Summon Nerfing

[Bryce]

Hi. I'm a fairly new fan of the Avernum series, registered user of 4 and 5.

 

Mr. Vogel, I think we both agree that summons were too powerful in A4. They were easy to exploit, especially shade summons. (But other kinds as well, because anything can draw fire and be a meat shield.) So, I agree with your decision to nerf summons in A5. However, I think there is a better way than limiting the whole party to two summoned creatures, which seems both unrealistic and inconsistent, since NPC mages are able to summon large numbers of creatures without any apparent limit apart from their ability to stay alive.

 

My Idea is this:

On a per-caster basis (all characters, not just PCs), track the number of summons currently in the battle. (E.g. Bob the Mage uses Call Beast 3 times, then one of the rats dies, so his summon_count is 2; Mindy the Cleric uses Summon Shade 1 time so her summon_count is 1).

 

Now, each turn, for every summon of that caster, use some number derived from the summon_count (and including midigating factors such as skills, luck or intelligence) to evaluate a chance of the summon "going feral" and attacking it's master's side.

 

The formula should have a "safe" area where the probability is zero, probably 1 summon per 5 levels of intelligence or so, and a rapidly ascending probability of going feral once outside of the safe zone (although not so much that summoning more creatures than your limit would always be a bad idea.)

 

Gameplay effects:

You would still be able to spam summons, but they would likely start fighting each other (and you!) unproductively, thus not whittling away at a boss monster so much (although they would still be useful as meat shields, but less so.) If you want to intensify the effect, give the newly-feral summons agro against their summoner rather than whatever happened to attack them last.

 

Realism argument:

Presumably the caster has to control the summon mentally, so making it more difficult as the number of summons goes up makes sense.

 

Also, this would provide consistency in applying the system to individual NPC/Monster casters. This is the most serious problem with the current system, which is on a per-party basis and doesn't affect NPCs at all.

 

Exempt summons:

Logically, some summons (e.g. a giant spider calling more giant spiders, blobs that spawn more blobs, and whatnot) would be exempt, since these creatures are naturally allied. Similarly, if there was some NPC with unusual empathy to the summoned species, s/he might also be exempt, particularly if they are called through mundane means rather than actually summoned per se.

 

Thanks for your consideration.

[Locmaar]

While there certainly went a lot of thought into this, it reminds me of many a discussion on realism in rpgs.

 

Realism may add to the gameplay-experience - then it's probably good and helpful.

 

On the other hand, realism may just as well do not a thing for gameplay value, but drain the poor game-designer's already too little and precious time. I wonder what's the actual advantage of your model while playing the game?

[Bryce]

It's not realism so much as consistency. Players don't crave realism, they want consistency. That is, players are quite tolerant of unrealism, so long as it is consistent. That is why the two-per-party versus unlimited summons for the party and NPCs respectively hits so hard.

 

Inconsistency threatens suspension of disbelief, and thus the player's enjoyment of the game. So yes, it's worth it. Besides, Avernum 5 is a huge game, the proportional amount of effort to implement this is tiny in comparison. If the effort really is a big deal, just change to a per-caster limit on summons based on int/skill or whatever and that's 90% of the solution, forget the whole feral mechanic (which was just to make things more interesting/realistic). The big request here is for consistency, not a particular solution so much.

[Locmaar]

If I remember the grounds for Jeff's decision to cap summons at 2 correctly, it was due to balance issues, i.e. parties could exploit the higher numbers of summons and really wreak havoc during otherwise darn fascinating encounters (soultaker comes to mind, along with a couple of others Randomizer mentioned).

Don't get me wrong: I'm not against realism in the way you meant it (consistency). It's just that I don't have trouble imagining a summoner, who's been at the job of summoning for decades, do a better job at it than my spellcaster who just a week ago wet his pants when the first fireball emerged from his fingertips. It's just a shame that summoner won't be sharing his secrets with me after we met.

 

edit: fixed typo

[Randomizer]

Soultaker and the last test in the Lake of Trials were ones where I abused the summon horde of shades, but the one that pushed Jeff over the edge was the Master of the Pit. After Jeff revised the encounter to make it clearer what you were supposed to do, almost everyone testing it used the same tactic of summoning creatures and retreating to deal with the death curse. Even with most of the damage being done by the party and not the summoned creatures, Jeff decided to nerf summons to prevent the leave tank like divine host shades standing there pinning down the Master.

