Originally Posted by
_Ln_
Basically, I have always thought that the degree of tracking for monsters in ADOM is insane. Aside from rats, orcs and goblins, there is practically no way to run from a hostile monster "permanently". Even if you exit its visual range, it will track your steps with a good level of precision and will eventually find you. My question is - does it have to be this precise for 90% of monsters?
I will list several situations which may or may not be relevant for the topic.
1) You see a hostile tough monster, quaff a potion of invis and run away only to find it matching you exactly step by step. I am sure many of you have noticed this effect.
If the PC has stealth, you can lose the monster pretty easily. If the PC doesn't have stealth, presumably the monster can hear the PC stumbling around in their heavy metal armor, breathing, or grunting under the weight of a 500 pound backpack.
2) You will lock a monster in a distant room, go to the other half of the level to continue herb farming, reading books and so. Eventually some other monster opens the room and your opponent will find you again (locking at you cats).
What's the problem with this? Why would they give up hunting you? (Cats, by the way, have excellent hearing and a comparable sense of smell to dogs, and are excellent hunters. They should have no problem tracking you to the other side of the level).
3) You enter a room, close the doors and start smithing/reading a complex book. Unless you have also locked a door, there is a 90% chance of someone barging in. This starts to get absurd when you lock the door, commence a long session of smithing and open the door to see a corridor absolutely packed with all monsters who have no reason to go into your room because they don't even know you are on the level (for example, spawned during smithing). For some reason, everyone gravitates towards you. If you quickly kill all of them and run around the level, you will find it devoid of any life. Which can only mean that no hostile monster stays in its place if the PC is somewhere.
In the specific case of smithing... it's pretty loud. There is really no reason that monsters looking for easy prey shouldn't come looking for you. In general, I think this behaviour has two advantages. First, it helps keep the player moving. If you could just close a door and w5 indefinitely, it means that you can basically always find a place to heal yourself without any risk or farm herbs, reading books, etc. without risk. If the player always has to worry that monsters will come after them, it increases the tension and makes the game more exciting. The second reason is that without this behaviour, using altars for live sac would be basically impossible.
Why hostile monsters that have no knowledge of the PC existence try to find him/her nevertheless?
It makes the game more interesting.
The related questions are:
How fair are tracking abilities of most monsters? Why are non-visual senses (hearing, smell, magical powers) so strong that everyone gravitates towards the PC even before any visual contact?
How would you feel about an RFE about cutting all these non-visual senses outright for the majority of monsters? A change to implement such functionality is to make all monsters "don't care about the PC" till the very moment they are able to identify them visually.
How non-visual senses are able to provide a legitimate target for a monster? A dungeon is populated by a whole bunch of critters. However, (assuming a monster can hear a target from far away), how do most monsters know that this is actually a PC who they are hostile to as opposed to something else?
How would you feel about an RFE to decrease these powers of tracking for most monsters?
Generally, I don't feel these changes are warranted. Given the power of stealth and invisibility already, I think that significant changes to this effect would basically mean you could ignore combat almost entirely. If monster generation on typical levels were significantly higher, this might be worth considering, but given that an average level has <8 monsters on it at any given time, it hardly seems problematic for these few monsters to be actively looking for the PC.
Hoping to win with every class, doomed. Archer, Barbarian, Bard, Beastfighter, Druid, Elementalist, Farmer, Fighter, Monk, and ULE Priest down.