MAngband

I saw PW make a comment somewhere about how currently, monsters can still wake up if your not doing anything, and just thinking. He suggested that monsters should only be able to 'hear' you if you were moving/doing something.
I like the suggestion, but I think it needs a bit of expansion.
I think monsters should still be able to hear you if you are regenerating your health. Otherwise, it could be considered somewhat broken.
Additionally, we would have to give players the ability to wake up monsters on their own with a shout command or something. Otherwise, a warrior would have no way besides agrovate monsters to wake them up, while he sat in his nice safe antisummon corridor.

The problem with stealth is that it has been designed for turn based game. You can stay hours in front of your PC and monsters will not wake up. In real time, this is not the case. In PWmangband, I've already implemented the "real" turn counter for the "C" command, which is only incremented when the char uses some energy (this is the counter that is shown in V). Using this counter instead of the current total counter for stealth should fix the problem.

I kinda agree, but we shall remember that time *does* pass in mangband when you're just standing around. I mean you wear all that clunky gear, shifting from one foot to another, your light playing tricks on the surrounding walls, etc. Is there some way to go kinda half-way through with this suggestion? Do time bubbles help in any way here?

As I said, time actually passes when something uses energy. This is not the case when someone stays idle.

Energy-wasting or not, time does pass in mangband world. It can slow down or speed up, but it never halts. It's not a turn-based game anymore.

By your proposal, *nothing at all* should happen unless you spend energy (extreme time bubbles?), for consistency sake. Which could actually be kinda interesting.

I agree, that in current implementation stealth is almost useless tho and something needs to be done.

What about stealth counting double, or triple, or some other factor that makes sense, when standing still. If you're wearing super-stealthy armor, it shouldn't clunk when you just shift your weight :)

Good idea. Instead of not counting idle turns, just use a multiplier to the stealth counter. Sounds fine to me.

Stealth is already relevant in MAngband. It depends ALOT on how fast you play tho.

Being a Half-troll, you wake up everything all the time. Even Glaurung.

As a hobbit rogue or even hobbit mage, it's nearly impossible to wake up any ancient dragon within a few turns if you have an elvenkind or stealth boots/cloak. Even many orcs and trolls sleep "forever" when you're stealthy.

Please keep in mind that half-troll rogues aren't stealthy at all. They're actually worse than most class/race combos unless they're in stealth-mode.


The challenge however is making stealth count for something when partying, because the monsters get a check against each character, I believe, so a party of hobbits have a much harder time than a party half-trolls, because everything awakes faster than the players can detect/react.

If the monsters get only 1 check against the noisiest character in a party, +stealth would be viable in parties as well.

ZAL