Review RPG Codex Review: ADOM

[Azrael the cat]

I think to understand the obsessive appeal of Adam you needed to play it during the 'developer v ADOM community' era, when the player base was working together as a community to solve some of the craziest puzzles in gaming history. You could get the standard win and the easiest special win (going into chaos and killing the big bad instead of just sealing it off and dealing with any monks intelligent enough to reopen the portal) playing solo, but the (many) ultimate, grand ultimate, etc wins are very much designed with a view to challenging a community that's sharing discoveries and working together on the forums to find and beat the game (one of them involves going all the way to evil and good in one game, getting crowned for both, getting corrupted enough to gain the right mutations to enter some otherwise closed off areas, requiring you to find ways of undoing your corruption twice in the game so it doesn't kill you before the end game, and finding two 'optional' boss fights that are only available during a fixed time period and at the right part of the moon cycle).

The developer would be constantly adding things into the game in a manner that took advantage of the games small file size to hide the scope of the update - he'd drop hints, but you never knew whether he'd added a few new monsters/weapons, inserted new ways for existing monsters to fuck you, or a whole new ending/area/macro quest line. Often he'd announce that he'd added a new ending or a whole series of areas a year AFTER they'd been in the game, if the community was being too slow in discovering it. Other times the community would find something major that had been quietly sitting in the game for years while the developer inserted various clues.

A lot of the games ludicrous 'special win' conditions make a lot more sense in that context. Beyond the standard win, they aren't really designed for a single player working it out by trial and error - it was about a community sharing clues and discoveries to work it out collaboratively and providing that challenge in the era of game FAQs.

 

[Damned Registrations]

A lot of the stuff in ADOM just boggles my mind, like the Gardening or Mining skills. The idea that there's actually a skill in the game for using a pickaxe to mindlessly carve out entire levels in search of gems, stat boosting crystals and stone giant meat. I have no idea how profitable this actual is, but I'm guessing you get enough gems out of it to offset the repair costs if it's a thing people actually do. Weaponsmithing is pretty much just as crazy. It's a shame melee is ultimately just a really shit way to go in ADOM, since no matter how strong you get you'll still need to rely on arrows for certain enemies.

 

[Castanova]

Definitely my least favorite of the big name roguelikes. I used heavy spoilers and guides to attempt to beat it anyway. Used a Wizard with that fast-start method (memory a bit hazy) where you farm those lizards at that temple to get up to ~level 7 then you use teleportation tricks to steal end-game armor/weapons from that dwarf vault. This was after playing the game for only a week or so. I was able to get almost to the end of the game just sort of following a prescribed method but died in the Water Temple (?) due to being stupidly over aggressive. I don't think you could make that much progress in DC:SS or NetHack just by following spoilers without accruing a decent amount of experience with the game first. Also, the beginning of the game is way too long and tedious if you're playing legit.

 

[SerratedBiz]

That's weird. You'd think a game that rewards player ingenuity rather than strictly grinding skills and levels would be well-regarded for it. It would seem to me that the former approach requires a lot more thoughtful design and, should you not come upon the solutions by abusing spoilers, would be much more rewarding for the player.

 

[Elwro]

This is, I think, the game I lost most time on throughout the years. I recently tried the newest version (DOS version in Dosbox -> Full Screen ASCII orgy) and the magic is still there.

(Finished it twice before the age of ridiculous jackals and generally broken XP.)

 

[Azrael the cat]

Just a small correction. It's true for the most part that monsters scale at the dungeon level, but outside of the CoC, the starter dungeon and the infinite caverns the monsters will be fixed to that particular location and don't normally get harder as you go down, outside of the mooks supporting the boss fights. Also, there's one important dungeon (let's you get to the evil town though you don't need to reenter the dungeon to return there once you've been, needed for some quests and to get either of the 2 adventurer companions - who are usually stronger than the pets you summon/tame once you level them up) that scales with PLAYER level. It deliberately overscales once you're over 4th level as well, making it exponentially harder the longer you leave it - if you want to go for any of the special wins going there before the starter dungeon is a good way of seeing if you're character has what it takes, without having to sink hours into the character first, and if you survive you'll be geared up enough to get an easy run to the mid game.

