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[beorn080]

There is Triangle Wizard, which has a few melee type wizards, but overall focuses on ranged magical combat. Much prettier then your average rogue like too.

[Mr.Person]

There is Triangle Wizard, which has a few melee type wizards, but overall focuses on ranged magical combat. Much prettier then your average rogue like too.

Triangle Wizard is a top-down shooter, not a roguelike.

[beorn080]

There is Triangle Wizard, which has a few melee type wizards, but overall focuses on ranged magical combat. Much prettier then your average rogue like too.

Triangle Wizard is a top-down shooter, not a roguelike.

Then so is Diablo.

[Mr.Person]

Triangle Wizard is a top-down shooter, not a roguelike.

Then so is Diablo.

Diablo is an isometric real-time two-dimensional RPG (the engine is 3d, but from a gameplay pov, you can't jump).

There's no formal definition, but I consider a roguelike to be a top-down (or isometric) turn-based grid-based RPG.

[a1s]

wouldn't it make more sense to just do a real-time 2d top-down shooter?

Let's make it an FPS. That would make it more personal and remove all that line of sight bullshit: if I see it- I can shoot it, if I can't then I don't see it (out of sight- out of mind). Ah, but the controls are unrealistic, whoever aims with a mouse (or, god forbid, "analog stick")? Let's sign up for paintball instead! But now all the damage model sucks (honestly even hit-points were better then being out for a for wound). Let's join the army!
Seriously though, sometime you want to play a shmup, and sometimes you want a (completely unrealistic^*) RPG, there's no accounting for taste.
------------------------------------
* do you remember how long a round takes in DnD? look it up, it's 6 seconds. in GURPS it would be 10 seconds. Do you know how long it took to resolve a 5 round battle (that's 30 seconds game time) in my last game? over an hour!  This seriously screws up your OODA loop, turning what is a chaotic skirmish into a grand strategic exercise discussed at leisure.
Even in computer assisted RPGs, battles that should last barely a minutes actually last dozens!  (unless you just always click attack, or find some other way to wing it, in which base, what is the point?)

[Soadreqm]

I don't think roguelikes are good for realistically depicting ANYTHING. It ultimately doesn't matter whether the battle system makes sense, as long as it's entertaining. And "entertaining" is really not well defined at all, since different people are entertained by vastly different things. Some want to point a crosshair at a human figure and click the mouse button, while others like spending fifteen minutes picking gear and junctioning materia to fine-tune their setup before they even get to the battle.

One definite problem I can think of with ranged roguelikes would be line of sight. It doesn't feel weird to only see ten meters ahead when you really have little reason to care about monsters outside the LOS, but if you have a rifle, it soon becomes jarring to be confined to a really short range. And extending LOS is tricky to do, since you can only display so many ASCII characters on a screen at once while keeping it legible. Ranged combat also benefits from a more open level layout, which makes it easier to notice the LOS limitations. How would you implement a sniper rifle in a roguelike?

[a1s]

One definite problem I can think of with ranged roguelikes would be line of sight. It doesn't feel weird to only see ten meters ahead when you really have little reason to care about monsters outside the LOS, but if you have a rifle, it soon becomes jarring to be confined to a really short range. And extending LOS is tricky to do, since you can only display so many ASCII characters on a screen at once while keeping it legible. Ranged combat also benefits from a more open level layout, which makes it easier to notice the LOS limitations. How would you implement a sniper rifle in a roguelike?

Well, yes, you are right ranged combat does benefit from open spaces, but that is only true for, shall we say, "symmetric warfare". What I mean is that if it's your character against a whole level worth of mooks, then after one shot (giving themself away) your character will become swiss cheese. If however a level is covered in corridors (or at the very least trees, bumps and other pieces of cover) it will even the chances a bit. Sniper rifles are actually easy (just press your aiming key, scroll through the enemies, and press the firing key), but detection would be hard (for a game to work well you'll probably have 1-2 meters per cell (ASCII character), for something like 50 meters on a screen, and your character will likely see half a dozen screens away during the day. Maps help, if you know what you are looking for. Perhaps a game could have an indicator that tell you have many enemies you see (X-COM style) and a message each time you see a new one, but this isn't being done, right?)

[magikarcher]

Umm... So thats a no on the Mafia Themed Roguelike?

[Shades]

It's not that you CAN'T do ranged combat in a roguelike, it's just not optimal.

What do you count as optimal? What do you mean by optimal in this case?
I'd have said it's almost as simple to do as melee in a turn based game.

You can do smooth and intuitive gunfights. The thing is that instead of selecting a square to fire at, you select the enemy. There are usually few enough baddies on the screen that cycling through all of them to get the one you want is trivial. There was a scifi roguelike, Warp Rogue or something like that, where you selected a target and fired separately. You were constantly targeting something, and could fire by simply pressing 'f' once.

Sounds a pretty good method to me.

[Soadreqm]

Umm... So thats a no on the Mafia Themed Roguelike?

'Fraid so. LCS is probably the closest thing in that area right now. At least no one here can think of any others.

On the other hand, new roguelikes are popping up like kobolds from hiding. If you ask about it on enough roguelike boards, someone will probably like the idea and make one.

[EuchreJack]

Are there any Mafia/Mobster/Organized Crime themed roguelikes? I know there is LCS but it's not exactly what I am thinking of.

In case you wanted an answer:

Check out Crimefighter.  It's a dos game where you play a gangster, committing crimes until your rep is high enough to make you the crime boss and retire.  And yes, it has a "grid" system, but it is a pretty primitive game in most respects.  But quite interesting for when it was made, and even fun today.

Trust me, this is not an action game.