Challenges

[ektemple]

Currently, increased difficulty in Kerkerkruip comes largely from two sources: stat manipulation and new monsters. I'd like to propose an alternate method of increasing difficulty that I think would be more fun: Challenges.

After the player beats Malygris on difficulty level 1, we offer him/her a choice of three challenges for the next game. These would be very broadly similar to "conducts" in Nethack, only they would be explicitly presented to the player as the basis for the next game. The player must accept one of the three challenges, but he can change on the first move of any subsequent game should he fail the challenge.

Challenges might be along the lines of:

• Defeat Malygris without using any scrolls
• Defeat Malygris wielding no other weapon than the rapier
• Defeat Malygris without using ment

...and so on. Challenges would be fed to the player in order of difficulty, with three available at any one time. Every challenge would also be an achievement (in fact, we might want to make the challenges the only achievements).

(See also #37.)

[curiousdannii]

I share your feeling that the current system doesn't give much to players who can win on standard difficultly but never manage to get much further up the rankings without coming back down again. I'm one of those players too!

For the system as you've proposed, what do you meant by "difficulty"? Would these initial challenges not be possible at higher difficulty levels? So initially you'd get those three choices, and if you win you get a second set?

I wonder though if this system would reduce the challenge/enjoyment to a player who has done a substantial number of challenges? Once the achievements are ticked off, then what? One idea would be to allow players to accept more than one challenge per game, and even to let them pick more up during the game. (If you've played Ticket to Ride it would be like its mission cards -- get shown 3 and choose at least 1, with a risk that none will be convenient for you.) The prestige of winning would then come from how many you manage to complete within one life, and scoring could follow appropriately.

If you like my idea, the player could be given a choice of three randomly chosen challenges, pooled from all the ones they have unlocked. Unlocking them should be based on challenges and not just the number of wins, but I'm not sure how. Individual challenges could be dependant on others perhaps. Challenges should also have a rarity rating.

Should challenges be awarded if the player completes them without having chosen them?

[ektemple]

I mean this system of challenges to replace the current system of difficulty levels. So, we would no longer algorithmically adjust the stats to make things harder for the player, though we would continue to bring in new content based on some measure of experience (which could now be as simple as # of challenges completed).

My idea was that the player would get three challenges, and he would choose one for the next game. If he succeeds in that challenge, a new (presumably more difficult challenge) would take its place among the 3. So, at any time, there would be three challenges available, one harder than the others.

But I kind of like your Ticket to Ride idea--if points were awarded for each challenge completed, that could also be a means toward high score. Though my mind is boggling a bit at the interface question for this idea. I'm not in favor of picking up more challenges during the game, though.

I think that challenges should be like calling shots in billiards--the player only receives credit if he declared the goal in advance.

[ektemple]

Another thought: the next algorithmic difficulty level could always be one of the challenges. Thus, after beating Malygris twice (no challenges until after winning at Apprentice level), the challenges might be:

• Defeat Malygris on difficulty level Adept
• Defeat Malygris without using any scrolls
• Defeat Malygris without using ment

I also thought of a workable UI for selecting multiple challenges, using keypresses and screen refresh to move items from one column to another, or under one heading or another. The player would type numbers to toggle challenges on or off, and space or enter to accept challenges.

A player should also be able to choose no challenges, in order to just explore the game or play without stretching herself.

One more thought, not sure if I like it or not: One of the available challenges could be a simple exploration challenge, to encourage players to explore new content as it is unlocked. For example, we might have the following challenges:

• Defeat Malygris on difficulty level Adept
• Defeat Malygris without using any scrolls
• Track the imp to his lair

The latter would not garner many points (score should be about core gameplay), but would result in an achievement.

[VictorGijsbers]

Allow me to vehemently disagree with most of the things said in this thread! And then allow me to give arguments and a counterproposal. :) This is also relevant for #37 .

First, I think the current difficulty system should be kept. It is an elegant way of balancing the difficulty of the game to the skill of the player, and gives an obvious reward for winning. The simple fact that Kerkerkruip cannot be too easy -- because a better player will simply achieve his 50% win ratio at some higher difficulty -- alone seems to me enough reason to keep the difficulty level in place.

However, I recognise that challenges might be cool, both for players who hover near Apprentice and, in fact, for everyone.

But I strongly dislike the conduct-style challenges proposed by Erik. Conducts always seem to take the form of "play the game, but without making use of option X". This is just boring and bad design. If scrolls are fun, and add something to the game, than playing the game without scrolls is going to be a worse experience than playing the game with scrolls. And idem ditto for ment, or anything else. Sure, conducts add challenge, but they add challenge in the worst way imaginable. (I'm expressing my opinions pretty strongly here, I hope you don't mind. I'm much more open to persuasion than I may sound. ;) )

In addition, I think the "choose between these challenges" approach doesn't fit Kerkerkruip very well. You don't get to choose anything in this game; you're given stuff, and have to work with it. In this sense, it is more like Brogue than like DCSS. We could of course depart from that model, but I'd like to look at other options first.

