Dipping my toe into Angband

So I spend yesterday and today playing Angband. I’m actually doing fairly well considering I haven’t played seriously in years. I have a Ranger who just turned 9:

–

–

Angband has 6 classes: warrior, mage, priest, rogue, ranger, and paladin. It is definitely a different game to play than Nethack, and I can see why many people like one or the other but not both.

Rangers seem (so far) to be archers who get mage spells. I tend to use arrows and magic missiles about equally; you can “R”est to regain mana and health when no monsters are about. You can also close doors to prevent monsters from coming up on you while you rest. Food is much less of an issue so far than it is in Nethack – you find or buy food rations, and need to use them much less often. No monsters leave corpses behind to eat. When you fire a spell or arrow, you’re able to not just pick a direction, you can instead target the nearest monster if it’s within range.

Rogues also get some mage spells; I am unsure of how they are different from rangers so far. The one time I tried to disarm a trap in a corridor, it worked immediately. Paladins are some mix of warrior and priest – I’ll start one of them tonight, to see how melee characters do.

You can’t steal from shops as you can in Nethack, but the shop owners will say some amusing things – especially when you sell them a NICE potion or scroll for the standard amount they give for unidentified items. Then they will grumble when you sell crappy potions to them.

The dungeon so far has had few stuck doors, some traps, and no special objects such as fountains, sinks, or thrones. The levels are huge (you can “M”ap the entire area discovered on the level if you need to), and mages get a detect spell for traps, doors, and stairs – which my ranger uses frequently. It won’t cover the whole level, but you get a message when you leave the boundary, so you know to recast the spell.

I probably need to find a stronger bow. I understand Angband has enchanting scrolls to improve your weapons and armor, but so far the shops don’t sell any. (Also, the 7 shops each deal in specific items – you won’t be able to sell excess armor to the potions guy).

I actually think that Diablo (the original) takes most of its inspiration from the Angband type of roguelike, with some ideas from Nethack thrown in the mix. The gameplay, dungeon/town layout, and goal all seem to be much more akin to Angband than the puzzle-focused Nethack.

Race and Role options in the Nethack variants

The variants of vanilla Nethack don’t, for the most part, add a lot of extra choices for character creation. Sporkhack and Nitrohack have no additional races or roles.

Unnethack lets you play as a vampire race, but has no extra roles. In Grunthack, you can play as a kobold, ogre, or giant, but otherwise seems just like vanilla.

In Sporkhack, although you have no extra roles, all races can play any role.

Slash’EM is the one variant that really throws a lot more options at you – in fact the Monk role in vanilla started out in Slash’EM. When you start a game of Slash’EM, you can pick a Flame Mage, Ice Mage, Necromancer, Undead Slayer, or Yeoman,  in addition to the base 13 roles. You can then choose to play as a doppelganger, drow, lycanthorpe, hobbit, or vampire if the role allows it. In Slash’EM normal elves are only lawful or neutral – if you want to be a chaotic elf, you’re going to need to play a drow.

The Nethack wiki has this to say about the playable races in vanilla, Sporkhack, and Nitrohack:   “Humans can be any alignment (subject to your chosen role allowing that alignment), but for the others, your race indirectly determines your alignment: dwarves are always lawful, gnomes are always neutral, and elves and orcs are always chaotic.
In general, dwarves are strong, elves and gnomes are smart, orcs are poison resistant, and humans are good all-rounders.”

Unique to Slash’EM is the concept of techniques. These are extra abilities each role and each race may get, that can be used every so often and improve as your character gains levels.

Here are typical starting equipment pictures for each role. These will vary somewhat but do give an idea of the sort of items that each one starts out with. Slash’EM roles are in bold, (Slash’EM races are in parentheses), and [Grunthack races are in brackets]. Unnethack vampires have the same 4 role options as Slash’EM vampires do.

Archeologist – can be human, dwarf, or gnome (or doppelganger).

Barbarian – can be human or orc (or doppelganger, drow, vampire) [or ogre, giant].

Caveman/woman – can be human, dwarf, or orc (or doppelganger) [or ogre, giant].

Flame Mage – (can be doppelganger, drow, elf, gnome, hobbit, human, orc).

Healer – can be human or gnome (or doppelganger) [or giant].

Ice Mage – (can be doppelganger, drow, elf, gnome, hobbit, human, orc, or vampire).

Knight – can be human only [or elf].

Monk – can be human (or doppelganger, hobbit) [or elf].

Necromancer – (can be doppelganger, drow, human, orc, or vampire).

Priest/ess – can be human or elf (or doppelganger, drow, or hobbit) [or giant].

Ranger – can be human, elf, gnome, or orc (or doppelganger, drow, hobbit, lycanthorpe, or vampire) [or kobold].

Rogue – can be human or orc (or doppelganger, lycanthrope, or vampire) [or kobold, ogre].

