It is arguable that slashem and nethack have been getting harder over the years. In particular (i have no evidence to back this up) I feel that slashem is much harder than stock nethack.
Explorer mode is nice but it seems too cheap and you can't "score" in it. I looked at many other RPGs and what they do for death is either have permanent death but have save files (I don't like this because it means you can be reckless and do quicksaves, savescumming) or when you die you find yourself waking up at the healers shack in the nearest town. I like the second idea. When you die, it costs you something and you magically end up elsewhere. I liked it so much I made a patch.
The behaviour of the patch is that if you die you are given a choice "Do you want to trade your goods and gold for life?". If you say yes, your character drops everything (included cursed items), you gold is destroyed (death tax) and teleports to level one and you have some hitpoints. So you end up on dungeon level one (or quest level one) with nothing but your fists (if you have fists). If you say no you die a permanent death. Now I'm not done with the patch but what I am thinking of is have this be a seperate mode, - CRPG mode (classic rpg mode) . I want this mode to still be scoring. Yes it is cheap but you should be able to score. What I was thinking of is scoring the game as SCORE / e^(number of deaths).
So if you NEVER die you have the same score as a normal nethack player. If you do die you are punished scorewise exponentially for each death til eventually you are asymptotically close to explorer mode.
A. it's much harder than explorer mode
B. it's easier than normal mode
C. You can play like normal mode but if you don't you are punished score wise for being foolish
There could be debate that this is unfair to normal mode players as it gives insurance for their death, as to allow people to experiement but not on the same level as explorer mode or savescumming. We could change the scoring algorithm to e^(1+number of deaths) that means every game score was by default was divided by e as an insurance cost.
The current implementation includes only:
1. Dropping all items
2. Destroying your gold
3. Teleporting you (some bugs in this, sometimes beasts follow you and sometimes you get interupted in teleporting)
What would need to be done:
-CRPG flag
score manipulation
I'd love to hear any comments on this suggestion and will share the code. I feel something like this could change the nethack scene for casual players.
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i think you misunderstood the point of explorer mode. i don't really think it's so much a mode of play, as it is a mode of, well ,exploring and experimenting in the game, so you discover things yourself instead of reading spoilers.
i think this is an interesting idea, but gets a bit powerful towards the middle of the game, where gold stops being all that important . and, btw, if you know you are about to die, you could just drop your gold and suffer no death tax, although this may be solveable by simply by needing to have a certain amount of gold to be resurrected. With this patch, when you die, you basically restart the game with nothing (save gained attributes, intrinsics, #techs, #enhance, already mapped levels, already identified items), and there's a guranteed bones file of your last game without a ghost or cursing of all items on a certain level.
oh, and whatever situation you somehow couldn't manage with all your equipment is still probably there, but now you have NO equipment. The only thing this really helps with are YASD, and those are what makes the game fun imo.
ways to possibly balance this:
-require x amount of gold to be resurrected (1500 * xlvl?), annihilate all gold upon resurrect anyway
-annihilate all non artifact items on your character, or on your current space (to prevent dropping items to save them). curse the artifacts.
-knock you down a few levels and constitution (dying is a bit of a drain on your person)
-must be in great standing with your god, and that goes down, as death is not seen as progress with the gods.
-luck penalty
i don't really like the overall idea, here's why:
i hate to sound elitist, but this game really isn't supposed to be easy. if someone wants to play another final fantasy, shtye should...go and play another final fantasy. What really sets nethack apart IS the permadeath, IS that you have to on your toes at all times, even if you have a full AK, your idiot vampire might still bite a cockatrice if you try to melee it.
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I think this is largely a brilliant idea. Better would be to give this mode of play it's own scoreboard entirely so there is no reason to complain about milked games, etc. This sorta reminds me of Diablo 2, where this is normal mode (your mode) and hardcore mode (regular nethack/slashem mode).
As for what to do about deaths, there's a million ways to deal with it, though I definitely agree with destroying everything you were carrying (not sure what to do about artifacts). This would bother Wizards and Monks a great deal even if they aren't as equipment dependent, since they would lose any luck/health stones, jewelry, wands, scrolls, tools that people carry around to make life easier.
