Radical consumables 1 by 1 changes

[Pollen_Golem]

No offense, but I feel like your post would benefit a lot from being condensed and focusing on the specific proposals you want to get across. As is it now, I kind of have to dig through it to see what you want.

I thought it is important to see the reasoning about consumables first and foremost, and notice how it leads naturally to the proposed changes. But I see your point - you want to root your way to the "verdict".

Maybe a TL;DR version like this is better?

REMOVE
magic: you should almost never want half the MP this gives, and you should be deprived of it at all other times.
berserk: to keep the normal cost of on-demand berserk, i.e. amulet/Trog.
invisibility: too easy to forget to use invis unless you could do it many times.
agility: misleading, and we don't need this simple buff that stacks with everything.
might: misleading
brilliance: possibly misleading, needs repeated exposure for the player to evaluate but is not common enough for that.
flight: only real point of these now is to ration them amongst difficult Shoals encounters, and Jorgrun, and loot vaults.
resistance: keep your dang resists in check.
holy word: no-one needs it.
magic mapping: trivialize challenges like finding timed portals or buried loot vaults. good opportunities for using this are obvious.
blinking: over-powered and doesn't need a brain to be used well.
summoning: shadow creatures are good but could be better for a rare scroll like this.
fear
silence: just why does this spell need to be in the game in scroll form in the first place?
confusion: there are too many sources of confusion in the game. This is too much of a "default" hex-wand.
slowing: junky expendable anti-melee wand.
flame, frost, fire, cold, lightning, draining, fireball: because why should any character get to be a Veh-conjurer, regardless of MP?

ADD, MAYBE
potion of bat-form: at least it is more widely useful than flight, and can still be used to get to loot vaults. Used to be a flight card effect.
potion of mana: a nerfed potion of magic
potion of slaying or blood-lust: to replace the muddier potion of might. Gives +9 slaying. Because 9 is special.
potion of brilliance: if the effect is given to Vehumet as an invocable power.
ration of resistance: like the potion, but rarer and longer-lasting. More like consumable gear than potion.
scroll of holy word: like torment, but for undead and demons.
scroll of telepathy: more interesting than magic mapping, more widely useful despite not "buffing" you.
scroll of fog: same scroll we have now. Just more.
scroll of summoning: same as now, but makes durable shadow creatures that can't leave their branch (level?).
wand of fear: like scroll but targeted. Single-targeted or cone shaped, I don't know.
scroll of abjuration: well, it's better than a silence scroll!
scroll of dissent: because your god is about to get mad or you want to pwn wiglaf or Norris.
wand of irresistible mutual slowing: as situational as wand of slowing, but much better in those situations.
wands of: sticky flame ranged, corrosive bolt, orb of electrocution: because some form of hopefully interesting attack wand is still ok.

[Pollen_Golem]

have you really never been playing a blaster or summoner who needs more MP right now?

You spectated this yourself: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=16651
FWIW draw out power restores no more than 15 MP.

As an aside, the "characters who love !magic most" are Vine Stalkers, full stop. It's the only thing remotely like HW for them.

OK, so it acts as a HW potion for a race whose gimmicks include a well-compensated inability to use HW potions. Lol, how is this good design? Spoiler, it's not.

I'd also point out that Fear: The Spell also doesn't display to-hit chance

The spell is different because you can get used to it. You can spam it. It's unlimited. You can cast it pre-emptively, just in case it starts getting ugly, when you're 90% sure it won't. You can't afford to do that with the scroll.

The scroll is strictly to prevent or escape a clear emergency. Unlike e.g. !might, it is not useful for an encounter you could easily disengage from. As such, it is to be used in situations of potential danger. In these situations, your decisions are important, and thus need to be well-informed. You need to know the chances of ?fear affecting the relevant monsters. You can't know from a few trials whether it is almost guaranteed to work or close to worthless. Therefore, you will be uninformed, and the decision to read fear, or not to read it, cannot even be bad or good. And a game where the player's decisions don't matter is a bad game. That ?fear is "very powerful" doesn't mean very much because a player can't know what that means quantitatively, and you can't expect someone to get the spell fear to max power and then go test it on pre-endgame monsters.