I believe that there are ways to add challenges to Kerkerkruip that fit the game much better, while still adding that extra thrill that players will relish. In fact, we already have a couple of them, like:

• Entering the elemental plane of smoke!
• Summoning a big bad monster in the arena of the fallen!
• Reading the tome of sudden death and playing a game in which everyone has 1 health!
• Reading the tome of the brightest flame and being immune to attacks, but having only 30 turns to win the game!

What I would like to suggest is that good challenges just consist of interesting, rare content that takes the form of a special challenge you can either accept or reject. Weird special monsters that can be freed by the player, are very dangerous, but give great boons when defeated! Portals to strange realms that can be entered or not! And so on. The player doesn't have to choose this stuff at the beginning of the game; she'll just come across it while playing the game. I would certainly like to increase the amount of this stuff to such a level that she'll come across it in nearly every game. In fact, that sounds fun.

Now, to make this feel more like real challenges, which one accepts or not, and which give a certain prestige when accepted, I suggest we link it to the new scoring proposal #37. Challenges give a bonus score, and we'll implement a "full score" command that shows how the score is built up. We can also show the current score in the status line in order to make the player more aware of it.

As a formula, I think something like

(levels of defeated monsters) * difficulty level + special scores

would work. The difficulty level gives you a bonus when defeating monsters, but surviving special challenges would give you a straight bonus to the score.

What do you think?

[ektemple]

Hm, I look forward to trying blood magic!

Interesting how diametrically opposed our perspectives are. As a player, the current scheme for scoring in Kerkerkruip looks like poor design to me. (I don't know if it really is poor design--but it looks like it!) There are so many difficulty levels! A game with that many levels just can't be well balanced on all of them. Surely there is one difficulty level that is the "right" one! The one that the designer built the game around, the one which he carefully balanced. As a player--and I have no knowledge of this from the design side--I would prefer to play that game to playing algorithmic permutations of it.

The simple fact that Kerkerkruip cannot be too easy -- because a better player will simply achieve his 50% win ratio at some higher difficulty -- alone seems to me enough reason to keep the difficulty level in place...

Partly this is touches on a fundamental question about what is fun in games. Reflecting on your comment about win ratios: I am nowhere near achieving a 50% win ratio in Kerkerkruip, so I think that assumption is way off in the first place. My ratio is probably closer to 5%, on normal difficulty. But if I ever did achieve something close to a 50% ratio, I would quit playing, because it just isn't fun to win all the time--or even half the time! The idea that a really good player will achieve a 50% ratio at a high level underscores what I see as the absurdity of the thing: The current system strongly implies that Kerkerkruip is a game for obsessives, math geeks, optimizers, hyper-milers. I think that it can and should appeal to many other people, and that they deserve equal or greater rewards. I do realize that these days obsession is assumed to be a good thing: calling a game "addictive" is for most the highest praise, and free to play and "social" games in particular--as well as many other games--encode player assumption into their mechanics and their business models. So I accept that I may just be woefully out of step with modern gaming...!

I think the game on normal difficulty is fun as it is.* I don't (yet) feel the need for more challenge, but if I did, I wouldn't find changes to the stats to be very motivating. An example from my own history with games: A while back, I used to play quite a bit of single-player Halo (the original): I used it for a shot of adrenaline when I needed to stay up late at night working. After beating it on the normal difficulty, I played through the more difficult levels (there are two levels above difficult); on these levels, enemies shoot much faster and the hits hurt more (i.e., their stats were buffed). The added challenge of these was fine (they were well-designed), but where the game got fun was when I started replaying with arbitrary, self-imposed constraints: play through the game using only the pistol, or healing only once per level, or fighting only with bare hands, or not using grenades, or some combination.

To my mind what you are missing in arguing against challenges is that they are self-imposed, and that is key to understanding them. Seeing the board in chess adds a lot to the game (I think we can agree!), but playing blindfolded allows a master to stretch himself in new ways. Making the game harder by taking away scrolls at Adept level would be a bad, lazy design decision in just the way you suggest. But when the player chooses to ignore scrolls--even if that choice is suggested by the designer--it takes on a whole new color. The scrolls are always there, tempting. Not using them presents itself every moment as both challenged and choice. "Losing" the challenge by giving in and using scrolls creates its own story, of imperfect asceticism ("...but I still beat Malygris, by gum!"). So I do think that you are fundamentally wrong about the nature of the challenges :)

You don't get to choose anything in this game; you're given stuff, and have to work with it.

This is a valid objection to the concept. Of course, one could argue that challenges are about choosing not to accept something even if it's given, so that we're not really talking about the same thing. But I see the point.