There'd definitely need to be permanent stat loss (Con for sure, maybe Str too), and if you really wanted to punish them, take it away from their attainable max. Definitely would need to lose max HP as well.
I also like the idea of needing to meet requirements to be resurrected, such as a certain amount of gold (to pay the priest who resurrected you?) and good standing with your god.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Well….(big disclaimer here)> I read nothing but the title Death to Explorer…..
Slashem is harder than Nethack because there are many many many more variables. So I started noticing I got to exp 4 before dieing on slashem whereas on nethack I got to exp 6 (that was quite a while ago). Back then I went to look for patches to see if someone had done a death and not leaving bones --> ask if you want to do explorer mode. Someone has written a patch for plain vanilla nethack that will ask you if you want to enter explorer mode if you die and are not leaving bones. I patched slashem with it (hand patched it of course because the line numbers do not match in the 2 programs). It totally worked (except you have to do ctrl-r <redraw screen> because it still displays the top ten over the top of your game when you say yes enter explorer)
But if you want to go and get slashem source and that patch. Look at the patch and it will say things like in file extern.h
then some things that are the last lines it (the patcher) looks for…
in this case:
E int NDECL(timed_occupation);
E int NDECL(wiz_attributes);
then the patch has
+E int NDECL(enter_explore_mode);
which means take the + off and add that line there (do it in dos program called edit…..type edit extern.h in the directory that file is in)
Thats the best I could do to be able to play characters out after their expiration date.
(although you could savescum as well but you would know you were cheating :)
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lol like I said I didnt read the posts you wrote a patch already. Sounds good from the description. But maybe there is a way to score on another top ten. Like explorer is not there (on the top ten) at all and maybe this give up all you have and go back to level 1 thing could have it's own scorelist. Well I like the idea anyway. Sort of a bit more diablo-ish. It also gives you the opportunity to die a stupid death and then within the same game not die that way again.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
It is arguable that slashem and nethack have been getting harder over the years. In particular (i have no evidence to back this up) I feel that slashem is much harder than stock nethack.
Explorer mode is nice but it seems too cheap and you can't "score" in it. I looked at many other RPGs and what they do for death is either have permanent death but have save files (I don't like this because it means you can be reckless and do quicksaves, savescumming) or when you die you find yourself waking up at the healers shack in the nearest town. I like the second idea. When you die, it costs you something and you magically end up elsewhere. I liked it so much I made a patch.
The behaviour of the patch is that if you die you are given a choice "Do you want to trade your goods and gold for life?". If you say yes, your character drops everything (included cursed items), you gold is destroyed (death tax) and teleports to level one and you have some hitpoints. So you end up on dungeon level one (or quest level one) with nothing but your fists (if you have fists). If you say no you die a permanent death. Now I'm not done with the patch but what I am thinking of is have this be a seperate mode, - CRPG mode (classic rpg mode) . I want this mode to still be scoring. Yes it is cheap but you should be able to score. What I was thinking of is scoring the game as SCORE / e^(number of deaths).
So if you NEVER die you have the same score as a normal nethack player. If you do die you are punished scorewise exponentially for each death til eventually you are asymptotically close to explorer mode.
A. it's much harder than explorer mode
B. it's easier than normal mode
C. You can play like normal mode but if you don't you are punished score wise for being foolish
There could be debate that this is unfair to normal mode players as it gives insurance for their death, as to allow people to experiement but not on the same level as explorer mode or savescumming. We could change the scoring algorithm to e^(1+number of deaths) that means every game score was by default was divided by e as an insurance cost.