I find it hard to understand how it's any more taxing "to remember that you can neutralize the reason an enemy is so dangerous" with !resist than it is with any other thing the game gives you that offers a viable way to handle a threat. When I think of "taxing," I think of, say, trying to remember how to price-ID items in NetHack without having the spoiler open. Or, for that matter, remembering the dance of buffs/charms/hexes and swapped jewelry

When going to a branch, or reconfiguring gear with resistances, or reviewing spells like ice/statue form, a player should keep track of what resistances can be available. This is where the non-renewable decision space of consumables encroaches upon the renewable decision space of spells and gear swaps. For just this one tiny little potion - resistance - the player has to mix these. That's poor returns for messing with a player's conception of what resistances can be normally available to him. It's disproportionate. At least remembering your buff/charm/hex/swap dance gives you full bang for your mental buck, unlike remembering about !resistance which can only help you so many times.

Laying it all out like that is almost tiring. It's like explaining why a joke is actually funny, after explaining why it's supposed to be funny, you know? Hope it helps this time.

[Pollen_Golem]

I'm obviously not saying that current consumables are unusable or indefensible. You say things like "but they're useful in a common situation" as if that somehow substantiates their current design. Power does not make a thing good.

unifying thesis...central goal

Goal is simply to improve the design of consumbables, not follow some strange agenda, though my eye is sharper for some flaws than others.

Here's a thought experiment.

Assume consumables were actually not the way they are now, but the way I'm recommending.

That is, if for the past few versions you never found wands of confusion, fog was more common, etc.

Imagine, in that situation, pushing for the current status quo: "Hey man, these rations of resistance? They're poorly designed. We should make them into potions, which would be somewhat more common and expire much faster. That would be better."

Good luck.

[dpeg]

[Fear scroll vs Fear spell]

The spell is different because you can get used to it.

This is a good point: all limited effects (this includes consumables but also, for example, god powers) have to be more clear than unlimited effects. Now, I don't think that Fear (whether scroll or spell) is particularly unclear only because you don't see probabilities. It is conceivable that someone died because they had a single action, and mistakenly used ?Fear. But the effect itself is pretty clear, and players can learn on their own, and quickly, that ?Fear is a decent, but not a top-tier, emergency item.

[Haifisch]

Your argument for most of these seems to be "people can use consumables to assist in tough battles, which is bad" or "there's more than one way to get an effect, which is bad", but those aren't very compelling arguments. To get more specific for a few of them:

invisibility: too easy to forget to use invis unless you could do it many times.

There's a lot of items you can easily forget to use. The solution isn't removing the item, it's remembering to use it when appropriate. I don't see an issue with Invis potions as they stand, since they fill a good consumable space. The spell, ring & cloak require non-trivial skill investments, and the wand is rare. The potions can be used with no investment, and you're likely to find at least one early, but you have a limited supply of them.

agility: misleading, and we don't need this simple buff that stacks with everything.
might: misleading

In what way are they misleading? Agility makes you more agile & Might makes you mightier, with all that implies. Yes, they're good in tough fights, but that's the entire point of consumables!

flame, frost, fire, cold, lightning, draining, fireball: because why should any character get to be a Veh-conjurer, regardless of MP?

Because they're a limited resource that gives non-casters a decent ranged option. Heavy emphasis on "limited", because you're never going to be able to spam attack wands as much as you could spells. I'm not sure how your suggested replacements would fix your complaint, especially with corrosive bolt(which would function like any of the other bolt wands, just with acid). They're filling the same function(zap wand, do damage), just with a different flavor.

wand of irresistible mutual slowing: as situational as wand of slowing, but much better in those situations.