Also, even the main dungeon (CoC) has exceptions to the 'deeper is harder' rule. Some are random (like spawning a greater vault), but others are fixed and there's one particular 3 level stretch (skippable through a quest, but the quest can take a long time, and hence chaos gain, if you're unlucky) halfway down that can rival the last few levels for difficulty if you try to fight your way through instead of teleporting/stealthing (one notoriously common way for players to die is to accidentally take the wrong stairway on the way back UP after winning the game!)

Generally you need to treat each location as having its own rules for determining monster difficulty.

 

[Damned Registrations]

That's weird. You'd think a game that rewards player ingenuity rather than strictly grinding skills and levels would be well-regarded for it. It would seem to me that the former approach requires a lot more thoughtful design and, should you not come upon the solutions by abusing spoilers, would be much more rewarding for the player.

The thing is, 'player ingenuity' generally means 'grinding shit besides monsters'. You can farm herbs, or SIs, or mine for gems, or pickpocket everything you see, or spend a billion years in the ID for spellbooks, or live sacrifice monsters all day, and all of that shit gives you huge, incredible advantages compared to just playing along normally. I picked this up again a while ago and got a wizard to the big room and pacified it (more or less, he seems to have made that not actually work completely any more, AFAICT) and no longer have the will to continue. I really don't want to dck around for hours to get a hundred stoma herbs and stat herbs and healing herbs, but if I don't I'll probably regret it later when I'm getting confused with my low willpower or one shot with low touhghness or whatever.

 

[Gozma]

If you want to grind something, just gremlin bomb -> wish engine, it's far more broken in less time than anything else you could do. Stat grinding shit and farming precrowns is not really qualitatively stronger than just incidental stat boosting done in passing and using a spear + tower shield and some bow.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yeah, that got taken out, obviously. But even back when I was playing the version that had it, I didn't want to do shit like that or stair scumming the ID. Herbs were generally the single best thing you could do- they solve all your food issues while keeping weight low, train your most important stats (str from being burdened while you farm them, toughness, dex and will from the herbs), get you enough piety for precrowning, and enough healing herbs to make healing potions irrelevant. Once you've got a pile of herbs the only way you die is instadeath. Which still happens all the fucking time, of course.

Although it's since been toned back a lot. You can't sacrifice herbs any more, it takes about twice as long to train your stats (so it's still just as useful, but now it's more tedious) and now apparently you can't totally pacify the room, so again, it's more tedious since you need to constantly run around fucking with whatever goblin happened to spawn so it doesn't let out the horde of white worms locked away to keep the whole level from being overrun with blink dogs and spider factories.

The stat boosting you get from a spear + tower shield is pretty much a joke, especially when you inevitably have said items get melted or blown apart by a random trap. But even with the gear, you need like a thousand fucking combat marks to get ~20 DV, which really means fuck all, since the dangerous shit is all fire breathing or so deadly that reducing the chance of being melee'd to death from 30% to 13% really doesn't matter.

Actually, I know exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to do a LP of my level ~12 wizard getting assraped by something because I decided to move on and search for a berserker lord (fucking quest) in the Tomb of Kings instead of farming herbs.

 

[Azarkon]

Hell, I remember ADOM. It was one of the Big Three of roguelikes right before they went mainstream with Diablo, the other two being Angband and Nethack, of course. It was my favorite of the three, because:

* Nethack was too hipster for me
* Angband was too repetitive
* Only ADOM allowed you to farm weed, mothafakas Only ADOM, I recall, had an overland map and a coherent world design

The concept of gradual mutations was very annoying back when I played it, but in retrospect, it was ahead of its time. It forced you to find ways to cope with the corruption and to go in with a plan beyond scumming dungeon levels till you find awesomesauce items, which is basically what you did in Angband and to a lesser degree Nethack.

The monster scaling didn't bother me back then because the corruption usually got you before the scaling did. Just avoid the small cave after the first few levels and you're fine.

There was a lot to do in that game, from what I remember. My favorite strategy was to play a bard for the pets-dont-abandon benefit, and then get my hands on blessed scrolls of familiar summoning, and hope for an end-game monster that I then babysit till it's high level enough to take out the entire main dungeon for me. I especially loved balors/emperor liches because they summoned other friendly monsters and pretty soon you're fighting with an army.