 

For people playing with less than a full party, being able to recruit an instant army makes a major difference. But it mostly means a change in tactics where finding a position to minimize being swarmed is the key to dealing with hordes of opponents.

[Student of Trinity]

The party members learn Divine Host or Arcane Summon by chopping up worms and turning up old crystals for a few weeks; stuff like this. The NPCs have spent ages studying tomes and communing with the shades of long-dead mages; stuff like that. There's no reason to expect their summoning skills to be exactly similar.

[Spidweb]

Actually, I intended from the original conception for the player to be able to slow down the Master of the Pit with summoned creatures. That is, slow down, not completely stop. Summoned creatures still do help in this encounter, and I'm happy with it.

 

The encounter that really made me knuckle down on summoned creatures is the Hraithe Lord. Summoned creatures were completely trivializing what was meant to be a reasonably challenging encounter.

 

Reasonable people can disagree about the best way to nerf summoning, but, all things people equal, I prefer to go for the simple, direct solution.

 

The "rogue" summonings solution isn't a good one for several reasons. Most importantly, it would still enable you to put a lot of warm bodies between you and the boss you're fighting. The reason summoned creatures were so overpowered was not the damage they did. It was because they enabled you to immobilize your foe far from you. Having the creations fight each other wouldn't do much about this.

 

- Jeff Vogel

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Spidweb:

Reasonable people can disagree about the best way to nerf summoning, but, all things people equal, I prefer to go for the simple, direct solution.

I think you're right about the rouge summoning idea. But simply going to a per-caster or even per-PC limit would make things much less blatantly arbitrary. Surely making the summon cap some function of the party's total intelligence would be easy enough, something along the lines of <b>max_summons = party_total_intelligence/k + 1</b>? (replacing k by some constant, say 6 for example.)

Besides being quite simple and direct, this would also provide a mechanical incentive for buying some intelligence for fighters, and makes sense on some level. Perhaps perfect consistency is too much work here, but the simple proposal above would be much better than the current system for not much effort.

Also, in the future (not now for A5, too much work) maybe the problem of summon spamming could be addressed partially though allowing large creatures to force small ones out of the way (similar to how PCs can swap positions, but between nonallied characters.) This really makes a lot of sense: if you are a 10' tall great and terrible monster, what are you going to do if there is a rat between you and the irritating adventurers who are wailing on you? Step over it and attack them! It would be a hoot to be able to get pushed off a cliff, too

[Delicious Vlish]

I think people became overdependent on summons in AVIV because the game looked Geneforgey and summons did so well. Better than ever before. Summons were actually worth summoning. And lots of them. Maybe a subconscious sort of thing perhaps, considering the Geneforge look of the game. In tough fights in the Geneforge series, you summoned cannon fodder to absorb the punishment. I think people brought that with them to the Avernum 4 game, and would have done so with AVV. Which may be why some people, my self included, are a bit miffed over the summon nerf. We expect the game to behave a certain way because it looks a certain way.

 

Game is still very enjoyable all things considered though. Probably be a best seller.

[Spidweb]

"But simply going to a per-caster or even per-PC limit would make things much less blatantly arbitrary."

 

I considered this, of course. But I wanted a solution that was kinder to people who insist on playing singletons.

 

"Surely making the summon cap some function of the party's total intelligence would be easy enough, something along the lines of <b>max_summons = party_total_intelligence/k + 1</b>? (replacing k by some constant, say 6 for example.)"

 

If I came up with a formula, I would then poke at it and modify it and massage it until it always returned this answer: two.

 

- Jeff Vogel

[Slariton]

Quote:

Originally written by Spidweb:
If I came up with a formula, I would then poke at it and modify it and massage it until it always returned this answer: two.

That sounds like a concise encapsulation of your design philosophy.

[Delicious Vlish]

Quote:

Originally written by Compound Tyr Hamsubstantiation:

Quote:

Originally written by Spidweb:
If I came up with a formula, I would then poke at it and modify it and massage it until it always returned this answer: two.

That sounds like a concise encapsulation of your design philosophy.

2 is the new 42?

[Alorael at Large]

 

—Alorael, who would rather see a hard and fast number anyway. It's one less thing to min-max (or balance from the other side), and it's one calculation that doesn't have to be done by the player. Constants are nice!

