Roguelikes

[Sigil]

Since this is, primarily, a TTRPG forum I thought there would probably be a significant appreciation about roguelikes and roguelike-likes here. Therefore this is a thread to talk about roguelikes of the more traditional variety (Nethack, angband, etc), and other games that share similarities with them (Binding of Issac, FTL, etc).

Currently I'm playing FTL (with the Infinite Space, and a few other, mods), Sword of the Stars: The Pit, The Binding of Issac, and Red Rogue.

FTL is probably the least like a traditional roguelike of the four, in which you upgrade a spaceship and fly around, well, space. It's got a moderately sized community producing mods for it, which is prolonging the experience significantly for me.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit, is a futuristic roguelike and is pretty traditional. It's got great polish, but the crafting system seems opaque and not as fun or useful as it could have been. I'd say it's worth getting if it goes on sale on Steam for less than $10.

The Binding of Issac feels like a cross between a roguelike and a Zelda dungeon, and has just broken 2 million in sales. The most prolific let's player of Binding of Issac has an interview with the creator on youtube here.

Lastly, I already posted about Red Rogue over in the Video Games thread.

So what roguelikes are you guys playing?

[Atmo]

I have played various of these Roguelikes in the past: adom, nethack, Izuna (for DS), and others.

ADOM


Izuna

[Sigil]

That Izuna one looks interesting, if only I still had a DS.

[SlyJohnny]

Roguelikes mostly piss me off, but I have all kinds of time for FTL That game was distilled genius that was polished to perfection before release.

Mostly the problem I have with RL's like Nethack is this conceit the playerbase has that every death is preventable and that it's possible to advance in skill to the point you can win consistently, when the best players in the world have logged hundreds of ascensions and thousands of deaths. The single minded vehemence they argue this with easily equals the "fighters are balanced" crowd.

[Sigil]

Those people are asshats who don't get the point. The point of a roguelike isn't to provide some sort of "fair" challenge, if it was they'd remove the random elements and you'd get Dark Souls (which is excellent). The point is to provide an experience that changes and is different every time you start a new character, and to have the rules governing this experience consistant enough that you understand how to interact with this new experience (excluding, perhaps, a players initial 'discovery' experience). No one plays FTL because 'every deat is preventable' in it, they play it because they get new randomly generated sectors that they can continue to play a game they like in forever.

So you're pretty much right, except about FTL, I love it to death, but it's not perfect, it's not even genius, but it is pretty damn fun. Which is all I ever wanted from it anyway.

[Koumei]

I really liked the Doom RL, as mentioned in the video games thread on Page X. Lots of fun, though I can only beat it on easy (admittedly, somewhat reliably, and even with setting myself goals like "as soon as you get the shotgun, it's SHOTGUNS ONLY" or "melee weapons only, but throwing knives is okay").

Similar to Roguelikes, but much more simplistic and with the mythical Save Game feature, was Castle of the Winds. I loved that as a kid, and as an adult I of course managed to redownload it and play it a few times. Basically all the tiles are just made using icons (indeed, back in the days of Windows 3.1 where you could flat-out make your own icons with the software right there, you could import those into CotW). In the early stages, you will learn to fear ogres and (especially) manticores. In the later stages, manticores will still give you a terrible surprise every now and then when you're resting, but you'll give undead the respect they drain out of you.

Good fun.

[Guyr Adamantine]

Currently I'm playing FTL (with the Infinite Space, and a few other, mods), Sword of the Stars: The Pit, The Binding of Issac, and Red Rogue.

FTL is probably the least like a traditional roguelike of the four, in which you upgrade a spaceship and fly around, well, space. It's got a moderately sized community producing mods for it, which is prolonging the experience significantly for me.

FTL has mods? Which ones do you suggest?

The only roguelike I've reliably played are Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Dungeons of Dredmor. I've tried The Pit, but despite my Sots fanboyness, it just didn't do it for me. It's the lack of racial character options, you see. I'd rather play a zuul or liir than a stinky human.

[Sigil]

Oh man, DoomRL. I haven't played it in about two weeks, but if I remember the newest version supports custom games and mods natively, so in theory you could just give yourself a starting shotgun.

As for FTL, there's a master mod list.. I like Infinite Space for replayability, the Balanced Arsenal and Drones Plus for variety.

[OgreBattle]

Azure Dreams, on the PS1


It's a Roguelike with elements of Pokemon, City Building, and a Dating Sim.

Go into the tower to fight monsters and get eggs and treasure.


Collect Monsters:




Collect Girls:


Eat Food:

[tussock]

Angband. I found my first ever potion of death by drinking it, which was head-desk awesome, and now they don't even have potions of death in the game any more. What's up with that? Anyway, awesome, no bullshit quests, just dungeon, dungeon, and more dungeon, until you kill the end boss, and then ever more dungeon.

It used to get super-interesting when the demons started chain-summoning and filled up the monster-queue with greater demons, then filled up the item-queue with ever more valuable treasure, then gradually called in enough OOD uniques that you had to abandon a level now full of nice artifacts. Much less likely in newer versions.

