion: Well Designed Monsters

[Tiktacy]

Discussion Questions:

What makes well designed monsters well designed?

What are some of your favorite "well designed" monsters?

What do all of them have in common?

What are some examples of monsters that lack this and how can they be improved based on the above details?

My two Cents:

In my mind, the most well designed monsters are ones that put you in interesting situations that require you to make choices. Generally speaking, monsters considered dangerous tend to be the most interesting(although not always). Another quality that makes up a well designed monster is having certain resistences, but not ALL resistences, and having a large effect on the game and therefore requiring you to plan ahead. Lastly, I think the placement of a monster is the most important aspect of what makes it well designed. In other words, a monster could be well designed if it spawns in lair, but poor designed if it spawns in depths(Centaurs are a good example of this).

Here are some examples of monsters I consider interesting:

Greater Naga's(Tele other)
Deep troll packs(Breaks through walls, very robust)
Flavored Vault Guards(especially sentinels, mark is scary)
Elephant packs(Pushes you off stairs, difficult to separate from the pack)
Hydra's(rPoi and require planning ahead to deal with)
Centaurs(Early range combat requires unusual re-positioning in order to get them into melee combat)

As for monsters that I think could use some improvement, I think many uniques have the same issues. They all have one specific weakness such as lacking see invisibility or rPoison and can be dealt with extremely easily at the expense of a single consumable. Perhaps offering more robustness to them and alleviating their weaknesses in addition to adding some more interesting powers to some of them would be a major improvement. Some uniques are good though, I like Saint Roka for example since he is so extremely robust and powerful if you find him in orc that actually killing him is an extremely intense and interesting challenge(even though ignoring him for most of the game is probably the optimal play).

[duvessa]

https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9881

I don't think I like liches anymore, their spell list is too long now.

[kuniqs]

What makes well designed monsters well designed?

- they are not overcommon (like orcs, draconians and branch monsters are), familiarity means less interest
- they can't be 'resisted' (like iron giant's throw, or torment/smiting), only avoided with tactics
- they are not annoying (like nymphs, weavers, mutators, beetles, blinkies, geryon, tramplers, blinking tramplers), so much they make me want to punch them
- they are a milestone (like OOF, Lords, Orc priests, TRJ, hydras) to be overcome, and a good measure of my character's progress

[lethediver]

-Difficulty, they should be not-popcorn. Examples of blatant popcorn: green/orange rat, plain naga, sheep almost anywhere, wisp, swamp worm, worker ant (in lair), flying skull (crypt), few others im forgetting.

-Same for mechanics, mechanics should be difficult and interesting for each monster but not 1-shot the player.

Good mechanics: torpor snail, guardian serpent, moth of wrath, orb spider, most of the stronger ghosts (silent specter, flayed ghost, revenant), most t1 demons, almost every monster in shoals, almost everything in elf, most of the hard hitting ranged monsters - crabs, boulder throwers, centaur warrior, yaktaurs, acid blob. All of these monsters make you think and plan carefully when they are in range, and can threaten your player a lot, but are escape-able. I feel this creates good tension and tactical diversity, allowing player to skirmish with them, use stealth and tactics to pick fights, use terrain, etc.

Meh mechanics: boulder beetle (too easily avoided), anything w banishment (1 turn 1 shot = bad, should be channeled ability), entropy weaver (not dangerous enough), torment (overused in late game imo), juggernaut (the fact it can 1 shot many players who first encounter it is spoilery), ghost moth (too one dimensional - invis makes them trivial, otherwise they are too dangerous).

Awful mechanics: neqoxec, cacodemon, hunger cob (hunger-lock is boring and heavily RNG based), hellion (there are just too many of them), lost soul (they are pure annoyance, nothing more).

Things I personally find annoying: shock serpent, caustic shrike, early lair dragons, early game centaur, most spriggans... i really dont like when a monster has very high speed AND good durability AND can kill you in a few turns. It feels un-crawl-like to me, for some reason, but others may differ.

Most angelic monsters - Other than Mennas. For some reason i just never find them dangerous by the time i encounter them, could use buffing imo. They are just like inferior versions of demons atm, with no torment or hellfire.

All the demonspawn in Pan: because they all look the same and have similar name, my brain just doesnt want to differentiate them. Would be better if they were more distinct. Also by the time i do pan most of them are popcorn, except the champions cause of sap.