[Slariton]

As Duke Ellington said, "Limitations are wonderful things. Everybody should have them."

[Randomizer]

As Clint Eastwood said playing Dirty Harry, "A man's got to know his limitations."

 

Having a simple number makes it easier to plan ahead.

[Synergy]

That's a quote I'm rather fond of imitating.

 

For what it's worth, I never really learned to or cared to exploit summons in the Avernuma games, and virtually never used them in the whole game of A5. A party of four on normal can get by without ever using a single summon, so though the nerfing by limitation takes away some of the sheer joy of creating your own unholy army, it was a feasible solution for a man on a schedule to get a game done, so you, the player, can now be enjoying it. Or so I imagine.

 

-S-

[Bryce]

One less thing to min-max? If you don't want to min-max, don't do it. I was a terrible munchkin on A4, I admit that, but I started A5 with my muchkin party and decided that I wasn't enjoying it all that much - I had wasted about 2 hours trying to figure out a way to steal the Fang clan's artifacts, get the XP from finishing their testing quest, and get the XP and loot from putting their entire ill-mannered village to the sword. ("Okay... if I move their artifacts to the area outside the gate that closes, then go upstairs and talk to their Elders...") Then I had an epiphany: clearly there were mutually exclusive loot and XP opportunities here, and I wasn't really enjoying my min-maxed party. So I made a new party, which was optimized but not to the point that it detracted from my role-playing experiance, and decided to play the game "for fun" rather than "for maximal power level attainable."

 

It's that epiphany that ends min-maxing (well, stops it from being an end in itself) and munchkinism. No sane amount of complexity-reduction can do that.

 

So please, don't think of the munchkins.

 

(PS The Fae encounter in the northern isles is really cool. I forgot to mention that earlier.)

[Bryce]

I just had a very unpleasant experiance as a result of no summon cap for enemies (perhaps it's not so irritating that your party has an arbitrary summon cap, it's that the enemies don't.) With my new party, I was fighting the harston docks road ambush battle. I killed them all except the mage, who started to run away. he prevented me from killing him by spamming summons for several turns, resulting in like 8 or 9 rats and bats. by the time i finally cut my way through to him with my strongest melee fighter, two of my characters had already died (granted those two were weak from the fight to begin with) to his summons. I killed the mage but my fighter got surrounded by his surviving summons, and was pecked to death by them. My mage was trying to get away (no energy left), but the bats caught up with her and killed her, finishing off my party.

 

Now, this incident makes it very clear that this is not a theoretical problem or something that only affects munchkins. My party died because of a glaring inconsistency in the game mechanics that treats PCs and NPCs differently. I'm a programmer myself and I recognize a quick hack when I see it: the 2 summon limit, applied only to the party, is a typical highly reactionary and poorly thought-out nerf that is nearly as bad as the problem it fixes. I don't buy the absurd suggestion made by some people in this topic that every other mage in existence, including some random mercenary mage like Hansen who aparently doesn't even know Acid Bolt, is a elite master of summon-fu, either.

 

I understand how time pressures could motivate a sub-optimal fix like the 2-summon limit, and I realize that you aren't just resting on your laurels now that it's released.

 

I registered this game well before reaching the encounter mentioned above mainly because I liked A4 and because you open-sourced Blades of Exile, and I wanted to show that I appreciated that gesture. However, I am now a dissatisfied customer. I don't see myself buying any more of your games unless this problem is resolved in some way that is less inconsistent.

 

Frankly, I don't see how it could be that hard to switch to a per-caster summon limit unless the code is an absolute mess. It sounds like an hour's work or less. I'm quite likely to buy at least one more of your ~$30 games if you fix this bug (A6 for one, if there is going to an A6), that's a sound economic reason.

 

I honestly hope you fix the summon nerf. It's a real blight on an otherwise fine game, and the obvious inconsistency can be readily encountered well before the demo ends. Certainly I would have thought twice about registering if I had had the experience above before giving you my money.

 

Since I already have given you my money, though, I will make the best of the situation. Since he can cheat by performing unlimited summons, I can cheat by using player knowledge to kill him as soon as I see him. That makes the encounter much easier.

[Slariton]

Speaking of highly reactionary: wow. If you expect perfect consistency and balance from every mechanic out there, I recommend you never play another RPG again. Seriously.

 

It strikes me as a little bit odd to say that you like the rest of the game, but because of one not overly significant aspect of a mechanic, it's ruined.

