MAngband

I'm sitting here watching a player new to mangband on my server. The guy ran into a floating eye at 50 feet, and is stuck in the perma paralysis loop. This sucks. What a lame way to welcome a new player to the game - the only advice I can give is to suicide and start over.

We should do something to sort this monter out - perhaps change the effect or its duration, or push it deeper.

On that note, I've seen a number of situations where a new player joins, runs into a floating eye and gets perma-para'd, leaves, and never comes back. This really speaks to the need to both sort out this particular problem, and more broadly evaluate what we have in the early game from the standpoint of new players.

Sure, mangband is supposed to be a hardcore dungeon crawl game. But this kind of thing is over the line - after all, we *do* want new people to check out the game, find an experience they like, and stay

[quote author=Fink link=board=thinktank;num=1187838419;start=0#1 date=08/22/07 at 22:09:18]Sure, mangband is supposed to be a hardcore dungeon crawl game. But this kind of thing is over the line - after all, we *do* want new people to check out the game, find an experience they like, and stay [/quote]

And THEN they can die repeatedly! Just not right away

I wonder if it'd be worth exploring game tweaks to make things much easier at start, and much harder toward the end game. We could solve the floating eye thing with more blatant mention of the 10 AC threshhold, but then we'd just see some newbie sitting in a room full of white worms and unable to get out... There'll always be something.

Worms at least are something a player can immediately learn from as they dive in and think they've hit the exp jackpot. A first-time user who runs into their first floating eye is just sad - the guy I mentioned above suicided and never came back.

I guess the easiest fix for the eyes is to make the tele after the player gets put to sleep.

Whoa, interesting thought!

Hey, I like it! I like it a lot! Is it even possible for a monster to check whether an attack was successful??

Also, I found Fink's post count entertaining: 404.

yes, great move
and actually, I think it'd only be cool if you walk up to an eye and it'll always blink/teleport away after attempting to gaze you. Keeps you alert, so not so important IMO to do a check for success.

Interesting thought, and it improves the "Uh-Oh, what'd I just miss" feature, which makes them learn the importance of ^P.

I got myself stuck in permaparalysis with an eye recentyl (man, I must have had crappy stats - I think I was level 11 or so), which brought this idea to mind. Let's do it!