Too bad Thomas Biskup is still working on releasing JADE after 20 years.

 

[Elwro]

Back before, I think, 2002 or something, monster scaling was perfectly fine. But the version the community was stuck with for quite a few years was one with broken XP code: trollish barbarians would not even achieve lvl 30 before D:50, and monsters you met frequently advanced in power ridiculously (e.g. jackals).

 

[Damned Registrations]

The way monsters are handled in ADOM is truly bizarre. Even putting aside the whole level scaling thing, there's a weird rarity = power variance thing too. Like vapour rats are incredibly rare monsters that are found at floor 11 or so... and they're literally the weakest things in the game I know of. They have 1 hp and do 1d3 damage and have normal speed. OTOH, at level 12 with slightly less rarity, can be found a werewolf lord. He has 126 hp, hits 3 times for 4d6+6, has 30% more speed than the player does by default, and summons werewolves, who in turn can summon wolves. More common level 12 monsters generally has half of each of those stats and no special abilities at all.

Then there's the fucking turtles.

*Encounters a dragon turtle, D kills it effortlessly with some caution.*
*Encounters a giant turtle, D kills it effortlessly with some caution.*
*Encounters a giant dragon turtle, D, thinks 'I just massacred one of these earlier right? Attacks once, does no damage, gets hit with super powerful breath weapon and dies*

I'd love to do that shit to some players in a PnP game. "After you finishing looting the goblin corpses, you move down the corridor and encounter a lone gohblin. You attack it? It breathes fire, you each take 4d20 damage."

 

[Borelli]

A thing i found badly designed about ADOM is the sameness of many beginnings. For example you will always visit the small cave for the blanket, will always visit healing quest if you don't have healing (i will at least), you technically don't have to do these things but will make the game so much easier that you have to. TOME4 has the same problem but of a much much lesser scale.

 

[Gozma]

The thing is at the time it was new having some options/differences in beginnings (like having/not having healing, running to the infinite dungeon, significant variations in the birth sign thing, etc.) made it the diverse Roguelike relative to Nethack and (god forbid) Angband.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It was a novel idea, but it would have worked much better if the rewards were something less vital to success. If you don't have healing, troll race, or candle sign, you're basically just dead, because it'll take you about 1000 turns to heal 30 hp. In which time you'll lose about 50 hp fighting all the new monsters that spawned. So you're going to get healing 90% of the time. I wish the reward had been something like a choice between gemology and weapon smithing instead. Those are somewhat useful for any class, but not even remotely vital to playing.

Incidentally, troll healer with candle sign is hilariously OP as a start. You regen insanely fast. Troll hunger sucks though.

Starsigns would have been more interesting with some balance too (like if that free talent on candle belonged to the relatively useless unicorn sign instead).

I can see the appeal, it certainly had me enamoured with the game at first glance as well when I found it years ago. But the closer you look the rougher things get.

 

[TigerKnee]

It was a novel idea, but it would have worked much better if the rewards were something less vital to success. If you don't have healing, troll race, or candle sign, you're basically just dead, because it'll take you about 1000 turns to heal 30 hp. In which time you'll lose about 50 hp fighting all the new monsters that spawned. So you're going to get healing 90% of the time. I wish the reward had been something like a choice between gemology and weapon smithing instead. Those are somewhat useful for any class, but not even remotely vital to playing.

Incidentally, troll healer with candle sign is hilariously OP as a start. You regen insanely fast. Troll hunger sucks though.

Starsigns would have been more interesting with some balance too (like if that free talent on candle belonged to the relatively useless unicorn sign instead).

I can see the appeal, it certainly had me enamoured with the game at first glance as well when I found it years ago. But the closer you look the rougher things get.

Basically, if only it had been... BALANCED properly, those would have been great ideas, rather than no brainers.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I'd like to see a rogue(y)like designed by .

Spoiler

No, seriously

 

[Gozma]

I never understood people that cared about birthsign balance. I guess because I played random class/race most of the time so who cares if the start is hard or easy

I installed the new version to play a game. Random roll: orc assasin - no healing, illiterate, pretty shit! Got annoyed that I couldn't see the entire floor at the same time and turned it back to ascii after about 5 minutes. Kill the healer to get heal, get to CoC, realize I'm gonna go insane without autopickup on arrows, shift-q Y no wait I meant save

Has Biskup put in any Crawl-equivalent movement options and that kinda shit (like being able to autopath to the up/down stairs) that are hidden down in the keybindings?

