Random Artifact Generator and player ghosts

[PelfElf]

I would LOVE to see both--to my mind they really enhance replayability. Thoughts?

[Grond]

To my mind there are a couple of benefits to random artifacts:

1. They allow for interesting items with multiple bonuses or intrinsics.
2. It's easy to identify them as special (IIRC in Crawl they show up as a different text color as well as having a description like "a silvery two-handed sword").

I think the first point can be covered with sufficiently flexible generation of normal items; already you can see stuff like cloaks of defense and precision. When a bigger set of prefixes and suffixes is implemented I don't see any reason random normal items couldn't be as interesting as random artifacts. The second point is somewhat more relevant, as the nagging thought that you left behind some random [+12, +12] leather boots is annoying. On the other hand, this isn't as much of an issue in ADOM as in Crawl: you have more generous carrying capacity, scrolls of identify are more effective, you have detect item status and altars to deal with cursed items, and valuable items often have unusual weights.

I would somewhat prefer having only fixed artifacts as it creates more of a link between different playthroughs (although you'd obviously want the pool of artifacts to be big enough that getting any particular one of them is rare). It's nice to be able to say "things really picked up after I found Vanquisher" rather than "I found this nice randart two-handed sword which happened to slay demons, dragons, the undead, the unliving, humanoids, giants, and jellies." In addition, there's the proud ADOM tradition of having the bulk of your equipment (including your really really good items) vulnerable to destruction by the cruel machinations of fate.

As for player ghosts, I think this would be cool to see (and other named boss monsters as well). If they were implemented similarly to Crawl there is the issue that a decent portion of deaths will occur in randomly named dungeons. Having player ghosts show up in graveyard or crypt levels would be a potential way they could be introduced.

[Grey]

I've yet to see a really good random artifact generator. They tend to produce items that are mostly crap or that are overpowered. The time spent tweaking a generator to be balanced and interesting might be better spent hand-designing some really good artifacts.

[Laukku]

I've yet to see a really good random artifact generator. They tend to produce items that are mostly crap or that are overpowered. The time spent tweaking a generator to be balanced and interesting might be better spent hand-designing some really good artifacts.

Besides, the results would be just indestructible items with stat bonuses, probably named "the [adjective] [noun] of [name]". Dull and unimaginative. Artifacts should be designed around a specific idea or theme, so that they contribute to the game world. Good examples of interesting artifacts would be the silver key, the Si, plot-related ones such as the chaos trinity, boots of great speed, and Needle & Sting.

[Aielyn]

Here's a thought for how a "random artifact generator" system could work, such that it retains the special-ness of the predefined artifacts while providing more variety.

Have three levels of item - regular, special, and artifact.

Regular items are the sort of items you'd find at random in ADoM - able to have one prefix and one suffix at most (for weapons and armour), with fairly regular stats, and destructibility decided almost entirely by the material it's made of. Artifacts would remain predefined and be indestructible, just as in ADoM.

Then there would be the new "special" items. Not quite artifacts, these items would still be capable of being destroyed... but their risk of destruction would be significantly lower than that of regular items, with the level of protection depending on the qualities of the item and an RNG-decided factor (decided on generation). Furthermore, special items would have semi-randomly-generated unIDed descriptions and semi-randomly-generated names (depending on its properties in many cases).

Let me give you an example, using ADoM item properties as a base. You find a special knife. Its unIDed description is "shimmering ruby knife" and it weighs 14s. Identifying this knife, you learn that it is the Ruby Knife of Salvation (+3, 2d3+10) [+4, +2]. As it turns out, it simultaneously has the effective prefixes of Red, Lawful, and Flaming, and the effective suffixes of Power and The Sun. The unIDed name comes from The Sun (shimmering) and Red (ruby), but these aren't the only properties that create these descriptors, and they're not the only descriptors that can be associated with those properties. The "of Salvation" happens to refer to it being a Lawful weapon, again somewhat randomly chosen.