This just turns slowing from 'rarely used' to 'never used'. What's the point of slowing a single enemy when it means slowing yourself as well? Slowing yourself is incredibly bad for the same reason hasting yourself is incredibly good.

potion of bat-form: at least it is more widely useful than flight, and can still be used to get to loot vaults. Used to be a flight card effect.

Batform locks you out of several important things(casting, potions, evocables, AC, doors). Most characters would rather just have Flight.

scroll of abjuration: well, it's better than a silence scroll!

Not really. Abjuration is pretty skippable in the first place, and it's much more situational than Silence. And Silence scrolls are really, really good, since they give medium/heavy armor dudes limited access to a useful high level spell.

Imagine, in that situation, pushing for the current status quo: "Hey man, these rations of resistance? They're poorly designed. We should make them into potions, which would be somewhat more common and expire much faster. That would be better."

Rations of resistance would be less balanced than potions, simply because they wouldn't expire in a sane amount of time. The point of !resist(and other buffs) is that it's meant for one battle, not an entire floor. You wouldn't see as many people complaining about resist rations, since people like things that make the game easier, but they'd still be poorly designed.

[byrel]

The one of these I like is replacing flight with batform. Flight is awkwardly simple right now; bat-form is a much more interesting tradeoff. Though that infringes on vampires. Maybe wisp-form?

[The Ferret]

Interesting situational hex wand idea:

wand of... uh... mesmerization? captivation? enchantment? (mesmerization would be the ideal name, but it's already an effect and this one isn't precisely the same)

checks MR

if successful, the target creature is... mesmerized? captivated? enchanted?... and will always attempt to move into melee range on its turn and stay in melee range once there (this overrides batty movement and blinking, but not special movement toward the player i.e. boulder beetles)

a hex wand that is definitely very useful in some situations, but is not a win button like paralyze

maybe it should be in the lowest success rate category of wands so it requires early Evocations investment to reliably captivate orc priests and orc wizards, and doesn't trivialize later casters without heavy Evo training... or maybe it should just be relatively rare and in a lower charge bracket so you can't spam it. In theory it should be relevant the entire game.

list of presumed common targets:

orc priest, orc wizard, orc high priest, orc sorceror
centaur, yaktuar, centaur warrior, yaktuar captain
blink frog
harpy, unseen horror, fire bat, golden eye, thrashing horror, bat (lol)
deep elf foo, draconian foo
various demons and fiends
many uniques

[Pollen_Golem]

It is conceivable that someone died because they had a single action, and mistakenly used ?Fear

yeah and add to that the situation where someone dies because they mistakenly do not use ?Fear because monsters wouldn't resist but seem like they would. And conceivability is a big deal because that's what a player inevitably uses to make decisions especially in an emergency.

Your argument for most of these seems to be "people can use consumables to assist in tough battles, which is bad" or "there's more than one way to get an effect, which is bad", but those aren't very compelling arguments.

OMFG how wayward does one have to be to misread like that. All consumables can assist in tough battles and if that was bad I'd recommend removing all consumables. And I even praise having multiple pathways to getting the same effect, but it can be over-done which is why we don't have every spell in scroll/potion/wand form. It was so disheartening to see a reply this bad that I could not answer when I first saw it. It should suffice to say "re-read OP" but that might come off as inconsiderate and some people require more.

In what way are they misleading? Agility makes you more agile & Might makes you mightier, with all that implies.

Being more agile or being more mighty can imply any of a whole plethora of things, so you can't in all fairness suggest that might and agility unambiguously suggest something specific and proceed to fulfill that expectation. Might and agility are extremely rigidly defined status effects, and the numbers involved are fairly arbitrary.

ring & cloak require non-trivial skill investments

This part is actually not true, they can be used well without skill; evocation training very slowly improves evoked invis.

Because they're a limited resource that gives non-casters a decent ranged option.

There's already throwing and ranged weapons for non-felids. And since when is it automatically a good thing to have options of every kind available to you, even if they're limited? Are limits magical? Do limits magically make bad things good?

I'm not sure how your suggested replacements would fix your complaint... They're filling the same function(zap wand, do damage), just with a different flavor.