[Parthenon]

The thing about Roguelikes is that sometimes I just don't have the patience. I really liked DoomRL and I've played a bit of others like Stone Soup, Incursion and Tales of Maj'Eyal.

But, then I get to the point where I just want to go through without having to piss about with tactics like dropping items as bait or trying to work out complex subsystems. Which then means I start rushing through and dying more often, leading me to drop the game for a while.

[Kaelik]

I play roguelikes, but I hate the time pressure elements.

I play Stone Soup as a Mummy Necromancer because magic is good and not eating is good, and fuck your eating mechanics.

I played FTL unmodded, and I tried to install infinity but it fucked up. But I did play the game after completely removing the rebel fleet progression, so I could dance around doing whatever the fuck I wanted until I had carved out all the sectors.

Fuck time pressure, is what I am saying.

[SlyJohnny]

Sigil, you are a rotten bastard for putting me on to The Pit. I really don't need another timesink when I'm supposed to be being productive.

I like it. Lots going on, but no bullshit minutiae tactics. I didn't think I liked roguelikes as a genre, barring FTL. Interesting.

[Lokathor]

Roguelikes mostly piss me off, but I have all kinds of time for FTL That game was distilled genius that was polished to perfection before release.

I hope you're joking because within the realm of roguelikes it's a poor showing. Most of the time the player isn't given any significant choices or way to influence things.

In terms of roguelikes I've played: Ivan, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Dungeons of Dredmor, Nethack, Rogue, Angband, Sangband.

I've dabbled in making my own roguelike stuff, but never ended up with anything presentable.

[Sigil]

Sigil, you are a rotten bastard for putting me on to The Pit. I really don't need another timesink when I'm supposed to be being productive.

I like it. Lots going on, but no bullshit minutiae tactics. I didn't think I liked roguelikes as a genre, barring FTL. Interesting.

Glad I er... helped you become unproductive? Like I said, the recipe system is pretty opaque, I actually just looked them up instead of trying to find them organically. Several ingredients only go into two, or even one, recipe. Many of the recipes feel like a waste of time, but there are a few that are pretty powerful.

OgreBattle: I remember renting Azure Dreams over, and over, and over again over the course of about two months. Goddamn rust traps.

[Judging__Eagle]

I think that the biggest problem with people who play roguelikes and declare them to be so freaking great is that they never played actual Rogue.

I actually played a lot of Rogue in the 80's with my brother at an office computer when my dad had to work on weekends and brought us with him.

Rogue is... hard. Myself and my brother never really got past the 5-6th floors before finding ... yet an other room with 10+ monsters that we had to grind our way through, or die.

Certain creatures, like Rattlesnakes, were brutal, and there was no way to reliably do anything. Sometimes you'd find a wand with some lighting bolt charges in it, often you'd find scrolls that would bless your mace, other times a leperchaun would steal your last mango* (*:the only food type one could get besides food rations). Then you'd die, hopefully with a higher score than previous games.

Later on I played some of the more GUI based roguelikes, and netHack. My opinions haven't really changed either.

As Kaelik says, the time constraints are the biggest bottleneck in having fun with one of these. Dying of starvation is the reason you can't reliably level up on the earlier levels by "waiting" for enemies to show up who are still somewhat level appropriate; and side-stepping the eating mechanics is handy.

Honestly, if the food mechanics were more like Ragnarok Online or Fallout where they instahealed the user like potions, that would be better; even a WoW method would be acceptable. The Everquest method that apes Rogue is not acceptable.

As slyjohnny says, Rogue really does have a 1:1000 victory to attempts ratio. Anyone suggesting otherwise has their head up their ass.

I'd actually prefer scum-saving before pickpocketing in Fallout over having to play Rogue, or most Roguelikes all over again.

[Lokathor]

The food mechanic is there because of the random spawn mechanic. The intent is that you NOT be able to grind out monsters to level up.

You can setup a roguelike without food, but then it has to prevent grinding in some other way.

FTL gets close to this by simply not letting you go back a sector, though you still have to avoid the rebel fleet, and you still use a fuel point to make each jump.

You could have a game where you can only go down the stairs, and make combat dangerous enough or make foes random enough that players can weigh the value of checking the next room for treasure against having the next room contain a deadly monster.

[Sigil]

As Lokathor points out, a roguelike needs some form of attrition mechanic both to prevent grinding and to give a sense of urgency, though it doesn't necessarily mean food and starvation.

For example FTL has the rebel fleet which prevents you from carousing a sector to you hearts content, and also has fuel (but that's rarely a problem unless severely mismanaged). The infinite space mod removes the fleet, but in turn makes encounters more difficult, the attrition factor then becomes money (scrap) since encounters will now cause more damage amnd need to be repaired. Both are valid, but I find the risk/reward factor of the second more enjoyable.

A game that does this wrong would be Sword of the Stars: The Pit, wherein you need food not to starve AND there are a finite number of monsters anyway, meaning you cant grind levels anyway. It could be argued that the starvation mechanic here encourages you not to revisit floors to claim items you passed up on, but I feel it could have been handled better.