The exact same knife might have the unIDed description of "fierce knife" and might be the Fierce Glowing Knife "Sunray", or the unIDed description of "crimson knife" and might be the Crimson Blade "Burning Sky", or the unIDed description of "etched copper knife" and might be the Copper Knife of Fire "Shining Truth".

Special items would have, say, between 3 and 10 special traits, some of which only occur on special items (some of the unique traits would be worth multiple regular traits - for instance, a special boot with the same properties as the seven league boots would probably take up 4-5 special trait slots, since it's so powerful, meaning a special item given only three slots wouldn't be able to have this trait). At minimum, each special item would get one protective roll to prevent destruction if marked for destruction. Some would get multiple protective rolls. What do I mean by "protective roll"? If the item is flagged for destruction, then the game rolls a virtual die, and if that die is greater than (or perhaps less than) a certain number, the item isn't destroyed. The size of the die and of the necessary threshold (and possible influences of luck, etc) are up for discussion, of course.

There might also be the possibility of a really special item, generated at character creation and given traits dependent on the character itself (including race, starting class, stats, etc), which gets named after the character and has a set of good traits (no "of damnation" type effects), and given an "indestructible" flag... basically, an artifact that isn't actually an artifact... and it would be hidden somewhere in the world. It wouldn't really be random, so much as specialised. It might even get a storyline attached to it.

[Grey]

Hey look, a green lawful sword of corruption "Acid Fell Folly"! A holy lucky shield of damnation "Fairy's Deathbane Doombringer"! An giant-killing dagger of magic "The Arcane Titan-Stabber"! A staff of dexterity and speed reduction "The Slow Quick Wood"!

Such a system requires such an immense amount of tweaking to produce items that aren't nonsensical or worthless that you're better hand-designing good things.

ToME4 uses almost exactly your system by the way. Pretty much all the results are crazily overpowered or completely worthless.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I agree with Grey. I love random stuff in roguelikes as much as the next guy, but the point of artifacts is that they should be unique, special things, and hand-crafting just works better for that IMHO. What we do need is a huge set of hand-crafted artifacts so that they aren't repeated too much.

[Aielyn]

Hey look, a green lawful sword of corruption "Acid Fell Folly"! A holy lucky shield of damnation "Fairy's Deathbane Doombringer"! An giant-killing dagger of magic "The Arcane Titan-Stabber"! A staff of dexterity and speed reduction "The Slow Quick Wood"!

Such a system requires such an immense amount of tweaking to produce items that aren't nonsensical or worthless that you're better hand-designing good things.

ToME4 uses almost exactly your system by the way. Pretty much all the results are crazily overpowered or completely worthless.

Intelligent creation of the system prevents stupidity or excessively overpowered items. The first thing to note is that "green lawful sword of corruption" wouldn't be a sensible way to name an item. The whole point is to only pick a subset of the item's features to generate the names and descriptions. So if the sword had the "green" and "lawful" prefix effects and the "of corruption" suffix effect, it might be called an Emerald Sword, or maybe a Geometric Sword, just as two ideas off the top of my head. As for the name, it might get named something completely random (for swords) like "Close Shave", or something related to one or more of its features, like "Twisted Heavens".

More than that, though, I'd certainly set up traits that wouldn't coexist - certainly, "lawful" and "of corruption" seem at odds with one another, just as "of dexterity" and "of speed reduction" wouldn't go together.

It's actually not as complicated as you'd think to come up with a system for generating these in a way that prevents nonsense combinations and gives priority to combinations that work well together. Suppose you have eight traits available: Red, Flaming, Green, Lawful, Chaotic, of Corruption, of dexterity, and of slowness.

What you do is you have an affinity matrix. Each pairing would be ranked on an integer scale of, say, 0-2 (for simplicity in this case), for how much they like to interact. The matrix might look something like this (columns in order listed above):

0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 <--- Red
2, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 <--- Flaming
0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 <--- Green
1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 <--- Lawful
1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 1 <--- Chaotic
1, 1, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1 <--- of Corruption
1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 <--- of Dexterity
1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 <--- of Slowness

You might notice that "of Dexterity" has a "1" in the slot relating affinity with itself. This is because it's a trait that can compound upon itself - that is, two "of Dexterity" traits would combine, increasing Dexterity by more. Same with "of Slowness".