I do like your proposal for formalizing in-game challenges by leveraging the score, and I agree that the general formula of (base points derived from powers absorbed + points for special actions) is the way to go. I think those sorts of challenges sound fun (presumably you are also planning to make choice-points clear in-game).

I do have a problem with your counterproposal, though: A challenge loses something fundamental when it is a choice the player makes in the course of playing the game--it becomes less about testing your mastery and more about making the right choice based on current circumstances. (Think about what would happen to billiards if you didn't have to call your shots, but if you did and you called them correctly, you got extra points.) So, I think your proposal is trying to do something fundamentally different--fun, but not at all the same sort of thing.

Those are my thoughts and my attempt at persuasion. I won't put up any more fuss: closer to my heart than this challenge thing is the reformation of the score; I do feel strongly that there needs to be some reward and gauge for progress in gameplay that isn't tied to winning streaks.

By the way, there's a recent article on Gamasutra that makes similar arguments to what I'm suggesting here (couching things more in terms of achievements, though). You guys might find it interesting: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/185436/an_alternative_to_achievements.php The guy who wrote it is making a very cool tactical game called Auro, a roguelike-descendant which I've been doing some light beta-testing for. If you want to check out the game: http://www.dinofarmgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=198

• Actually, I still think that Level 1 and 2 enemies could be slightly tougher, particularly the daggers.

[VictorGijsbers]

Thanks for the thoughtful piece, Erik! I'm going to put off answering until after I've had some time to think about it.

By the way, I'm the kind of gamer who (1) doesn't like the adjective 'addictive' and prefers roguelikes to many other genres precisely because the frustration factor ensures that he doesn't get addicted (nothing cures a DCSS addiction faster than losing your level 20 character to something stupid), but (2) can agonize for minutes over the decision whether to attempt the Minotaur now with a package of ment, or go after a level 2 creature instead. So perhaps an obsessive, but not an obsessive of the I-play-World-of-Warcraft-40-hours-a-week kind!

Well... I know I'm not immune to that kind of addiction. So I just don't play games like WoW, because, hey, I have better things to spend my time on -- I could be rereading Faust, or meeting friends, or programming Kerkerkruip. :)

As a scientific project, I hereby promise to keep a track record of my Kerkerkruip games, so we can see what my win percentage is.

[ektemple]

I think my win percentage would slip from what I quoted if I were to keep scientific track of it... But maybe I'd better start.

(By the way, this suggests that we should be tracking number of games played in the stats!)

As a player, I am more heedless than I should be when it comes to a game like Kerkerkruip. I don't not agonize over decisions, but I don't always think everything through as I ought to. Forgetting to snuff ment before I face the Minotaur, for example.

[VictorGijsbers]

Well, tracking my win percentage in-game would be useless for scientific purposes, because most often I'm in "testing mode", not "real play mode". :)

[VictorGijsbers]

Unscientific N=1 research: won!

Lovely game. I turned into a vampire, killed Miranda and the chain golem (tough fight there, I probably shouldn't have done it in bat form). Then I discovered the Arcane Vault with the Tome of the Brightest Flame. I didn't read it yet, but went on to attack the minotaur -- I made some mistakes with ment there, but managed to win in the maze nonetheless. I used the unguentum diminuendi to turn his axe medium. Followed by a friendly undead priest, I then took out the hound and the blood ape, but ignored the fanatics of Aite. I then read the tome of the brightest flame, spent an agonizing 6 or 7 turns to get to Malygris, and managed to quickly maze him. Luckily, I found him quickly. Being in the maze, he couldn't teleport away, and since I was immune to all attacks, I killed him!

* You have destroyed your foe, and will be able to enjoy your victory for another 9 turns! *

I like Kerkerkruip. :D

[VictorGijsbers]

(O, and I discovered five bugs and/or errors in the process...)

[curiousdannii]

I have to agree with Erik on most of his points. The current difficulty system is 100% boring and uninspiring. I have never won a game at Adept, and even if I did playing at Expert would not be exciting in the slightest. I wouldn't mind if the current difficulty system was entirely abolished.

For those who do however like playing at the harder difficulties, it would be easy enough to add challenges for them. For example there could be a permanently cursed item which drops all stats. Put it in the entrance hall and if you want a challenge based on simply being out-classed, equip it!

It probably would be good to track more stats, like the number of play throughs, even if it's not displayed to the user. It would be easy enough to have the cheat commands make a play through ignored in the stats. We could even have a EXPERIMENT command that would also make a play though be ignored.

[ektemple]

Victor, there should be a Kerkerkruip Stories sidebar on the website for narratives like that one! I have never been a vampire :(

BTW, it may not be productive to view the debate in this thread as Current Difficulty System vs. Challenges. Even if in the end we decide we all agree that the current difficulty system needs to change, the answer isn't necessarily challenges...