 

If I were a gamemaker, I wouldn't want customers who are going to make a big fuss if everything isn't perfect.

[Randomizer]

You should have seen the original version of that encounter. It was known for one shot kills of party members before they could react.

 

Hasen is a mage, so he needs to be neutralized early. Daze will usually deal with the fighters before they spread out so you can use range attacks (wands and javelins) to get Hasen before he buffs too much and starts summoning an army. This is also a good place to burn a lightning scroll.

[*i]

"My party died because of a glaring inconsistency in the game mechanics that treats PCs and NPCs differently."

 

So what? NPCs and PCs are and have always treated differently. They have more HP/SP than you can get, get battle tactics and spells that you can't have, etc. How is NPCs being able to summon more than you any different from basilisks having freezing touch, different breath types, automatic weapon poison, etc.?

 

"Frankly, I don't see how it could be that hard to switch to a per-caster summon limit unless the code is an absolute mess. It sounds like an hour's work or less."

 

Coding effort is not the problem here, I suspect. What you suggest should be easy to implement. The question about what should be done. You have your opinion on the matter, and Jeff has his. Who is right? No one. Which one gets implemented? Jeff's, because he is the author. If you write your own software, you can implement that as you wish.

 

"Certainly I would have thought twice about registering if I had had the experience above before giving you my money."

 

You are, of course, free to vote with your pocket-book as you wish. Quite bluntly, this one little thing to me seems like a ridiculous point of aggravation. Again, I could argue a lot of experiences where the monsters behave in ways inconsistent with what my PCs could do. So what? It's a game, not reality.

 

"Since he can cheat by performing unlimited summons, I can cheat by using player knowledge to kill him as soon as I see him."

 

I don't see how this is cheating. The real reason monsters need all of these special abilities is that human players are invariably smarter than monster AI. How is this any different from killing a basilisk right away because he can "cheat" by turning my PCs to stone (well freeze me, but whatever)?

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Compound Tyr Hamsubstantiation:
expect perfect consistency .... it's ruined .... everything isn't perfect.

I am neither asking for nor expecting perfection. You seem to mistake a request for improvement with a request for perfection, which is confusing because you have made this mistake in spite of the presence of nice relative words such as "better" (in reference to other possible solutions, n.b. not "best") and "sub-optimal" (re the current solution) in my posts.

Also, I'm complaining about one particularly notable inconsistency. I'm not complaining about the many other inconsistencies that I do not characterize as "glaring" or "blatantly obvious" because these do not impair my enjoyment of the game or suspension of disbelief. (For example, I am not complaining about how normal enemies never seem to use the scrolls and potions they carry.)

Perhaps "blighted" was too strong a word. I should have said "blemished." Probably this is why the statement came off a bit odd to you. I don't think the game is ruined.

Yes, my post was reactionary. I wrote it in the heat of being killed by a glaring inconsistency so there was some emotion there. But I still feel strongly that there needs to a real solution to summon spamming in general, not just to players exploiting summon spamming; and I stand by my economic statements in the previous post.

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by *i:
NPCs and PCs are and have always treated differently. .... How is NPCs being able to summon more than you any different from basilisks having freezing touch,

Basilisks are obviously quite different from the PCs. This situation is similar to being allowed to have Basilisks as PCs, except that only one can use freezing touch per turn for no obvious reason.

I certainly would not complain if, say, Gladwell could summon spam. I expect him to be quite different from my mages, for some of the reasons that were suggested by others earlier. But the fact is that Average Joe Mage in this game is qualitatively different from my mage even though, within the context of the game world, they are by all accounts rather similar. (You could say that being empire-trained makes a difference but I will argue that point if you do.)

The crux isn't that the enemy can do things I can't, which is hardly a problem at all (the game would be rather boring just fighting other adventurers all the time), but rather that similar things should behave similarly, and with respect to summoning, they don't. That's a basic principle of realism, and there isn't even a token effort in-game to argue that the things involved are, contrary to appearances, dissimilar.

[VCH]

I like only having two summons. Much more simple, and the summons seem to be more effective than in in previous games, i.e. they actually do some damage.