Monsters that get bonus points:

Mummies - they are slow, but still manage to be interesting/dangerous which is rare. One of the few monster types that torment feels interesting on.
Death knight, Profane servitor - for the sheer 'cool' factor.

Suggestions:

Make banish, malmutate have more restrictions - either channeled ability (similar to naga stormcaller), or a touch only spell.

Make torment do less damage, or remove it from a few monsters.

Give angelic monsters much more dangerous abilities.

Remove the demonspawn and replace each with a more thematically unique monster, and make them a bit more dangerous.

Remove cob, lost soul, caustic shrike, entropy weaver, plain naga, sheep (replace with yak), green/orange rats from game.

Make boulder beetle "rev up" and then hit you 2-3 turns later if you're still unobstructed.

[Elystan]

Black suns have a way of ruining my day

[viggolo]

Discussion Questions:

What makes well designed monsters well designed?

What are some of your favorite "well designed" monsters?

What do all of them have in common?

What are some examples of monsters that lack this and how can they be improved based on the above details?

To answer those questions one needs to first ask the question of what makes a game about monster-slaying and looting good.
Battles with well designed monsters would have to be:
*Fair (not instakilling out of nowhere or putting the player into an irrecoverable position)
*of acceptable duration (not tedious like blink frogs that extend the duration of battles for example)
*appropriately challenging (not too hard nor too easy AND can be dealt with in more ways than one)
*rewarding (not a waste of time and effort)
*varied (not the same experience every time)

Is there one single mob in the game that does all this? Maybe.
A large number of mundane orcs can be a challenge or a cakewalk. Sometimes you don't have a mass AoE spell to wipe them all out in one go and the battle becomes tedious. Sometimes the orcs flank you and attack from every direction. If you are low-lvl, you may find the amount of xp that you get from killing them decent, most of the time, however, not. Sometimes the horde of orcs has some warriors and knights with random weapons mixed in, making the fight more varied.
Is an orc as a monster well designed? Kinda and it really depends.
Those naga mages that cast a spell that surrounds you with other nagas are unfair because they demand you to have certain equipment to succeed ("gear check"), meaning that there is no other solution than to have the equipment/spells/skills that you need and nothing else (they don't usually leave a gap in the surrounding circle for you to escape through).
Forced permanently mutating monsters are unfair because there is no consistent and on-demand available mechanic in the game that would let you selectively remove bad mutations.
So goblins are well designed monsters if you are a lvl 1 player.

[Sar]

*Fair (not instakilling out of nowhere or putting the player into an irrecoverable position)

I'm sorry, I don't understand. If a monster can't put a player in an irrecoverable position, how is it supposed to be a threat? You mean, like, in one turn?

Those naga mages that cast a spell that surrounds you with other nagas are unfair because they demand you to have certain equipment to succeed ("gear check")

What kind of equipment?

[viggolo]

* when you might as well be instakilled outright. Putting the player into an irrecoverable position ->immediately <-.

tp wands, (maybe)blink scrolls, tp scrolls (away from naga caster's LOS in order to prevent getting surrounded and constricted again immediately).
powerful enough weapons as a melee character to kill surrounding enemies within a short amount of time.

[Sar]

That's awfully vague. See, the thing with Crawl is that it does have extremely strong escape and buff consumables, and powerful weapons, and good armour,and god powers. Many people would argue those are too plentiful and make the game too easy. When designing a monster, pretending that those things don't exist is probably not wise. The cost of a hypothetical extremely unlucky character being guaranteed survival is the fact that the more lucky characters (which, I'm going to make a wild guess, is well over 99% of characters played in Crawl) would have a boring (even more boring) time with said monster. Which is kind of sad, is it not?

Edit: also, it's guardian serpents who surround you with enemies, they aren't nagas but some weird snakes with human faces. Also draconian shifters do that!

[viggolo]

What is the metric to measure boredom and how is it related?
Guaranteed survival has not been previously mentioned. Luck is a part of the game but a game that is based entirely on luck is a game that plays itself.
Mob abilities need to be examined on a case by case basis: guardian serpents surround player with constricting enemies ability is not fair for a caster, for example. Requiring you to pass an arbitrary gear check. It wouldn't be an issue if equipment wasn't randomly generated in the first place. If you were for sure able to find a way to acquire something that you needed in order to find a solution to a predicament such as this, then a player's death would be the result of his/her negligence or mismanagement (directly a result of player's actions and not pure chance). Especially now that dungeon levels are being cut out of the game, acquiring specific gear seems to become even more unlikely.