The current implementation includes only:
1. Dropping all items
2. Destroying your gold
3. Teleporting you (some bugs in this, sometimes beasts follow you and sometimes you get interupted in teleporting)
What would need to be done:
-CRPG flag
score manipulation
I'd love to hear any comments on this suggestion and will share the code. I feel something like this could change the nethack scene for casual players.
i think you misunderstood the point of explorer mode. i don't really think it's so much a mode of play, as it is a mode of, well ,exploring and experimenting in the game, so you discover things yourself instead of reading spoilers.
i think this is an interesting idea, but gets a bit powerful towards the middle of the game, where gold stops being all that important . and, btw, if you know you are about to die, you could just drop your gold and suffer no death tax, although this may be solveable by simply by needing to have a certain amount of gold to be resurrected. With this patch, when you die, you basically restart the game with nothing (save gained attributes, intrinsics, #techs, #enhance, already mapped levels, already identified items), and there's a guranteed bones file of your last game without a ghost or cursing of all items on a certain level.
oh, and whatever situation you somehow couldn't manage with all your equipment is still probably there, but now you have NO equipment. The only thing this really helps with are YASD, and those are what makes the game fun imo.
ways to possibly balance this:
-require x amount of gold to be resurrected (1500 * xlvl?), annihilate all gold upon resurrect anyway
-annihilate all non artifact items on your character, or on your current space (to prevent dropping items to save them). curse the artifacts.
-knock you down a few levels and constitution (dying is a bit of a drain on your person)
-must be in great standing with your god, and that goes down, as death is not seen as progress with the gods.
-luck penalty
i don't really like the overall idea, here's why:
i hate to sound elitist, but this game really isn't supposed to be easy. if someone wants to play another final fantasy, shtye should...go and play another final fantasy. What really sets nethack apart IS the permadeath, IS that you have to on your toes at all times, even if you have a full AK, your idiot vampire might still bite a cockatrice if you try to melee it.
not to mention you have some classes (monk comes to mind) where they really don't do too bad at all naked and without weapons.
not to mention wizards who still have all their spells, which tends to help a LOT.
I think this is largely a brilliant idea. Better would be to give this mode of play it's own scoreboard entirely so there is no reason to complain about milked games, etc. This sorta reminds me of Diablo 2, where this is normal mode (your mode) and hardcore mode (regular nethack/slashem mode).
As for what to do about deaths, there's a million ways to deal with it, though I definitely agree with destroying everything you were carrying (not sure what to do about artifacts). This would bother Wizards and Monks a great deal even if they aren't as equipment dependent, since they would lose any luck/health stones, jewelry, wands, scrolls, tools that people carry around to make life easier.
There'd definitely need to be permanent stat loss (Con for sure, maybe Str too), and if you really wanted to punish them, take it away from their attainable max. Definitely would need to lose max HP as well.
I also like the idea of needing to meet requirements to be resurrected, such as a certain amount of gold (to pay the priest who resurrected you?) and good standing with your god.
Well….(big disclaimer here)> I read nothing but the title Death to Explorer…..
Slashem is harder than Nethack because there are many many many more variables. So I started noticing I got to exp 4 before dieing on slashem whereas on nethack I got to exp 6 (that was quite a while ago). Back then I went to look for patches to see if someone had done a death and not leaving bones --> ask if you want to do explorer mode. Someone has written a patch for plain vanilla nethack that will ask you if you want to enter explorer mode if you die and are not leaving bones. I patched slashem with it (hand patched it of course because the line numbers do not match in the 2 programs). It totally worked (except you have to do ctrl-r <redraw screen> because it still displays the top ten over the top of your game when you say yes enter explorer)
But if you want to go and get slashem source and that patch. Look at the patch and it will say things like in file extern.h
then some things that are the last lines it (the patcher) looks for…
in this case:
E int NDECL(timed_occupation);
E int NDECL(wiz_attributes);
then the patch has
+E int NDECL(enter_explore_mode);
which means take the + off and add that line there (do it in dos program called edit…..type edit extern.h in the directory that file is in)
Thats the best I could do to be able to play characters out after their expiration date.
(although you could savescum as well but you would know you were cheating :)
lol like I said I didnt read the posts you wrote a patch already. Sounds good from the description. But maybe there is a way to score on another top ten. Like explorer is not there (on the top ten) at all and maybe this give up all you have and go back to level 1 thing could have it's own scorelist. Well I like the idea anyway. Sort of a bit more diablo-ish. It also gives you the opportunity to die a stupid death and then within the same game not die that way again.