History VideoGame / Angband

* VendorTrash: In an attempt to streamline the game, since version 3.5.0, the ability to sell items has been turned off by default while gold drops being improved to avoid having the player constantly going back to town to sell stuff. It can be enabled in the options however - savvy players using this will restart the game until they get a combination of high maximum payout shops to sell to.

The objective of the game is to defeat Morgoth, the BigBad of Middle Earth. To get to him, you must first descend through 100 levels of increasingly hostile dungeons, and hopefully acquire enough experience and equipment to defeat him. The challenge comes from learning how best to deal with the vast menagerie of enemies in the dungeon, and knowing when and when not to take risks.

* VulnerableCivilians: You can kill everyone in the home village (except shopkeepers - they are just flavour names when you enter the shop and not actually present on the map). Some of them even drop a few coins, handy if you need a little extra for an item before it vanishes from a shop.

* MinMaxing: This is pretty much the aim of the game. You can get all your stats to 18/100 eventually, but the scale goes up to 18/*** (for scores over 18/200) with equipment bonuses. You'll never be able to wear enough equipment to have all stats at 18/***, so it's about choosing which stats need to be maxed.

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: Every single monster in the dungeon (and a couple in the town) are hostile and will kill you if they can.

** It's highly recommended to carry some kind of missile weapon as there are lots of enemies (such as jellies and molds) that you don't want to fight in melee as they have nasty debuffs, can wreck your equipment or both. Even casters should do so as some enemies can drain mana, resist a lot of attack spells or regenerate hit points faster than casters can regenerate mana points.

** The town level is full of beggars, harmless drunks, street urchins, and various mangy animals. They're generally no match for you whatsoever, even at your lowest level, so you can kill them with abandon (and they even sometimes drop money). Some of them are dangerous to low level characters - Mean Mercenaries are an even fight for a starting character and Battle Scarred Veterans remain dangerous for a few levels. Squint-eyed Rogues and Street Urchins can steal gold from you and should be avoided or killed at range and the Rogues have a damaging melee attack that can surprise an unwary player.

** You can also configure the game to start explicitly warning you when your hitpoints drop below a certain percentage to lessen the chance of dying due to not keeping an eye on it. There are also options to allow you to automatically know all runes allowing you to auto-identify any consumable magic, permanent item or both.

** High level spellbooks are immune to item destruction as they cannot be easily replaced.

** The town level is full of beggars, harmless drunks, street urchins, and various mangy animals. They're generally no match for you whatsoever, even at your lowest level, so you can kill them with abandon (and they even sometimes drop money). Some of them are dangerous to low level characters - Mean Mercenaries are an even fight for a starting character and Battle Scarred Veterans remain dangerous for a few levels. Squint-eyed Rogues and Street Urchins are not dangerous in melee but can steal gold from you and should be avoided or killed at range.

* WakeUpCallBoss: Smeagol and Wormtongue. Smeagol is invisible, fast, moves erratically, steals your gold (and then teleports away) and has a ludicrous number of hit points for the level he's native to. He's not actually that dangerous but is very annoying and hard to kill. Wormtongue is also annoying as hell. He appears somewhat later, isn't invisible and has less hitpoints but can heal himself, slow you and create traps around you, as well as being somewhat dangerous in melee and also steals gold (and again teleports away). Most players will simply avoid them or leave the level if they know they are not equipped to deal with them.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/angband_4_2_2.jpg]]

* ImpossibleItemDrop: With the exception of a few monsters that only drop money (hydras in particular) or never drop anything, what a monster drops is completely uncorrellated to its species. A crow can drop an artifact zweihander, or a beastly unique can drop mundane garbage. The fact this drop table is tied to dungeon level, not monster level, is yet another reason why it's rarely worth taking dangerous fights in Angband. Safely picking off a dozen chumps is not only safer than taking on an ancient dragon, it'll probably get you just as much loot.

