"Leaky" stamina, and other "balance" changes

So, I'm still hacking out changes to make Magecrawl playable.

The major change of the night implements what I hope is a solution to the HP problem I talked about last post. I decided the underlying problem was that going from 100% stamina to 5% stamina involved zero risk. Now, once your stamina goes below a cutoff (currently 80%), there is a chance that some of the damage will "leak" through and apply directly to the underlying health. The chance is inversely proportional to the amount of stamina, so you are much more likely to leak at 20% stamina than 75%. This changes make combat more dangerous overall, but having lots of stamina is still useful but not overpowering.

Other changes I've implemented this week include:

• Map generator won't generate a horde of monsters on top of the player starting position
• Monsters will notice the player from farther away when they are wearing heavy armor (noise).
• Toughness skill will now give health instead of stamina, giving the player the option to "buy" more long term health.
• Bug fixes, seriously lots of bug fixes.

The problem with HP...

I know I've linked to this tv trope, but it is seriously still true in magecrawl. For those not playing along at home, here's what the current system is:

HP is divided into health and stamina. Damage taken is drained from stamina first. Stamina quickly recovers in between battles (assuming you aren't noticed by enemies, you can't rest then). Health damage requires magical healing to fix up. Stamina represents your ability to dodge and block damage enough to get out only with scrapes, bruises, and surface cuts. Health represents actual wounds, while bandaged up enough not to get worse, would normally require weeks to heal on their own.

Let me show you my current problem with an example:

Given 100 health and 60 stamina, you fight a monster which on average does 20 damage per round and takes 4 rounds to kill. Given these stats, you'll exhaust your stamina every fight, taking 20 damage to your health. In five fights, excluding magical healing, you will be dead.

Now repeat with 80 stamina, you on average take little to no health damage, extending the number of one-on-ones to tens or hundreds. If you repeat with 100 or more stamina, you'll extend the theoretical number of battle you can last, but you'll never get close to the "jump" between 60 and 80.

This creates a problem with skills and armor that increase your stamina, at some point you'll be able to solo monsters with no danger of taking semi-permanent health damage. I have a few solutions I'm playing around with:

• Make the line between stamina and health less clear cut. When you are at 100% stamina, you are sure any damage you take will be stamina related. As it decrease, there is a higher chance some of the damage goes to your health.
• Advantages - Makes battles less one sided, as any blow after a round or two can be lasting.
• Disadvantages - Adds a significant luck factor
• Make healing stamina take resources
• Advantages - Makes every battle matter
• Disadvantages - Makes every battle matter, makes it easy to want to micro optimize which isn't fun. Starts to approach the dreaded "food" system in other roguelikes.
• Make low stamina penalize certain attributes, such as mp total or time in between actions.
• Advantages - Makes stamina damage matter.
• Disadvantages - Can snowball, making you more likely to take even more damage. In a game with permadeath, this can get nasty.
• Make the stamina and health levels relativity constant (they increase at a rate similar to monsters damage output). Skills/armor give other benefits than more stamina.
• Advantages - Makes balancing easier. One you have a good setup, just make sure the rates of growth match.
• Disadvantages - Intellectually unsatisfying. Keeps player from feeling any tougher, as at the beginning of the game to the end, the can pretty much only take x hits from a even level monster, where x stays constant.

I'm currently leaning towards the first option, but am unsure right now. 

Balancing combat is hard, Let's go shopping!

It is amazing how difficult it is to balance the numbers that underlay combat. I've been messing them for a few hours now, and I have the game currently somewhere between Crawl and the "Nightmare" difficulty in doom. I can't get past the first level most of the time, so it needs some toning down obviously. A few thoughts:

• Splitting HP into a regenerating and non-regenerating part is working great. For me, it makes the initial part of combat not-painful, as I don't feel like I'm burning non-replaceable resources (if hp didn't regenerate). As combat continues, it gives me a reason to finish quickly as soon as I get near the end of my stamina bar. If I let it continue past that, I start taking damage that won't regenerate easily.
• Right now, allowing the player to rest after combat along with tough monsters makes the game feel like you're the little guy against the big army. You have to slink away after taking a guy or two down and rest before more find you. I've caught myself finding corners and cracks in the wall to press myself against before I hit '/' to rest to decrease the chance of a wondering monsters from finding me mid-heal. 
• In the next iteration, I have a rough idea how to model things like sound, smell, and visual changes due to battle. That will make monsters even more likely to stumble upon the player while he's resting. I'll have to tie that along with a system to keep some enemies grouped up, so groups don't turn into hide around a corner and pick one off at a time. 
• I've been tempted to go play a video game tonight instead of doing the work on my own, hence the title. For those who don't get the humor of the title, see here.