Samurai – can be human only.

Tourist  – can be human only (or doppelganger, hobbit).

Undead Slayer – (can be doppelganger, drow, elf, gnome, hobbit, human, lycanthrope or orc).

Valkyrie – can be human or dwarf (or doppelganger) [or giant].

Wizard – can be human, elf, gnome or orc (or doppelganger, drow, hobbit, or vampire) [or kobold, ogre, giant].

Yeoman – (can be elf, hobbit, or human).

I was somewhat surprised to see that in Slash’EM, hobbits cannot be rogues. I guess none of the developers read The Hobbit?

I’ll go into more details about the racial benefits/drawbacks and the Slash’EM techniques in a later post.

Nethack and Angband

I chose to focus primarily on 2 games and their variants: Nethack and Angband. Each one has a very distinct playing style.

Nethack

In Nethack you choose your character’s race, gender, and class (called “role” in Nethack). The standard game offers 13 roles to choose from, and 5 races. While one role is restricted to females, the others can be played with male or female characters. The role you choose affects which races you can become. You’ll start off equipped with some useful items, a weapon, and armor. As your character gains levels, they get abilities (some right away) that are unique to each role. Learning how to use those abilities will improve your chances of survival.

The roles are: archeologist, barbarian, caveman, healer, knight, monk, priest, rogue, ranger, samurai, tourist, valkyrie, and wizard. The races are the usual fantasy ones:  human, elf, gnome, dwarf, and orc.

The way to win Nethack is to journey through a dungeon of 50 levels, find the Amulet of Yendor, bring it with you back to the surface, ascend a few more levels, and offer it on an altar to your god. This, of course, is far from simple. Becoming better at Nethack involves learning the uses of anything you are carrying (including some far from obvious uses), interacting with the features and inhabitants of the dungeon, and trying not to make mistakes. Because it is turn-based, you should think about your options carefully – that vicious monster won’t move while you check your inventory.

Nethack includes a “Guidebook” of 62 pages, and an in-game help system. The Guidebook has a lot of useful information and hints to help you play the game, and reading it before you begin play is definitely recommended. The game is very hard even without making use of other sources of information about the game  (termed “spoilers”).

Nethack can be played using ASCII characters

Priest – Nethack with ASCII

or with tiles enabled:

Priest – Nethack tiles version

If you play on a Debian-based Linux system, the “Documentation” section of the repositories will have a spoiler file.

Nethack is considered to have 3 stages of game progress – early, middle, and late – determined roughly by what area you have reached in the game. Your short-range goals will change from stage to stage. It seems to be the consensus among the better players that the roles also fall into 3 groups: strong in the early game, weak in the early game but becoming excellent in the late game, and weak throughout the game (yet still able to win).

It is a single player game, but most variants (and the vanilla version) let you play online using a telnet client to sign in and play. You can watch other people play, see high scores, and others will see your progress. The only thing you can’t do online is use a “tiles” version of the game.

Nethack doesn’t have a town level, and each dungeon level is preserved while playing the same game. Unless you look up spoilers, you’ll be taking a lot of notes about monsters and their weaknesses, special levels of the dungeon and how to reach them, and what items are the best ones to keep with you for use later on.

There are less than 10 Nethack variants, some of which are no longer active. The Nethack wiki has a list of all of them.

Angband

In Angband you also choose your character’s race, gender, and class. The standard game offers 11 races but only 6 classes. The classes are Warrior, Rogue, Mage, Priest, Ranger, and Paladin – much more “standard fantasy” types than Nethack lets you play.  When you choose your race and class, the game shows you how your attributes are affected, and any advantages or disadvantages you have.

Your choice of race has no effect on which class you are allowed to choose.

Angband doesn’t have a Guidebook, but an FAQ mentions the 2 primary websites for it: rephial.org and angband.oook.cz. The forums, and a list of variants are at the second link, while rephial features a link to spoilers and an outdated but still useful Players Guide.

Two of the big differences between Angband and Nethack are the town level at the top, and the fact that when you leave any particular level, it is lost. Returning generates a new level, new artifacts, and monsters. You are expected to return to the town every so often in order to buy scrolls, better weapons, etc (town portal scrolls in Diablo are definitely borrowed from Angband). Angband is generally considered to take longer to play through than Nethack. It is more of a combat-oriented game, with very few puzzles. Because of the way shops work, stealing from them is impossible; in contrast, good Nethack players have learned the benefits of stealing from shops they find (one of the benefits of keeping your pet around!)

The levels in Angband are also much larger than those in Nethack. Nethack levels always fit on one screen when using the ASCII graphics, while Angband’s sprawl all over. There’s a command to see the entire map at once, which will also show you any stairs found. Hunger in Angband is much less a focus than it is in Nethack – monsters won’t leave corpses, and you must buy your food.