[Croases]

I think the problem with blink allies encircle is that it uses the caster's line of sight rather than the target's. If it used your LoS, you could blame yourself for letting other enemies into your screen with a serpent around (especially since half of Snake is slow), but as things are now you have to treat every guardian serpent as a guardian serpent and 8 warriors/sharpshooters/mana vipers/anacondas at melee range, because there's a small chance that the bugger will decide to bring in some ritualist band and naga stragglers that you didn't even get to see.

[Sar]

a game that is based entirely on luck is a game that plays itself

Are we still talking about Crawl now? There's not much luck involved in winning a game of Crawl, people won 30 and 40 characters in a row. It's more about being patient, really.

guardian serpents surround player with constricting enemies ability is not fair for a caster, for example

Why is it not? Casters can (and probably should) train defences too, and casters don't get less escape options. In fact, a proficient "caster" might nuke the serpent before it gets a shot at casting its spell, or summon some potent allies to fight at their side.

[viggolo]

There's not much luck involved in winning a game of Crawl, people won 30 and 40 characters in a row.

That statement pulled straight out of the ass.
15/15 rune runs (full game) or just zot runs (fraction of a game)?
In either case, good on all the people streaking who minmax to accomplish a win condition, but zot runs do not represent the complete game.

[Sar]

Nobody really bothers streaking 15 runes runs to my knowledge, so I admit defeat.

[Chicken]

@lethediver: Sheep don't need to be removed ... what they need to be is more distinctive for what they are, i.e. a food source. They should be inherently neutral, make no attacks, and if you can keep the (other) monsters from killing them, you can come back and chow down when you want. A fed troll is a happy troll.

[ydeve]

There's not much luck involved in winning a game of Crawl, people won 30 and 40 characters in a row.

That statement pulled straight out of the ass.
15/15 rune runs (full game) or just zot runs (fraction of a game)?
In either case, good on all the people streaking who minmax to accomplish a win condition, but zot runs do not represent the complete game.

How in the world do you get from complaining about guardian serpents (a pre-Zot monster) to criticizing Sar for bringing up examples that ignore extended?

[Shard1697]

I think it's a bit misleading to think that in a game like this, all monsters should/must present interesting situations(and implicitly, not be chaff). Having monsters that are "simple" makes the more interesting monsters feel more special. If all orcs had smiting, early orc priests mixed into a band of normal "boring" orcs wouldn't be as cool.

[zxc23]

a game that is based entirely on luck is a game that plays itself

Are we still talking about Crawl now? There's not much luck involved in winning a game of Crawl, people won 30 and 40 characters in a row. It's more about being patient, really.

Luck does play a major role in the early game, especially D:1-3. You're completely at the mercy of your entrance vault, and a D:1 adder is a coinflip with most combos and can't be escaped from. Once you're past that stage luck is a very small factor.

There's not much luck involved in winning a game of Crawl, people won 30 and 40 characters in a row.

That statement pulled straight out of the ass.
15/15 rune runs (full game) or just zot runs (fraction of a game)?
In either case, good on all the people streaking who minmax to accomplish a win condition, but zot runs do not represent the complete game.

A 3 rune win is a full game. Getting more runes is entirely optional. Anyway, there is almost no luck involved in extended either, unless you get thrown into the middle of hellion island when you enter a new pan floor. Almost all the luck in a run is concentrated in the early game, and the rest is unavoidable banishment/paralysis.

Nobody really bothers streaking 15 runes runs to my knowledge, so I admit defeat.

For the most part, but it's been done before. Sphara won 16 games all with 15 runes and unique races/roles / mostly unique gods.

[Sar]

Didn't know about Sphara's achievement!

[TeshiAlair]

That's one of my favorite things about this game, the fact that it is very non-luck based for good players and fairly luck based for people like me who are inexplicably terrible at it despite playing for....like 9 years I think?

On the topic of well designed monsters, I love the vault guard types and have been finding a greater appreciation for elephant packs. I wish there were more monsters that affected how a player is permitted to move, given that positioning is such a large part of the game.

[bcadren]

A monster can't intrinsically be "well-designed" it has to mesh artistically, thematically and mechanically with the area it spawns within the game it spawns and it must fulfill a purpose within that area. Green Rats are well designed if we understand that their entire purpose it to be fairly weak creatures for the level they spawn at that primary only endanger the player because of sheer numbers or blocking exit/runaway from a more dangerous creature. You have to look at the environment a lot more holistically, rather than just holding a few monsters up on a pedestal.

