There are also items that can be wielded by monsters that can kill with one hit, such as Vorpal Blade or the Tsurugi of Muramasa.
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It's still rather more reliance on spoilers than anything in Rogue requires. Still, Medusa always appeared on a specific level of the dungeon, and the level was always downstairs and never upstairs, so a player could conceivably be prepared for her. This situation was arguably bad design, which may explain why more recent versions of Nethack put Medusa on a special level, where at least experienced players will know where she lurks. Since merely seeing Medusa kills the player this breaks the rule, unless the player had a way of knowing Medusa was there before stepping into sight, and the game was random enough that there was no reasonable chance of that happening. Reverse example: In old versions of Nethack, Medusa was a random monster that appeared in a random room in the deeper dungeons. They can initiate delayed stoning, but that gives the player a few turns to cure the condition. Provided reasonable play, the player’s character should not be killed or harmed too greatly and permanently in one attack.Įxample: In Nethack, cockatrices can't immediately kill the player through a single attack. I apologize in advance for there being a lot of Nethack in these examples, but, well, it still has many features worthy of discussion. Each leads with a name, in quotation marks, to facilitate discussion, followed by the rule itself, followed by discussion, and then finally followed by both examples of games using it well and "reverse examples" of games doing it badly. But they all apply, with different strictness, to all the other major roguelikes: Nethack, Angband, ADOM and Dungeon Crawl. These rules are useful, however, when talking with respect to the default state of roguelike play and design, which I will define here as being that of Rogue itself. I tend to rebel whenever I hear someone tell me about features that "obviously" should never, or always, be present in a game. If there were a hard-and-fast rule about test-IDing potions of confusion, then an argument could be made that they shouldn't be in the game! In fact, the most effective roguelikes purposely make it difficult to always know when it's safe to perform dangerous actions. That is a less obvious case, but the player could have test ID'd the item while in a large, lit room, decreasing the chance that an unseen monster could reach him before the potion wore off. Now, while a bad effect is active, it's possible for a previously out-of-sight monster to walk up and start hitting the player. You are on your own in figuring those out. A game built on the idea of literally constant peril would have different design demands. Unknown items are possibly dangerous, so there must exist times of lesser danger in which to try them. That is the fact on which the idea of reasonable play rests. Most of the time in a roguelike, the player is not in immediate danger. If you're down to one hit point, even slight damage could kill you, and some games have items that damage you when you use them, so don't do that either. Discovering the potion of confusion by quaffing when a troll is attacking you is dangerous, so don't do that! For example, almost any bad effect from using an item can prove fatal if the player uses it at the wrong time. It refers to being in a neutral state in terms of danger. I use the term "reasonable play" several times here. I'm fairly outspoken in my appreciation for item-ID systems, so please calibrate your wonk-o-meter appropriately. Maybe not to all roguelike games - some of these have to do with designing a good item identification system, for instance, and many of the more recent games do not use that. But given we are talking about roguelikes, there are certain properties that have been important to the genre. I don't think there are any inviolate laws of game design.
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![potion of true seeing angband potion of true seeing angband](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/AWsAAOSwl01dhk9e/s-l640.jpg)
I call these rules for rhetorical purposes only. It's taken a bit longer than I expected, but here they are. Back in November, in my previous column, I mentioned a number of proposed rules of roguelike design, and promised soon to describe them.