Still possible to leave Orbs in permanently inaccessible places
issueid=5203 10-06-2017 05:43 PM
Ancient Member
Number of reported issues by Grond: 971
Still possible to leave Orbs in permanently inaccessible places

In the pyramid and minotaur maze, you can get around the Chaos Orbs returning to your backpack by throwing them. There are also two new areas that can be made permanently inaccessible:
  1. Rolf's throne room, which becomes inaccessible if you kill dwarves.
  2. The volcano, which becomes inaccessible once rendered dormant.
Issue Details
Issue Number 5203
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category All without NotEye
Status Unconfirmed
Priority 8
Affected Version ADOM 2.3.3
Fixed Version (none)
Milestone (none)
Users able to reproduce bug 0
Users unable to reproduce bug 0
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)




10-12-2017 02:23 AM
Junior Member
Quote Originally Posted by Taederias
Hm possibly, this seems like a good idea too, still it would probably be best implemented as something that occurs only a limited few number of times.
It could also be another way that the "messengers" aspect of the Raven starsign could be used, if only for a bit of Developer's Foresight.

10-12-2017 10:26 AM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by Taederias
You can ruin your game in a myriad of ways by "forgetting to do something" or "accidentally doing something" and so on. If you forget you didn't pick up the crumpled scroll, and when you return for it an acid vortex destroys it, you'll lose your chance at an ultra ending, possibly even more frustratingly. Or if you lose it in a trap. Or polymorph it by mistake. There are lots of foolish things one can do.
Yes, but an ultra is an extra, a bonus. It should not be expected. The game is still winnable if the crumpled scroll is destroyed. Here, we are talking about making the game unwinnable.

Quote Originally Posted by Taederias
The reason this is different is because a new player might not even have much reason to suspect that what they're doing is a bad idea, hence the suggestions of hinting at that fact in more or less subtle ways. But if a player knows full well that leaving the orb makes "winning" impossible, then they bear full responsibility. Yes, they might do it by mistake but they can also die by mistake in many ways, or do many other stupid things, as I've already said. They are still responsible for paying attention to these things.
As I said earlier, I don't want to handhold anyone or absolve players from responsability. I have a sizable bunch of wins under my belt, I'm not a wimp. But the correct way to punish players in a roguelike is death, not making them play for hours only to find that their game was unwinnable in the first place. That has always been seen as bad game design, even in the wild 80's, when Sierra adventures sometimes had dead ends like that, but were heavily criticized for it. Why? Because dying in games is fun, but losing hours (or even days, if you use savegames) without even realizing that the game has become unwninnable isn't.

Quote Originally Posted by Taederias
Furthermore, even if the orbs are lost, they can leave the Drakalor Chain and end the game that way. Yes, they will have failed the main quest, but they still will have done lots of other stuff, and still get a scoreboard entry. That's why I don't think handholding veteran players is necessary, but helping newbies a little would be okay.
That is true, and I'm a bit more in agreement with it. But still, for most players the goal of a game is to try to win, not to get a better loss. And also, the problem is not that much the fact that you cannot win (when you die, you don't win either) but the fact that you can spend hours of days without knowing. So I still stand by the opinion that this shouldn't happen.

By the way, this gives me the idea that something nice to do would be giving the player a small chance of still winning, but with great work and suffering... for example, if an orb is left in an inaccessible place, make it apear in a very deep level of the ID (99 or something like that?), maybe guarded by a powerful boss. They're chaos orbs after all.

10-12-2017 03:16 PM
Junior Member
In my opinion, having some monster deliver the orb back to you is pampering - not suitable for Adom.
Making the orb appear on I:99 or some other super deep place is just grinding - simply not fun and doesn't function as a punishment.
Rendering a game unwinnable and letting it continue is indeed something I hated all the way from the original King's Quest.

I say kill the player whenever the situation arises that an orb is somewhere inaccessible. And make sure that some vision of Andor Drakon (oslt) appears and makes sure that you understand what killed you.

10-12-2017 11:58 PM
Junior Member
Yeah, I'm not so sure about the orb delivery idea anymore. Having the game just end would be the simpler solution. But maybe instead of outright killing the PC, the game would go, 'you feel as if having permanently lost something of enormous significance. a deep sense of dread takes over you'. This would result in dooming and all monsters gaining a lot of levels, like how it goes if you play an edited savegame, and the PC would die to whatever mobs they face next. It shouldn't be too hard for the player to figure out what it is they lost, especially if they've paid attention to Khelavaster's story.

10-14-2017 11:19 AM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by sillihai
Yeah, I'm not so sure about the orb delivery idea anymore. Having the game just end would be the simpler solution. But maybe instead of outright killing the PC, the game would go, 'you feel as if having permanently lost something of enormous significance. a deep sense of dread takes over you'. This would result in dooming and all monsters gaining a lot of levels, like how it goes if you play an edited savegame, and the PC would die to whatever mobs they face next. It shouldn't be too hard for the player to figure out what it is they lost, especially if they've paid attention to Khelavaster's story.
Yeah, why not. This would also be a source for an interesting challenge game.

It can even make logical sense, Andor Drakon finds out that the only way of stopping him is now impossible, so he launches the last wave of his attack earlier.

10-14-2017 07:28 PM
Junior Member
Quote Originally Posted by sillihai
Yeah, I'm not so sure about the orb delivery idea anymore. Having the game just end would be the simpler solution. But maybe instead of outright killing the PC, the game would go, 'you feel as if having permanently lost something of enormous significance. a deep sense of dread takes over you'. This would result in dooming and all monsters gaining a lot of levels, like how it goes if you play an edited savegame, and the PC would die to whatever mobs they face next. It shouldn't be too hard for the player to figure out what it is they lost, especially if they've paid attention to Khelavaster's story.
I'm okay with that too, and it seems so are others. The utterly ridiculous level of upscaling upon "running out of luck" may or may not be fully appropriate, an overwhelming swarm of (still really, really high-level) chaos monsters encountered both in dungeon levels and as wilderness encounters might be better suited to the explanation offered by Al-Khwarizmi. Then you might (with considerable difficulty) still be able to flee with your life by leaving the map, and let the swarm overtake the world, failing your quest. But it's all a matter of fine-tuning, and simply making the loss of the orb trigger some message (like that described above) and the (already implemented) out of luck modifier is a good start.

10-15-2017 06:48 AM
Ancient Member
What if lost orbs could show up in an arbitrary general or tool item shop? Either in a randomly generated one or one of the guaranteed ones (HMV, black market, Dwarftown, casino). After a player has foolishly lost their orb in a location that has become permanently inaccessible, the next time they enter a level containing one of those shops, it's restocked with the orb. Upon entering the shop the shopkeeper could say something along the lines: "You won't believe what my item providers have found!"

10-16-2017 08:35 AM
rho rho is offline
Member
Alternative suggestion: stop having places that become permanently inaccessible.

What would be lost if the Pyramid or Minotaur Maze remained open until level 50? If it would cause a problem, are there any other ways of fixing it? For instance, if the problem is "a player shouldn't be able to get the AMW and Ankh if they don't kill Rehetep at an appropriate level", then would it also work if he was still there but stopped dropping the items after level 17? Or if he adjusted in power? Or if the top level of the Pyramid was just entirely empty once you were too high level (as Rehetep heard how powerful you had become and chose to move away)? And so on and so forth. Similar logic could also be applied to any other similar location.

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