[carbonbasedlifeform]

Nobody really bothers streaking 15 runes runs to my knowledge, so I admit defeat.

For the most part, but it's been done before. Sphara won 16 games all with 15 runes and unique races/roles / mostly unique gods.

My doubts pertaining that particular streak were based on the fact it was done on two servers. I've asked Sphara himself and indeed it was legit which is outstanding. He switched servers for the overcrowded lantea during tournament season. Silly me...

Not derailing the topic - I'm sharing the thoughts with bcarden. Every monster has its purpose. If you think rats are badly designed - just think of the situation when one is blocking your path in corridor when escaping adder. Thats one of their purposes I guess. Not mentioning 1v1 a rat is easiest exp you can hope for at d:1. Game needs popcorn.

[Shard1697]

A monster can't intrinsically be "well-designed" it has to mesh artistically, thematically and mechanically with the area it spawns within the game it spawns and it must fulfill a purpose within that area. Green Rats are well designed if we understand that their entire purpose it to be fairly weak creatures for the level they spawn at that primary only endanger the player because of sheer numbers or blocking exit/runaway from a more dangerous creature. You have to look at the environment a lot more holistically, rather than just holding a few monsters up on a pedestal.

Yes, this. A game loaded with nothing but very dangerous difficult "interesting" monsters is a game that is likely to be exhausting to play. Monsters that are weak/not flashy/don't have 'cool' special abilities, like hobgoblins, can fill their design niche just as well as monsters that do, like vault wardens.

[Sar]

Hobgoblins are very strong for their min depth!

[Shard1697]

This is true, but they're not a monster most players tend to think of as "interesting", because they don't have flashy abilities. They're a monster which basically just walks and hits you with melee(which nothing in the OP's list of interesting monsters really is, minus hydras which have their own complicated gimmick). My point is that simple stuff like this can be just as well-designed as the more complicated stuff(or moreso!), in part because it makes the more complicated stuff special by comparison.

[Sar]

They also occasionally throw stuff!

[lethediver]

A monster can't intrinsically be "well-designed" it has to mesh artistically, thematically and mechanically with the area it spawns within the game it spawns and it must fulfill a purpose within that area. Green Rats are well designed if we understand that their entire purpose it to be fairly weak creatures for the level they spawn at that primary only endanger the player because of sheer numbers or blocking exit/runaway from a more dangerous creature. You have to look at the environment a lot more holistically, rather than just holding a few monsters up on a pedestal.

I might agree with you if green rats ever achieved that, but for me personally, they never have. Maybe if they were more like ants in spawned in groups with some diversity and a few tougher members thrown in... but they dont do that. They generally just show up on my screen, I tab or spellspam through them, and then hit 'o' again at which point a different monster will appear. I rarely see green rats at the same time as a dangerous monster for whatever reason.

I do try to look at environments holistically -- its one of the reasons Shoals is my favorite part of the game, because of how all the enemies work together to create interesting movement constraints to endanger the player. The popcorn i listed, in my view have no value, not even in the context of other monsters being there. Surely there is a balance between "monster with interesting mechanic you must think hard about" and "completely one dimensional easy monster you have to think hard about to FIND The interestingness in".

-

To address the point being made about hobgoblins, it's fine to have easy, straightforward enemies in the first few levels. People learn to play on those floors after all. But the depth (lol no pun intended) being added by each monster should increase as you go down. Disagree if you like, but I feel like the game would be much better if it was 4 hours of careful play rather than 3.5 hours careful play + 4 hours total of mindless tab/hotkey spamming.

[Shard1697]

To me, it feels closer to the former than the latter, although there are times when there's a bit much popcorn. But maybe that's because I usually do just 3 rune now? At any rate whether we're talking 2-4 hour games or 6-8 hour games, I don't feel like a full half my playtime is mindless popcorn killing.

[bcadren]

Every "flashy ability" that's unique to a specific monster is another layer for new players to learn in order to understand crawl. Extra layers of complexity aren't necessarily good for playability.

[MainiacJoe]

Every "flashy ability" that's unique to a specific monster is another layer for new players to learn in order to understand crawl. Extra layers of complexity aren't necessarily good for playability.

I thought of this thread playing last night when I encountered a manticore. I died to the first manticore I met because I didn't understand Barbs. And I haven't died from a single one since, but every battle that has a manticore has its own rules and that cures the boredom. So in terms of playability, I think that manticores adding a lot to subsequent games more than makes up for "unfairly" killing off newbies the first time they encounter them.

