Scummy tactics: which ones would you remove/solve from Adom/Jade? How?

[Anonymous]

How much do you consider any of them to be scummy? (from 1=not at all to 5=totally). How would you resolve it?


Gremlin bomb - creating lots of easy to kill gremlins and using them to get easy loot, be it by killing them, or by pickpocketing and then killing them, or having a pet kill them for you (and pickpocketing them). It's not workable for XP since gremlins give few to begin with, and thought they grow more experienced, XP gain is reduced the more often you kill a monster. Note that having items and the knowledge of how to use them are different things.
Scumm-o-meter: 4
Solution: in my opinion, the only thing that have to be changed is the pickpocket skill. It's ok in my opinion to flood a cave with gremlins and kill them; ok, you gain lots of drops, but you also spend a lot of time and after 3k gremlins killed they start to become strong. But it's not ok to spend lot of real life time using that skill and getting lot of great stuff; furthermore it's very unrealistic to pickpocket something that doesn't existed if you kill a monster. So my solution is to change pickpocket making it a skill useful only in new quests, npcs or situations (imagine a level where you have to flee from some really hard enemies). Another possible solution is to add a 1% possibility that a water trap will break when triggered.

ID stairhop - continuously going up and down stairs between two certain ID levels. One could also explore them instead, but stairhopping exposes a maximum of floor tiles per turn. Loot created inside the room is picked up, and accumulates over time. Requires some patience, but is very safe in general, much safer than trying to find the respective loot in-game. Refraining from this technique - or, indeed, from entering the ID at all - will make the early game considerably more challenging.
Scumm-o-meter: 4; this is unrealistic, boring and gives too free stuff.
Possible solution: making every ID level with two stairs up and one stair down; every time you go down, you enter the other level on a stairs that if taken will take you to the level you just explored. The other stair up is in another room (just like the stair down).

Piety overflow - abusing integer overflow to turn big negative piety into big positive and milk your god for goodies. At current time this is considered to be very cheap and exploitish by most ADOM players, but some legit Hall of Fame entries used it. It should be kept in mind that if there was an opportunity in game to achieve integer overflow of experience, it would most certainly defeat the purpose of almost the entire game; this only defeats the purpose of the sub-game of dealing with divine forces and provides virtually unlimited prayers, with all their benefits.
Scumm-o-meter: 3; not game-breaking, just wrong.
Possible solution: I think this is an easy coding matter.

Dragon gold doubling - Dragons which pick up gold drop double the amount drop it in addition to their own gold upon death. Currently there is quite a debate if this is a bug or an intentional feature. Due to its exponential nature, this can easily be used to create truly game-breaking amounts of gold, which are commonly spent on getting piety for precrownings or to pay for Garth's training. There is a bit of risk involved since many types of dragons can destroy entire heaps of gold with their breath attacks, and dragons are relatively rare in the early game and cannot double more than once. Even if the player wants to avoid this effect, it's not always possible to keep dragons from picking up gold in tension rooms or vaults.
Scumm-o-meter: 2; ok, the effect is quite big, but there are risk involved.
Possible solution: maybe raising a little the risk of a dragon brething at the player then dissolving the money.

Stat lowering - intentional lowering of stats by controlled sickness and/or starvation to train stats beyond the common limit of certain methods, such as herbs. Requires some cautiousness. Is not considered to be heavily game-breaking, it only squeezes out a bit more extra stats from a very safe stat training method, and opens up the possibility of being ridiculed for dying of starvation in this manner (even sickness can be deadly, but players will usually have it removed before that happens).
Scumm-o-meter: 1; this is risky and not unbalancing.
Possible solution: -

Wish engine - mostly considered to be to game breaking - once it gets going, the player has basically unlimited wishes at his disposal, which makes the rest of the game about as easy as it can be. The fact that 19 rings can be dipped at once, and a wish for potions of exchange usually returns three potions contribute to the effectiveness of this method. Even 19 wishes, as gained from one successful dip, are more than enough to increase the character's power to game-breaking levels. To gain enough potions of exchange and a stack of 19 identical rings Gremlin bombs are frequently employed.
Scumm-o-meter: 4. Ok, not easy to do, but 19 wishes is game breaking.
Possible solution: making the ring of djinni summoning more unlikely to come out (at the point that an engine is euristically impossible). However, solving the pickpocket skill as I writed before would also solve this problem.