Judging__Eagle: I have played the original Rogue and, yes, it is very hard. I don't think, though, that it is an absolute necessity for someone to play it to understand roguelikes. Modern roguelikes are frankly just better than rogue. Also, you're right, they aren't the greatest shit ever, no more than any genre of games is. They can be great games when executed well though (just like an FPS, platformer, puzzle game, etc).

[DSMatticus]

You don't need to make play time finite in order to avoid XP grinding. You can just set XP/level caps based on a challenge/progression system, such that the character won't get more powerful until they seek new challenges (fight tougher things, go down a floor).

That doesn't stop item grinding, but if you've designed your game such that spending time grinding for items is a viable or even necessary way to attain ULTIMATE POWAAAH fuck you item grinding should have died with Diablo II it's time for the medium to evolve past that bullshit.

[Sigil]

It's not that grinding is always going to be necessary, it's just that if grinding is viable, then it's always beneficial, and therefore players will use it. Also, challenge-gating your level advancement is just another form of xp attrition, and would be another fine way to do it. It just functionally serves the same purpose as fatigue, fuel, limited spawns, or whatever.

[Lokathor]

Well sure, just explain what your ultimate RPG system is that doesn't have any way to let grinding give you more power and is still very randomized/replayable and is also interesting to play for hours on end.

Because I don't think you have one so easily. Because RPG design is actually not so simple. And it often revolves around parties of characters, which isn't as easily applicable to a single-character game without some considerations (such as there being no one in your party to pick you up when you fall down bleeding).

And a roguelike is an RPG + a computer program, and most of the programmers are just programmers, not RPG designers.

And if you can explain a convincing and complete roguelike system without any viable grinding in it then I will personally turn your idea into a functioning game.

[DSMatticus]

It's not that grinding is always going to be necessary, it's just that if grinding is viable, then it's always beneficial, and therefore players will use it. Also, challenge-gating your level advancement is just another form of xp attrition, and would be another fine way to do it. It just functionally serves the same purpose as fatigue, fuel, limited spawns, or whatever.

It's absolutely not the same. Limiting advancement directly does not force the player to manage time as a resource. Starvation/fuel/fatigue mechanics use time as a resource to limit advancement. That is exactly the sort of difference that is relevant to people complaining about time pressure.

Item grinding is a more difficult thing to handle, but there are a number of ways to tackle that:
1) Balance consumables around the action economy, not around the quantity in the player's backpack.

2) Limit the amount of special bling you can gain benefits from simultaneously to a reasonably small number and fill out the player's slots early.

3) Keep the random loot tables tight such that farming goblins 10 minutes (or whatever) is likely to have the same power payout as farming goblins for 10 hours (no 1 in 1,000,000 drops of UBER GODLY POWER).

4) Events that break point 3 should exist and be finite per level and therefore not farmable. So occasionally you will run into Goob Gob, Goblin Warlord extraordinaire and be able to murder him for a random magic item out of line with your current place on the advancement track. But Goob Gob the IInd will never take his place for you to murder and acquire another random magic item from.

5) Grinding a level for optimum XP and drops should take longer than gaining access to the next level (grinding has measurable benefits), because people will want to speedrun your game and the time/power tradeoff is a thing that should exist.

[Omegonthesane]

It occurs to me that DoomRL seems to have a lot of boxes ticked in the way of anti-grinding due to its objective of being relatively small.

You can't just let infinite monsters spawn for infinite XP (anymore), a finite number spawn at the start of each level and new summons (or Arch-Vile reanimations, natch) don't give you XP.

A finite number of items spawn per level, and your inventory's kind of limited besides.

In theory you could grind for "all teh ammos" if you face a former human/sergeant/cap'n/commando next to an arch-vile, since reanimated creatures get new ammo when animated, but this is about as good a way of dying as it is of grinding - and in any case is limited by inventory space.

[Sigil]

It's absolutely not the same. Limiting advancement directly does not force the player to manage time as a resource.

I never said it was the "same" as all the other forms of XP attrition, just that it serves the same purpose or function, which is to limit level advancement. Note that I included "fatigue, fuel, [and] limited spawns" as ways to do this. You bring up several other ways to do this, and I wish more would use number 5 allowing you to balance risk and reward on your own terms when deciding to either explore more or to advance to the next level and save your health.

[SlyJohnny]

Roguelikes mostly piss me off, but I have all kinds of time for FTL That game was distilled genius that was polished to perfection before release.

I hope you're joking because within the realm of roguelikes it's a poor showing. Most of the time the player isn't given any significant choices or way to influence things.

How do you come to that conclusion? Sure, your ship build might be limited by the total contents of all the shops you encounter, but that seems like an extension of the normal roguelike "random drops", to me. Sometimes you get a wish from a genie, sometimes you get poisoned and die in a pool of your own vomit. At least FTL always gives you the stuff you need to win; even if none of the shops ever stock weapons, that means they have tons of sub-systems and drones or crew to spend your scrap on, so you go to the final boss with a mantis boarding team and souped-up defense drones. The randomly generated ships mean that there's still the odd time where your next jump will be a fight against some monstrous killcruiser precisely designed to fight exactly the type of ship you've built, but you can usually escape and it's usually your fault for having put all your eggs into one basket.