That said, I'm at the point in my skill level where the frontier of New Stuff That Will Kill Me the First Time is in Depths. It sucks a lot more to be learning these newbie mistakes after 10 hours of gameplay, vs. one hour.

It isn't like Crawl is Nethack, where you have to learn the hard way all the myriad ways a rubber chicken can kill you, among a million other things.

[prozacelf]

Every "flashy ability" that's unique to a specific monster is another layer for new players to learn in order to understand crawl. Extra layers of complexity aren't necessarily good for playability.

That said, I'm at the point in my skill level where the frontier of New Stuff That Will Kill Me the First Time is in Depths. It sucks a lot more to be learning these newbie mistakes after 10 hours of gameplay, vs. one hour.

I'm mostly past this point now, but I remember not all that long ago (maybe 8 months ago) I discovered to my dismay that vampire knights can paralyze you. Since they also hammer and tend to carry big weapons on top of that, it did not end well for me. I know I had dealt with plenty of vampire knights before that particular encounter, but obviously not with the level of MR I had that time. Now of course, I am always hyper-aware of the fact that they have that ability, and am paranoid about killing them and/or any phantasmal warriors that may be around. Unfortunately, that is a painful lesson to learn by the time you're in Crypt or Depths.

[Hurkyl]

I think it's a bit misleading to think that in a game like this, all monsters should/must present interesting situations(and implicitly, not be chaff). Having monsters that are "simple" makes the more interesting monsters feel more special. If all orcs had smiting, early orc priests mixed into a band of normal "boring" orcs wouldn't be as cool.

IMO, crawl has a problem that it has way too much chaff, not too little. You want the possibility of dangerous monsters around the next corner to cause tension, but all of the trivial encounters deflates the tension before it can build up -- and, IMO, actually dulls one's sense of danger and excitement.

[Rast]

unless you get thrown into the middle of hellion island when you enter a new pan floor

That's not an autoloss either, last I checked.

[crate]

I think it's a bit misleading to think that in a game like this, all monsters should/must present interesting situations(and implicitly, not be chaff). Having monsters that are "simple" makes the more interesting monsters feel more special. If all orcs had smiting, early orc priests mixed into a band of normal "boring" orcs wouldn't be as cool.

IMO, crawl has a problem that it has way too much chaff, not too little. You want the possibility of dangerous monsters around the next corner to cause tension, but all of the trivial encounters deflates the tension before it can build up -- and, IMO, actually dulls one's sense of danger and excitement.

The problem is this is literally unsolveable unless you make crawl much smaller, or make it almost completely empty. Or make it unwinnable, I guess, though that's functionally equivalent to making it smaller.

[dowan]

a game that is based entirely on luck is a game that plays itself

Are we still talking about Crawl now? There's not much luck involved in winning a game of Crawl, people won 30 and 40 characters in a row. It's more about being patient, really.

Why do people throw this around like it proves something? If I flip a coin over and over and over and over and over and record the results, if I do it long enough, I'll get streaks of heads. If I am patient enough, I'll get streaks of 30 or 40 heads in a row, eventually. This does not prove that getting heads on a coin flip is skill based.

Not that I think crawl is entirely luck based, just that pointing out the existence of win streaks does not prove otherwise.

[johlstei]

Right but if you take the same setup, and see a guy get 40 heads in a row with only, say, 500 flips total, you can nearly discard the chance that it was random because its much more likely that he is actually skilled at flipping a coin so it lands on heads. That is certainly seems like the case here.

[Sprucery]

Not that I think crawl is entirely luck based, just that pointing out the existence of win streaks does not prove otherwise.

It does, because a skilled player does not have to play 2^30 games to get a 30 streak.

[dowan]

Well, whether there is luck involved or not doesn't mean it's a 50% chance. And almost all of the extremely skilled crawl players do not have 20+ win streaks, to my knowledge. In fact, the extremely skilled players who say the game is too easy still die sometimes.

[Lasty]

Not every skilled player plays for streaks. I can't speak for anyone else, but I play crawl primarily to have fun, and I often voluntarily undertake self-imposed challenges or deliberately avoid strong but boring strategies and tactics. Despite that, I have several streaks, though none approaching 20 wins.

[dowan]

I totally agree with you Lasty, most people aren't playing to just win over and over, I was only objecting to what I see as spurious logic. The existence of streaks does not prove by itself that chance plays no part in the outcome, that's all.