💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2024 › 06 › 27 › rogue-legends.gmi captured on 2024-07-09 at 01:46:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Why only two rings? In rogue(6) the limit is two, even though a humanoid could wear more. Maybe the player is a dolphin? A boring answer is that rogue(6) was a big process. Adding code for, say, wearing 10 rings would take time away from other tasks, like making the monsters more interesting, fixing bugs, and might have resulted in a game too complicated to work, a fate suffered by various ambitious games of that era. Also it would have likely needed a new window and ring inventory code, as there was no support scrolling the inventory, which limited items to just 23 plus a status line, and the player must lug around a lot of loot: wands, panic button scrolls a potions, spare armor, food, hopefully not cursed weapons, and of course some rings, maybe. Does the system have enough memory for that? Some games have expanded on the limits, others not.
Modern roguelike implemntors are free to invent stories for the two ring thing, or maybe they are arm bangles, and chakra imbalances—or hyperconduit alignment tearing, for some scifi flavor—can explain why only two. With more rings one might invent new systems such that the player has to fiddle with their equipment to get everything properly balanced or otherwise min/max'd. This might be something like fitting a ship in EVE Online, or there could be other ways.
Some roguelike have "ring of the missing finger" after which you might learn to be careful about how you use-id items. I forget whether you could keep on putting on rings of the missing fingers until you run out of those, and maybe there could be a "win without fingers" conduct or whatever crazy things players might invent on top of the existing gameplay.
Yet another problem is that of balance; wearing lots of rings could make the game too easy (Octopodes in DCSS can wear eight rings but are fragile), or ring hunger cost might blow the food budget, forcing adjustments to food generation, ring powers, loot drop rates, and maybe how much micromanagement the player must attend to, which may not be fun. A two ring limit while low and arbitrary may force one to make do with less. Also, it's traditional.
P.S. Someone was asking what color the @ was traditionally, possibly on the assumption that there were more colors than two to be had back then.
$ cat colors.c
#include <curses.h>
#include <err.h>
#include <locale.h>
int main(void) {
setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
initscr();
if (!has_colors()) warnx("no colors");
endwin();
}
$ CFLAGS=-lcurses make colors
cc -lcurses -o colors colors.c
$ TERM=vt100 ./colors
colors: no colors
$ TERM=xterm-256color ./colors
$