[Student of Trinity]

There is simply no reason whatever to imagine that your capabilities and those of your NPC enemies have to be 'consistent', even if the enemies are 'Joe Mages' with no developed personality. Perhaps controlling more than two summoned creatures requires years of specialized training, which your guys do not have. You can't take it for granted that you know what your enemies can do. That might be part of the unwritten ground rules for a strategy game like Starcraft, but it's not in the constitution of the RPG genre, and it's not the realism of Avernum.

 

You got wiped by a bad ambush, because it did something you weren't expecting, in particular some better summoning than you can do. That's frustrating to anyone, but it's part of the game. If you take out the mage quickly on reload, everything is fine. And in retrospect they're good, these nasty little reminders that the real enemy is far ahead somewhere, and a lot more serious than all the neat little sidequests that take up your time in each zone.

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Student of Trinity:
Perhaps controlling more than two summoned creatures requires years of specialized training

At very least the game should say that. I mean, everyone would know it's just an arbitrary game-balance thing, but at least the game could pretend there is a reason. That could easily have been worked into the discussions of magic limitations in the Empire if there was really an in-game rationale.

Again, if only high-level mages could summon spam, we wouldn't be having this discussion; your in-game argument would be reasonable. But literally every other mage in existence who can summon at all can summon better than you, and not only that, but the limit is per-party rather than per-caster so the any mage-expertise based argument becomes obviously absurd in that light.

Seriously, think about it:
a. A party may control at most 2 creatures
b. A party consists of 1-4 characters.
By b, any character can be a 1-character party. Therefore, by a, any character can, by whatever paraphysical mechanisms are invoked in summoning, control two creatures.

But, somehow, the "mystic bond of party togetherness" breaks this when two characters that could each individually control two summons join up? And, more ridiculous yet, this same mechanism does not affect other nearby summoners, who, in fact, do not seem to follow any analog of (a) at all?

So, not only can any another mage summon better than your party mages, any two mages in your party could effectively summon better without the other one present!

I'll grant that "it's magic," but if there really were some in-game reason for it the reason should be explained. Indeed, summoning is a locus of so much party exceptionalism that explaining it could probably fill a whole side-quest.

That actually might be a pretty interesting side quest. (Too late now I suppose, but it really would be mollifying to see an in-game explanation for all this.)

(Oh, and I knew that mage was going to betray me, I had played the encounter before with my munchkin party and wiped the cave floor with him. But with my less optimized party, including (gasp!) humans and some non-demigods, it was harder going. Yes, I probably should have burned magic items.)

[Khoth]

It's always been the case in Jeff's games that you should kill the spellcasters first. Nothing has changed about that in A5.

[VCH]

Quote:

Originally written by Bryce:
I just had a very unpleasant experiance as a result of no summon cap for enemies (perhaps it's not so irritating that your party has an arbitrary summon cap, it's that the enemies don't.) With my new party, I was fighting the harston docks road ambush battle. I killed them all except the mage, who started to run away. he prevented me from killing him by spamming summons for several turns, resulting in like 8 or 9 rats and bats. by the time i finally cut my way through to him with my strongest melee fighter, two of my characters had already died (granted those two were weak from the fight to begin with) to his summons. I killed the mage but my fighter got surrounded by his surviving summons, and was pecked to death by them. My mage was trying to get away (no energy left), but the bats caught up with her and killed her, finishing off my party.

Funny Stuff!!

[Locmaar]

Quote:

Originally written by Bryce:
At very least the game should say that. I mean, everyone would know it's just an arbitrary game-balance thing, but at least the game could pretend there is a reason.

I feel reminded of my first D&D experience in the 80s, when somebody was trying to climb down a rope carrying two huge bags filled to the brim with coins. The rope tore, sending the PC to his death. The player, close to tears, complained to the DM that he couldn't possibly know that ropes could tear, since it never said so in the rulebook and also it's a fantasy game after all.

I felt betrayed a couple of times in the game, too. First off, I don't like the fact that travelling through a series of caves for a couple of weeks can turn someone who is hardly trusted by the Empire to wield a rusty fork into a warrior, who wipes the floor with every single veteran Derwish, the elite force of the Empire. Now that makes sense.

On another note: Literally every mage you encounter in Avernum 5 has probably been in training longer than your party, so I don't think the grounds for treating low-level NPC-summons differently are as far-fetched as you claimed.