So how is this matrix used? Simple: you multiply the affinities for each type that is already on the object, and that gives you the probability that each trait is chosen next. So, suppose that it randomly chooses "of Corruption" as the first trait. Then the affinity vector becomes:
1, 1, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1
which is the affinities for "of Corruption". Now, it has a 1/7 chance of choosing any of the 1s, and a 2/7 chance of choosing "Chaotic". As it happens, it chooses "of Dexterity". Now, this causes all except the "of Slowness" affinity to remain fixed at 1, giving us:
1, 1, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0
Now there's a 1/6 chance of any remaining affinity except "Chaotic", which has a 1/3 chance of being picked. The next pick happens to choose "Flaming". This doubles the affinity for "Red" and nullifies the affinity for "Flaming", giving us:
2, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0
which means a 1/6 chance each of "Green" or "of Dexterity" and a 1/3 chance each of "Red" or "Chaotic". The final pick happens to be "Chaotic", and we have our feature set: Flaming, Chaotic, of Corruption, and of Dexterity.

Naming for combinations with high affinities (like Red and Flaming) would include some special names for those combinations; for instance, this choice has both Chaotic and of Corruption. So the random name generator chooses to give an unIDed name based on two properties - Chaotic and of Dexterity - leading to a random name that happens to be something like "fast black sword" (just off the top of my head as a plausible pair). By random choice, the IDed name would keep the unIDed name, and just append the name of the weapon, which happens to be chosen to use the Chaotic + of Corruption pairing, giving, say... fast black sword "Evil's Blade".

Keep in mind that these aren't actually artifacts, though. Items generated like this are just a more special version of ego items.

It may seem daunting, the idea of coming up with, say, 100 different traits that all have to have entries in the affinity matrix (making for 10,000 entries)... but keep in mind that most affinities will just be 1, with many 0s on the diagonal, because many traits would be binary (like "Lawful") and most traits wouldn't interact well or poorly with others. So you'd just have to put 1s everywhere first, put 0s on diagonals for binary traits, and then put 0s and 2s where appropriate (like putting 2s on related traits like those involving fire, or those involving luck).

My point is, if ToME4 uses a randomising system and it results in items similar to the ones you mentioned, then it's poorly-designed, and the immense amount of tweaking would be due to that poor design, rather than due to the idea being a bad one.

As for crazily overpowered, that's fairly easy to control - set a limit on the "rating" of the weapon, where each trait gets a certain rating and the ratings of traits get added together (with negative traits getting a zero rating, not a negative one). That, combined with affinities and a limit to the number of traits that it can have, with a bias in favour of fewer traits (range 4-10 makes sense, to me), should keep it well under control, along with a high level of rarity (more common than random-drop artifacts, but far less common than regular ego items). And some of them will be worthless - that's fine, since worthless items are generated all the time, and these aren't artifacts.

[Grey]

You never got my point, which is that the items I described are unthematic and useless. The chance of a useful or relevant combo is very low unless you restrict the system a lot.

[Aielyn]

You never got my point, which is that the items I described are unthematic and useless. The chance of a useful or relevant combo is very low unless you restrict the system a lot.

You never got MY point, which was that these AREN'T artifacts. They're not meant to be thematic or specifically useful. They're meant to add a bit of extra random flavour to the game by providing special items that aren't quite as special as artifacts. And while particularly useful combinations are unlikely, that just makes them all the more special if you happen across one of them, kind of like finding a masterwork eternium two-handed sword of devastation or a wicked eternium two-handed sword of penetration.

It also gives more value to the Greater Identify spell, since the name and description of the special item doesn't necessarily tell you everything about it, and you can't just look it up in a guidebook or manual.