* SuperiorSpecies: High elves are the best or near best choice just about every class except priests (where Dunedain are top with Dwarves next) due to their stat bonuses (except wisdom), ability to see invisible (very useful at low levels) and light resistance (which is one less resistance you have to find an item for). This is countered by them requiring more experience points to advance than any other race.

** You can exploit the monsters vision/activation distance to draw them out a few at a time rather than having to deal with a whole group at the same time. Telepathy is especially good for this - you can move towards a vault of monsters until the ones nearest the door start to come out, step back, kill them and repeat, gradually moving closer to draw out the next layer of monsters.

* DeathOfAThousandCuts: Creatures with the ability to produce copies of themselves will generally kill you in this manner - they're usually relatively harmless by themselves, but once they start multiplying they can block passages and totally surround you, picking you off a little at a time.

* AIRoulette: Monsters use spells and abilities randomly, unless you've turned on "monsters learn from their mistakes". Even with this on, monsters still cast spells or use abilities using strict probability calculation and if no spell or ability triggers, their behaviour defaults to "move towards player/attack if next to"[[note]]certain enemies such as canines won't do this unless you're in an open area[[/note]] unless they can't actually move. This, for example, leads to enemy spellcasters wasting turns moving towards you rather than spellcasting every turn and randomly healing themselves rather than using it every time they get wounded enough.

* MinMaxing: This is pretty much the aim of the game.

* SaveScumming: Possible, but discouraged as you have to manually backup and restore savefiles. One use is to to make sure +1/-1 stat potions decrement a dump stat. Note that it's pointless trying this to get better hitpoints on level ups as these numbers are fixed at character creation.

** At early levels, Wands of Wonder can throw out far more lethal spells than you would normally have access to but since the effects are entirely random and can include hasting and healing the monster, they are more trouble than they are worth unless you are desparate.

* DiminishingReturnsForBalance: As a weapon or armour pieces plusses increase, the chances of Enchant scrolls and spells working on them decreases. Essentially this means they top out around +15 on any plus - you can't keep enchanting your sword until it gets +100 to hit and +100 to damage. This is to stop high level priests with the right spellbook from destroying the game as they can cast these spells over and over again.

** Fighters: Intelligence and Wisdom - as they'll never cast cast spells they don't have to worry about mana points and the saving throw bonus for Wisdom is anemic unless the stat is very high.

* InventoryManagementPuzzle: You can only carry a certain number of different items and while most items will stack, they have to be exactly the same (you can't stack partially used and full torches together for example). Carrying too much weight will also, depending on your strength, slow you down and make you vulnerable. It's generally recommended to return and sell stuff (if the option is available), stash spare equipment and consumables in your house or outright discard less useful items if your speed drops into negative numbers as this means monsters can get multiple turns against you which can be very dangerous. It is possible to increase the number of inventory slots by editing a text file, but this doesn't help with the weight issue and can problems with inventory handling and display and setting it too high will cause the game to crash if you pick up too many different things.

* {{Doorstopper}}: Spellbooks are ''heavy'' meaning, counter-intuitively, that pure casters should after maxing their primary casting stat put as many points into strength as possible to avoid speed penalties from lugging all their spellbooks around.

** If you have the "sell to shops" option off, the only way to get money is to find it lying on the ground, mine it out of the dungeon walls or kill enemies that drop it, but the amounts are larger than normal for all three to compensate. With the option on, money drops are reduced in amount but you can sell unwanted items for money (limited only by the maximum the shop will pay and if they have storage space for it).

** The Deep Delve scroll. It drops you five levels deeper than your lowest delve. You will face a ''significantly'' more challenging level.

* Doorstopper: Spellbooks are ''heavy'' meaning, counter-intuitively, that pure casters should after maxing their primary casting stat put as many points into strength as possible to avoid speed penalties from lugging all their spellbooks around.

** Secondarily, after your primary stat it's ''strength'', even if you are a Mage. The reason is that you have to carry a lot of gear to survive and strength affects your carrying capacity. If you are overloaded you start taking hits to your speed which can be fatal. Mage spellbooks are ''heavy'' so perversely after maxing your intelligence you should dump the rest of your points into strength!