MAngband

Recall death and insta-death on stairing have always been an issue in MAngband.  Typically one goes down the stairs (or recalls) into the middle of several packs of particularly nasty hounds, no time for tele, you die.  Probably all long time players have died like this at least once.

I am about to add a patch to the Ironman server so that hounds no longer appear immediately around the stairs (or recall point).  Unless anyone can give me a good reason why this shouldn't be done ?

- Jug

Excellent idea Jug.
Way too many players have died this way, and in ironman its just way too big of a risk when there's not even the chance of trying to stair back up: "Morgoth waits for you in the darkness below." I certainly don't see any reason not to include the patch.  
-Avenger

I feel very ambivalent about this, it's such a complicated matter, I don't know where to begin...

...Actually [snip snip]
(sacrifices personal opinions for the benefit of the community and the game as it is).

And I remembered that my vote doesn't count, I do, after all... have intrinsic death resistance.

::)


- Warrior

Beautiful idea. I like to know the game beat me fair and square, and when I die to a pack of hounds at the stairs, that doesn't feel fair and square.

Ok, this is actually mostly about vanilla MAng, but still...

I like the idea of a stupid adventurer getting killed by chaos hounds because he doesn't have chaos resistance. Resistances are part of the game and stairing into something you don't resist is also part of the game. However - stairing into something that is NOT resistable, like Time for example... well that doesn't feel- as Berendol says... fair and square.
Hounds on stairs/recall is responsible for 95% of high level character deaths and if we remove that risk most high level people will never die, they'll never lose their equipment or artifacts, they'll always supply the rest of the server with great items and the game's/server's balance will be broken.

As for the Ironman server...

Even if we count some silly deaths that could easily have been avoided only a handful out of 133 people on the ironman ladder has been killed by hounds, I doubt more than 1 or 2 of these actually staired into hounds and got instakilled.

Just trying to point out that it's not such a big problem in Ironman, not yet at least.

That said... I DO support this "fix".

- Warrior

I don't think the problem of hound insta-death is a fair game balancing feature.  If the game is imbalanced, with too many players living forever, I would think that was because of other much more significant unbalancing issues.

To my mind the single most unbalancing feature of MAngband, which is a variation from Vanilla Angband, is player ghosts.

Anyhow, anyone who wants to remove hound insta-death from their version of MAngband could apply this patch.

EDIT: and this fix to the original patch

- Jug

I think it's perhaps good for us to keep in mind that the biggest unbalancing issue in MAngband is that M in the name, heh. It is absolutely brutal to take this great ol' turn based game, and in one fell swoop make it real time.

I've felt that a lot of the seemingly odd features and aspects of MAngband, in the end, exist to try to soften the blow of playing a realtime roguelike.