Ring of weakness - easily abused, combined with some potions of exchange and plenty of food and time almost all of your important stats can be increased to 99. Very game-breaking - the player can only die to severe cases of carelessness afterwards.
Scumm-o-meter: 5; 99 to every attribute must not happen.
Possible solution: when wielding a ring of weakness, str goes to 2 and it stops training.

Self education - writing lots of scrolls of education and using them to raise/get some skills. Under certain not really known conditions scrolls can be created without any stat drains, but losing a few points of mana is not unexpected, even with a blessed scroll and writing set. Not that scummy since it does require magical writing sets, rather rare tools, and getting really good skills is not common.
Scumm-o-meter: 1; just a little unrealistic, but interesting feature.
Possible solution: -

Grinding - usually staying on cavernous levels with high monster generation to kill lots of monsters gaining xp, items and weapon skill marks in process. Not very scummy since it is not entirely risk- and hassle-free, depending on the location where you perform it. More dangerous locations will yield greater returns, so for a challenge choose a place where you will be faced with monsters that actually give a fight. Since you will naturally meet monsters and kill them while pursuing your regular goals, such as the overarching quests or exploring dungeons, you often don't have to specifically grind at all.
Scumm-o-meter: 1; time passing = corruption and stronger monsters, so it's ok.
Possible solution: -

Shop restocking - repeatedly buying out all of the items from a shop so that a shopkeeper will produce more items. Can be combined with kick robbing occasionally. Provides a challenge in that obviously you have to get the gold somewhere; of course, gold is not exactly an issue if you use other scumming techniques such as dragon gold doubling.
Scumm-o-meter: 1; it takes game time.
Possible solution: -

Kick robbing - opening a hole in a store wall that allows the PC to kick items out of a shop without enraging the shopkeeper. Most definitely not supposed to be possible, as it usually happens in plain sight of the shopkeeper, and pretty exploitish.
Scumm-o-meter: 2; should be solved because it's unrealistic, but non game breaking at all
Possible solution: making the shopkeeper upset when unpaid stuff goes away from the shop.

Milking - some monsters always, eventually, throw/shoot things at a character which they would not ordinarily drop if they were killed instantly. Allowing them to attack you will ensure you get these items. A common method to stock up on arrows or quarrels, or obtain an orcish spear as early in the game as possible.
Scumm-o-meter: 2; unrealistic but not gamebreaking.
Possible solution: making those monster always drop the stuff they throw when they die.

Pickpocketing - used to gain more items from monsters, as after a certain point about 99% of the creatures you will encounter are weak enough that you can easily afford spending another turn on a Pick pockets attempt. Everything that weighs 10 stones or less can be pickpocketed from any applicable creature, and items pickpocketed will not in any way lower the amount of items you gain from killing - in other words, you will find easily double the (below 10s) items in total, and thus be much more powerful than another player who did not pickpocket at all by sheer availability of resources. There are no good reasons to not pickpocket other than it involves pressing additional buttons (at least two), while most small fry is usually killed in one or two hits. Due to the heavy increase in total loot, a habit some find worthy of picking up, and others can't stomach. The difference is considerable, but nothing which will decide over life and death; a non-pickpocketer will probably simply find himself grinding more often than the pickpocketer.
Scumm-o-meter: 4; boring and quite game breaking.. not to mention it's very unrealistic
Possible solution: making pickpocket steal only stuff that the monster already have (and if not pickpocketed will give when dead).

Banshee in animated forest. One of ways to scum for items is to bring banshee into animated forest. High rate of tree spawning combined with area instakill effect leaves some items rather soon. Although there is danger in banshee gaining some levels and becoming rather dangerous in melee too.
Scumm-o-meter: 1; this is a clever one-time trick and it's ok.
Possible solution: -

[Silfir]

I pretty much agree with your assessment. I think Thomas is going to give most features he reintroduces from ADOM a second consideration. With the way his engine is set up I doubt Pick Pockets will work as before, for instance, and with the sheer size of the procedurally generated game world I don't think an ID will exist either.

It's best to wait for the first JADE version and look what kind of game-breaking stuff we can find in there so we can complain about it then

[grobblewobble]

> Banshee in animated forest.
> Scumm-o-meter: 1; this is a clever one-time trick and it's ok.