I played through the game with actually summoning something twice, and it was never more than one creature, since I usually prefer nuking the enemy to prepping an epic battle. Also I had the feeling, that it's very difficult as an Empire agent to summon more than one creature down into the caves of Avernum. The creatures got very aggravated and quickly so. I think they feel safer around the natives of the caves, but I'm not sure.

[Student of Trinity]

There can always be a reason for magic. Maybe summoning things and controlling them requires maintaining some sort of extra-spatial wormhole link between the summoner, the summoned being, and the place where it came from. Maybe it's very difficult to maintain more than two of these links in the same small region of physical space, because any shmoe can have one wormhole spin left and the other spin right, but only an advanced expert can construct wormholes with higher spin states.

 

Not only is it plausible that the player characters lack this expertise, but it's entirely plausible that they lack understanding of what they're missing. In the course of the game they're too busy hunting Dorikas to ever get this arcane issue resolved; but as soon as they win that last battle, they're going straight to wikipedia.av to figure it all out.

 

Whatever. It might still be nice if the game made some brief one-line allusion to this technical detail of summoning magic, but there are dozens of other little details whose acknowledgement would be just as nice. Jeff has to draw the line somewhere, or he'll double his dev time and only please a handful of nitpickers, half of whom will still find something else to hate no matter what he does. Then he'll lose his house.

 

I often find things in Jeff's games that I wish were briefly explained. I am still wishing for a single sentence in G4 justifying the cut-scene in which the player is forced to walk calmly into Moseh's parlor. A one-line pop-up about 'suddenly his power overwhelms you!' would have made me happy, but Jeff's reaction was that he would add this just as soon as he had nothing else to do on the game. I still wish he'd include this, but he's the guy who has made a living doing this stuff for all these years, and it's his house on the line when resource allocation decisions have to get made.

 

Deciding that one thing like this makes you stop buying Jeff's games seems to me like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Rather than simply make up the explanation yourself and pretend you read it in the game, and go on having fun, you give up a lot of great stuff completely.

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Student of Trinity:
<snip>

Yeah, there are other things that could use explaining too, but because of their generally non-lethal character I didn't bother complaining.

I haven't found any of the arguments for an in-game explanation convincing, because no-one has convincingly addressed the "whole is less than the sum of its parts" issue.

I see this as part of a broader quality issue... as far as I'm concerned this is a problem just as surely as the fact that character's heads are sometimes rendered over the tops of doorways. (Which did not seem to happen in the A4.) Now, A5 is a huge game and it's very true that excessive attention to detail could have made it stay unfinished. But we aren't talking about the details of how some side-quest where in reality there would be more options than the game gives you, we're talking about a game mechanic that places a limit on the party, and only the party, for the entire game. I think that makes it worthy of consideration. One of the design principles I work by is that special cases are to be avoided, because of their tendency to accumulate and thwart the brain's ability to generalize (which it also detects is happening), and the 2-summon party-only cap is certainly a special case of the most arbitrary kind.

Mr. Vogel, I hope I haven't hardened your resolve against implementing an improved summon nerf by my previous words. Some of them were said "in the heat of battle," and with something less than perfect tact. (I don't vainly try to take them back, I just regret not putting things in a less confrontational manner.) Still, though, I think that this really is an important issue that would be easy to correct. Thanks for your time.

[Slariton]

Not being able to summon more than two creatures isn't generally lethal. Neither is the fact that enemy wizards can summon more than two. In fact, summoned creatures are sometimes less of a problem than direct attacks are.

 

What I don't get is why you are acting like you know better than Jeff. It would be one thing to say "I don't like the two summon cap." That's <i>feedback,</i> and I think Jeff generally appreciates it. You could state the reason why you don't like it. That's feedback too.

 

When you post long rants about something, however, rants which say (in bold print!) you are a dissatisfied customer, rants which make ultimatums about future registrations on your part, rants which present sharply worded judgments about what is best for the game, you start to sound like you think you know better than the designer. And when you argue at length with anyone who has a different opinion, it becomes clear that you think you know better than everyone else.

 

As for me, I'm open to you knowing better than me. But the hubris in your manner of making this argument makes me skeptical. I'm open to you knowing better than Jeff too, but I'd like to see some proof. If you really know better than him, then where are the RPGs you've coded and published?

 

What's that? There aren't any? Then stop acting like you know how to make a game better than somebody who has actually made a game!

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Humbelina:
<religious extremism snipped>
where are the RPGs you've coded .... stop acting like you know how to make a game better than somebody who has actually made a game!