 

[TigerKnee]

Has Biskup put in any Crawl-equivalent movement options and that kinda shit (like being able to autopath to the up/down stairs) that are hidden down in the keybindings?

I think there's Mouse support auto-path in the newer version but I don't know if they work outside of Tiles mode.

 

[Damned Registrations]

When you cast teleport there are prompts to go straight to the up or down stairs. Don't think those were there before.

 

[Elwro]

Playing without healing, and even without getting healing later on, is entirely viable. It's nice that there are many options in this game for various challenges

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Roguelikes—wherein you slip your cock into ninety-nine gloryholes concealing tigers, until finally figuring out which one conceals the lady.

I enjoy roguelikes from time to time. The problem is that I have to play each one long enough to discover whether it's hard but fair, or just flat-out bullshit and broken as Hell. Before a certain point in the learning curve, all I really know is that I suck and die a lot.

The perfect roguelike for me would be one in which every single playthrough is theoretically winnable by a master of the game who knows all its ins and outs. I hate roguelikes in which you must overly rely on luck. That's why I discarded FTL (which is merely a roguelike-like) very early on, despite all the buzz surrounding it when it released a few years back.

Your first statement is funny but not applicable to all roguelikes. I suggest you try Angband, or for more refined mechanics, Zangband. In the many years I have been playing that game, I have not once been 'jobbed' by the game. When you die in Angband you can generally understand why and learn from it. You need no meta knowledge.

 

[Sceptic]

Your first statement is funny but not applicable to all roguelikes. I suggest you try Angband, or for more refined mechanics, Zangband. In the many years I have been playing that game, I have not once been 'jobbed' by the game. When you die in Angband you can generally understand why and learn from it. You need no meta knowledge.

TBH I think the only one that really fits Blaine's analogy is Moria, although it does fit to a T. Maybe the original Rogue, but I didn't spend enough time on it. In most of the others that I know (especially Nethack and Angband), if you think you died "randomly", chances are there is something you should have been paying attention to but didn't. I"m particularly puzzled by the FTL comment; sure there are many ways to screw yourself in some of the choices, but in just about every single one, if you're a master of the game then you know which ones carry a risk, and you can just avoid taking the risk entirely.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Your first statement is funny but not applicable to all roguelikes. I suggest you try Angband, or for more refined mechanics, Zangband. In the many years I have been playing that game, I have not once been 'jobbed' by the game. When you die in Angband you can generally understand why and learn from it. You need no meta knowledge.

TBH I think the only one that really fits Blaine's analogy is Moria, although it does fit to a T. Maybe the original Rogue, but I didn't spend enough time on it. In most of the others that I know (especially Nethack and Angband), if you think you died "randomly", chances are there is something you should have been paying attention to but didn't. I"m particularly puzzled by the FTL comment; sure there are many ways to screw yourself in some of the choices, but in just about every single one, if you're a master of the game then you know which ones carry a risk, and you can just avoid taking the risk entirely.

Indeed. Discipline in delving approach, planning for escape and always having contingencies ready are the keys to getting further on in the game. When I die in Angband it is because I get caught failing to mitigate risks or having an escape plan in case I encounter something way out of depth.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Your first statement is funny but not applicable to all roguelikes. I suggest you try Angband, or for more refined mechanics, Zangband. In the many years I have been playing that game, I have not once been 'jobbed' by the game. When you die in Angband you can generally understand why and learn from it. You need no meta knowledge.

TBH I think the only one that really fits Blaine's analogy is Moria, although it does fit to a T. Maybe the original Rogue, but I didn't spend enough time on it. In most of the others that I know (especially Nethack and Angband), if you think you died "randomly", chances are there is something you should have been paying attention to but didn't. I"m particularly puzzled by the FTL comment; sure there are many ways to screw yourself in some of the choices, but in just about every single one, if you're a master of the game then you know which ones carry a risk, and you can just avoid taking the risk entirely.

Ironically, the CRPG Addict just quit playing Moria and there is a big discussion about the older rogue-likes on his blog right now: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2015...howComment=1424480106297#c5157707433221055973