I beg to differ. You get tens of high-danger level items in a very short time. This one is at least as good.. uhm.. I mean scummy! scummy! as a gremlin bomb. Also, if you have 7lb there is no real danger in it.

> Stat lowering - intentional lowering of stats by [snip] starvation
> Scumm-o-meter: 1; this is risky and not unbalancing.

Again I beg to differ. Folks who know what they are doing are not taking any risk.

[JellySlayer]

How much do you consider any of them to be scummy? (from 1=not at all to 5=totally). How would you resolve it?

My fixes:

Gremlin bomb

Summoned monsters don't drop items and can't be pickpocketted.

ID stairhop

Remove the ID entirely would be one option. Removing floor drops in the ID would work too.

Piety overflow
Possible solution: I think this is an easy coding matter.

Ditto.

Dragon gold doubling

I think this is a bug and should be removed entirely.

Stat lowering

I would make it that stat potentials either can't increase, or are much more difficult to increase than simply training stats (eg. only can increase by appropriate potions, maybe athletics skill, etc.). As it is, stat potentials don't really do anything, so this seems a logical way to make them useful. I would then eliminate the "hard caps" on stat scumming and let potentials take care of this. So if your To potential is 40, you can train up to 40 with morgia. If your potential is 12, you can't train higher than that with morgia. This would have huge effects on racial choices overall, but I think it would make it more realistic. I'd also make it that you need to train harder to raise a stat the closer it is to its potential max. In simplest terms, if you have potential To of 20 and To of 10, you need 5 morgia to raise. If you have potential 11 and To 10, you need, say, 25 morgia to raise.

Wish engine

Make PoEX unable to dip multiple items (see Potion of Raw Chaos) would go a long way to solving this. Archmage is a separate problem, but considering how difficult archmage is to set up anyway, I'm inclined to allow this to remain ingame.

Ring of weakness

Solution with potentials above would fix this problem as well.

Self education

I don't have a problem with this. Scrolls of education and writing sets are pretty rare as it is. You could up the penalty incurred for writing scrolls of education if you felt this was really abusive I guess.

Grinding

I would like to see corruption behave as it was intended (background corruption doubles every 90 days), but generally I don't really care if people grind.

Shop restocking

I would change it so that just moving all of the items into one corner of the shop doesn't trigger a restock. Other than that, I don't think I'd really change this.

Kick robbing
Possible solution: making the shopkeeper upset when unpaid stuff goes away from the shop.

Agreed.

Milking

I don't really have a problem with how this is currently handled.

Pickpocketing

If gremlin bombs are eliminated, pickpocketting would be fine as it is IMHO.

Banshee in animated forest

Make trees immune to banshee wail. Or make beeswax melt over time even if you aren't hit by fire attacks.

[Silfir]

Most of these suggestions are basically suggestions for the non-existant ADOM II project. Keep in mind JADE is redone work from scratch, so code oddities such as Pick Pockets magically creating items (which makes no fucking sense and pressures players into annoying habits - or will any of the pickpocketers around here come forward and state "I pick pockets because I enjoy pressing two buttons extra per humanoid monster every blooping time and I would still do it even if it didn't give me moar items"?) will hopefully disappear, and we'll see if JADE even has animated forests or banshees...

Though piety overflow fixing is something for the bugfix ADOM (Silfir-codenamed 1.1.2), which Thomas has hinted at at one point. I really have no clue how dragon gold doubling could be a bug - how does one write the code for that by accident? Kick robbing is something I think that fits within the scope of a bugfix - the easiest thing would be for the check that has the shopkeeper protest about you kicking items in his shop to check whether the item that would be kicked is unpaid, not whether the player is standing on a shop square. Probably easier to do than modify the mapping code to damn well make sure that ALL shop walls cannot be dug.

Honestly, the stat raising balance will and should look entirely different in JADE. Take away the stat raising herbs, and treat potentials as truly hard caps, and make stat potions extremely rare. Maybe taking out wishes should be considered. The thing is, in ADOM the character was on his own on a quest to save the world in a limited timeframe (agreed on the doubling every 90 days btw), so it made sense for him to become a superhero over time - the stat pumping methods don't feel out of place. in JADE things will get a lot more sandboxy.