I think I'll call you on that . You should have read my web page.

Maybe it will help you to know where I'm coming from. I'm a member of the free software community and mainly GNU/Linux user and have been so for years. This does not mean that a cheapskate who does not like to pay for software, although some of us are. What it does mean, however, is that I am part of a community that respects programmers, but does not revere them as gods.

Clearly, we are different in this respect. To you, or a mere mortal to think he "knows better" than a lofty developer is "hubris." That's normally a word we associate with people who flout the strictures of the gods.

You are so mired in the developer-god mindset of proprietary software that you seem to have become a sort of coder monotheist, to whom There is One True Programmer and so obviously if I am not your programmer I must not be a programmer

Note well that I do not in any way claim that the RPG which I wrote, TunnelHack, is better than any of the Avernum games. I claim it is fun, but there are other things you could be doing that are more fun, and among these is playing A5. It was put together very quickly because it was a final project for a programming class. (Comparing my first RPG ever, which is also one of the first Java programs I ever wrote (which is why the interface is lame), to Avernum 5, which is the product of an experienced programmer with actual art resources, who is under the great motivation of keeping a roof over his head and nourishing his family as opposed to just getting an "A," would hardly be fair anyway. On the other side, TunnelHack is version 1.3r5 whereas A5 is version 1.0 which is also not a fair comparison, since the TH maintainer and I have had quite a bit of time to work out minor kinks.) But it does show that I have written an RPG and faced the gameplay and technical issues of consistency.

Least you claim that this is a highly sophisticated scam to get you to go play my game and find all the inconsistencies and wave them in my face, which you probably don't have the patience to do anyway, I'll let you know that development has since been moved from Java to Python where another programmer has taken over the work of maintaining it, so changes/fixes are "out of my jurisdiction." I'd still be interested in knowing about them though, so that I don't do it again someday. I'll pass it on to the maintainer as well.

Incidentally, though, TunnelHack does have summoning monsters, some of which are quite noisome, but they have a summoning cap which applies to both allied and enemy versions of the creatures. The need for this feature was not apparent to me until a player showed me a pathological game where there were about a lot of summoned monsters in a room. (Although the maintainer may have changed it somewhat, I seem to recall him enjoying being king of a zerg horde of summons. In any case they don't get in the way of attacks so there isn't a meatshield problem.)

The bold print was just there so that someone skimming this topic would be sure to notice it. There are a lot of long posts here and it might be tiresome to read in detail.

[edit] quote misattribution

[Bryce]

Also, funny story: When I was working on TunnelHack, people whined a lot about how hard it was. "It's not hard, you're just lame," I said, although using nicer words. Then when evidence that it was very hard became irrefutable (e.g I couldn't beat it but very rarely), I moved to the line: "It's supposed to be challenging."

 

Then I realized that I had the test comparing the player's level to monster difficulty backwards. Opps.

[Spidweb]

A quick response before I head out the door for a week.

 

The summoning cap is a bit hackier than I normally like in my designs, but I went with it because it was simple, it was transparent, and it was exactly the right solution to what I felt was a serious problem. Considering the time constraints, I was very happy to live with something ugly given the advantages.

 

I very rarely try to justify rpg game mechanics, because the whole genre is so ludicrous reality-wise that trying to make one thing make sense only draws attention to the thousands of things that don't.

 

I do not apply PC limits to NPCs. The need to keep the summoned creatures under control when fighting enemy mages is part of the game. It requires strategy, I like it, and I think that applying PC rules to NPCs in this case (or many cases) would make for a poorer game overall.

 

A person does not have to design a game for their opinions to be valid. Period.

 

I'm sorry that this decision has caused anger, but I am absolutely standing by my guns on it. It just works.

 

- Jeff Vogel

[Dahak]

There is a very simple answer as to why we can't have more than 2 summons.

 

The party is stuck in the god's game of heroes and monsters with the Avernum gods (Jeff) picking you (the party) as the heroes side. Seeing as how immortality tends to lead to ennui the gods like to spice theirs and yours life up with a challenge. While the party can in fact summon more than 2 monsters to their side the gods in their infinite boredom and need for excitement can decided to lean on the extra-planar creatures. They have made it very clear that no more than 2 may answer the parties summons at a time. Any violation of this rule will be met with divine wrath.

 

Needless to say, they listened.