The number of Angband variants is much larger than those for Nethack – many are no longer being maintained, although they are still playable. The Angband forums has a Variants subforum that seems to consider less than 10 variants still current.

Playing online is pretty well supported in all versions of Nethack, while I don’t really see it as an option for Angband. I’m planning a post specifically about online play, where I will go into more detail.

Exploring the World of Roguelikes

I’ve starting this new blog to document my curiosity. For a long time, I have been interested in certain role playing games that are termed “roguelikes”. These are single player games, usually with a fantasy bent, that have been around since the late 1980s. In them, you name and create a player who you send into a dungeon, using different skills to fight monsters, survive, and find better armor, weapons, and magical items to help you (potions, scrolls, wands, rings). At the bottom of the dungeon is either a final powerful monster to kill, or a specific item you need to bring back to the surface, in order to win.

Two of the main games in this genre are Nethack and Angband. Unlike nearly all commercial games, the source code that goes into these games is freely available for people to read and modify if they wish (this is referred to as “open source”). Because of this, each one has several variants. Angband has over 30 that are considered stable or “beta” (playable with practically no bugs), while Nethack has about 5 or 6. I really haven’t found much information online about the differences among all these various games, so I decided to learn them first hand.

Roguelikes have many advantages over commercial games, but do have one major disadvantage: they have ascii-based graphics  (or sometimes small tiles). If the lack of pretty graphics doesn’t bother you, there are several features that make roguelikes better than even today’s games:

* They are free, unlike most games today that are often $40 to $60 dollars when first released, and yet they offer hundreds of hours of playtime.

* They are single player turn-based games, so you can take your time choosing your next move – although you do have to pay attention!

* You never need to be online to play them, although some versions have been made for internet play.

* They are fairly small in size, usually under 20 megabytes, and include help files within the games (and a Guidebook in Nethack’s case).

* Because the graphics are so low-tech, it’s pretty much guaranteed that any computer (PC or Mac) from the last 8 years will be able to play these games, no matter what graphics card you have. They also run fine on netbooks, and some have been ported to the iPhone and Android phones.

* The game developers have spent their time making it possible for you to use most items in nearly any way you can think of (which is why the controls are keyboard based). You can open locked doors in different ways, mark the floors, fall down stairs if you are overburdened…

* Their content is generated anew with each new game, which makes them extremely replayable – even with the same character class and race, the dungeons are never the same layout.

Roguelikes also are known for ‘permadeath’, which means that although you can save the game at any time, if your character dies you have to start the game from the beginning (the save file is meant for taking a break from the game, and will be deleted once the game loads the file). Taking notes on what monsters there are, and how to best defeat them, is essential. Even though ‘spoilers’ exist online for the main games, you will still have to be mindful of all your items, think of innovative ways to use them (especially in Nethack), and not get careless. This feature is the other reason why the genre remains a niche – not everyone can deal with losing a character for good that they’ve invested hours in, and who may be very well equipped to win the game.  But the danger is what gives them their appeal for other gamers; each dead character teaches you tricks and cautions for the next attempt.

There are, of course, a lot of other games in the roguelike genre besides Nethack and Angband. But these are two of the oldest ones, and the only ones with significant variants that are still available to play. I may look at other games in the future, but wanted to focus on them first.

The playing styles of these 2 main branches is a little different – in Nethack and its variants, you start on the top floor of a 50 level dungeon with a pet, and must descend to the bottom, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor (a difficult task), and then ascend to the first floor again, leave the dungeon, traverse several more levels, and finally offer the Amulet on your god’s altar. Shops to buy and sell items will be found occasionally in the upper half of the dungeon. When you create your character, you choose their class/profession first, then the race. Finally you choose an alignment (lawful or chaotic), if your class choice doesn’t restrict you to a specific one. Each class has some useful skills they gain as they level up, and a small set of starting gear.

In Angband, you start in a town of 8 shops (and 1 home that you can store items in). You have no pet. The game is won by killing Morgoth, who dwells on the 100th floor of the dungeon. You can leave the dungeon at will to buy or sell items at the various shops. In these games, you are only trying to gain better armor, weapons, and skills with which to survive the descent, reach Morgoth, and kill him. When creating the character, you choose your race first, then a class (different races have different options here), and finally you choose the skills that your character starts with. Another difference from Nethack is that while both games let you go up or down dungeon levels, in Angband each level and all items in it will be lost once you leave. When you return to the same level, Angband creates a new one (while in Nethack the whole dungeon will always be there during any single game). This has an effect on playstyle, although I’ll explain the details later.

I’ll be playing both of these, along with their variants, over the next few months. I will be using the website RogueBasin as my primary source for information on these different versions, along with the list found at the official Angband site and the Variant list at the Nethack wiki. Because both games have lots of “spoiler” information, I may hide certain paragraphs in blog posts that describe game play, which you can open up if you are an experienced player.