[almack9]

Most of these suggestions are basically suggestions for the non-existant ADOM II project. Keep in mind JADE is redone work from scratch, so code oddities such as Pick Pockets magically creating items (which makes no fucking sense and pressures players into annoying habits - or will any of the pickpocketers around here come forward and state "I pick pockets because I enjoy pressing two buttons extra per humanoid monster every blooping time and I would still do it even if it didn't give me moar items"?) will hopefully disappear, and we'll see if JADE even has animated forests or banshees...

Though piety overflow fixing is something for the bugfix ADOM (Silfir-codenamed 1.1.2), which Thomas has hinted at at one point. I really have no clue how dragon gold doubling could be a bug - how does one write the code for that by accident? Kick robbing is something I think that fits within the scope of a bugfix - the easiest thing would be for the check that has the shopkeeper protest about you kicking items in his shop to check whether the item that would be kicked is unpaid, not whether the player is standing on a shop square. Probably easier to do than modify the mapping code to damn well make sure that ALL shop walls cannot be dug.

Honestly, the stat raising balance will and should look entirely different in JADE. Take away the stat raising herbs, and treat potentials as truly hard caps, and make stat potions extremely rare. Maybe taking out wishes should be considered. The thing is, in ADOM the character was on his own on a quest to save the world in a limited timeframe (agreed on the doubling every 90 days btw), so it made sense for him to become a superhero over time - the stat pumping methods don't feel out of place. in JADE things will get a lot more sandboxy.

Thats exactly what id like to see out of jade. I wouldnt even mind if there wasnt a central storyline...a life simulator if you will. I VERY much would like to be able run as a caravan guard, then maybe join the merchants guild, then after that if I should so decide I could leave and join the militia, and perhaps become a blademaster and have people seek me out to teach/duel them.

Also, as far as stats go. I wouldnt mind a purely morrowind esque way of raising stats...quite simply...you swing around a big axe all day you get stronger...you play with a sword all day you become more dexterous etc etc

[Laukku]

Stat lowering - intentional lowering of stats by controlled sickness and/or starvation to train stats beyond the common limit of certain methods, such as herbs. Requires some cautiousness. Is not considered to be heavily game-breaking, it only squeezes out a bit more extra stats from a very safe stat training method, and opens up the possibility of being ridiculed for dying of starvation in this manner (even sickness can be deadly, but players will usually have it removed before that happens).
Scumm-o-meter: 1; this is risky and not unbalancing.
Possible solution: -

Ring of weakness - easily abused, combined with some potions of exchange and plenty of food and time almost all of your important stats can be increased to 99. Very game-breaking - the player can only die to severe cases of carelessness afterwards.
Scumm-o-meter: 5; 99 to every attribute must not happen.
Possible solution: when wielding a ring of weakness, str goes to 2 and it stops training.

IMO when training/increasing attributes, the game should check the original unmodified value. For example, if your strength really is 50 but is reduced to 1 because of a -60 modifier, the 50 value should be checked instead of 1.

And I agree that potentials should be much harder to increase. Get rid of potential increasing potions and make other potions not increase and attribute if it's already at its potential.

Regarding ring wish engines: I think that used rings of djinni summoning should disappear (the djinni would want to destroy his former prison, wouldn't he?). This should make ring wish engines impossible, allowing a maximum of 19 wishes.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I really have no clue how dragon gold doubling could be a bug - how does one write the code for that by accident?

Easy... have two slots in dragons' inventories point to the gold instead of one. Imagine if you unadvertently do something like this:

Item ** inventory = ( Item ** ) malloc ( ... )
Item * leftHandSlot = inventory[0];
Item * rightHandSlot = inventory[1];
Item * goldSlot = inventory[2];
Item * headgearSlot = inventory[2];
...

There you go: when the dragon picks up some gold, you store a reference to it in inventory[2]. Then, when the dragon is killed, you drop the items in each slot. So you drop the gold two times, once as gold and another time as headgear.

For me, it's clearly a bug, and I'll think that until I see TB declaring it a feature.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

By the way, I would add a simple condition that any dungeon levels's danger level increases by one for every, say, 1000 turns spent in it. That would make much harder things like gremlin bombs, scumming for precrowns, massive herb farming, etc. etc.; and it would also work for possible forms of scumming originating in JADE that we can't even imagine with ADOM. In general, player staying for very long periods in the same place -> scummer. So add a penalty to that, and by adjusting it it can provide an interesting form of level scaling even for non-scummers (say, the top CoC levels would become somewhat more dangerous if traversed very frequently).

[Anonymous]

I must say there are some really clever ideas here.