Here is how the function is different. Orb of electrocution has a huge area of effect and (I think) highly variable damage, and is an effect you can't control in other ways (disc, makhleb, ball lightning). Sticky Flame deals elemental damage to a single non-insubstantial target over time and makes them glow. Corrosive bolt reduces monster AC, thus debuffing them, and doesn't work on some monsters - admittedly bolt of draining does something similar, less dramatically, but it's also a spell while corrosive bolt is not. Such wands would tactically enrich e.g. a berserker's game, more than showering them with bolt wands. I did not mention this but these wands should be rarer than current attack wands. Not as rare as /hasting, but uncommon.

EDIT: again, imagine arguing that a crawl which has only wands of corrosion/OoE/SFR must get rid of them and replace them with draining/cold/fire/fball/lightning/etc.

Slowing and bat-form have been discussed upthread already, and most characters have little use for consumable flight that bat-form would not satisfy.

Abjuration is pretty skippable in the first place, and it's much more situational than Silence.

Yes, abjuration is more situational than silence, and that's what makes it better as a consumable! There are extreme moments where you really hanker for abjuration, even if subconsciously, because the threat is all due to summons. Sure, you just want to take out the summoner (if such exists because shadow traps death curses hell effects), but if the summoning becomes (or would become) overwhelming, that's a great opportunity for a consumable! It's archetypal for crying out loud.
Silence can be used to greatly mitigate the threat of a huge number of monsters. The scroll is strictly preventative. But the scroll is rare. There's not even enough to go around for the ancient liches usually. So whatever devices you must use when you don't read ?silence, you might as well use them instead of reading ?silence. As such, its most effective uses, like after getting teleported close to nasty elf spellcasters, feel hackish and should not be available... whereas if you happen to have the spell in that circumstance, it's like, great, whatever, lucky you that it is with a silencing character that you land in this really rare (far rarer than summon-swarm) perilous situation.
And the spell Silence is interesting because it means you have to make your character spell-compatible to cast Silence, but you also have to develop (usually melee) capacity to deal with being spell-less. There is no such trade-off with scrolls of silence.

Rations of resistance would be less balanced than potions, simply because they wouldn't expire in a sane amount of time.

Heh, equipment doesn't expire in a sane amount of time, in fact equipment doesn't expire at all! That doesn't make equipment less balanced than potions, whatever that might mean. So your comment here doesn't make sense to me, nor anyone else I suspect.

Rations may in fact become a more valuable item, even making the game easier overall, but having them would make for more interesting decisions. For example, you find an ice cave with a pretty good character but you have absolutely no cold resistance. You had lucked out earlier and found one ration of resistance, and it is really valuable. Do you eat it as you enter the ice cave? Or, if you do slime pits on a mediocre char, do you eat it when entering the first floor, or when get to the sixth floor?

The point of !resist(and other buffs) is that it's meant for one battle, not an entire floor

This problem can be fixed by making resist a ration and not a potion. This is not a problem for all other limited buffs because those do not infringe upon the realm of equipment/spells/mutations by providing resists. As I've already said, when gaining access to anything that can make the player stronger, he has to mentally process it somehow; there is a line between consumable buffs and resistances, and !resistance is the only resource in the game to have its feet on both sides. This is not good design, for such a rare consumable to mess with player reasoning to such an extent.

Your other post, by the way, is hilarious!

I don't see how [the case for removing cTele and -cTele] is "self-evident." Scrolls of blinking are good, and this is a problem because? They're a limited resource, especially early game, and very little of their use would change by making them semi-controlled other than removing a margin of safety against ranged attackers(if you blinked while using terrain well). Is there a reason to nerf teleport control as a whole beyond ninjaing in pan(which already got nerfed by having pan lords chase you if you don't kill them) and it being one of many solutions to the V5 ambush(which people will just replace with semi-controlled blinking away from the stairs)? If it's just those two places, can't it be more elegantly solved by making pan/V5 -ctele? I haven't seen people spam controlled teleports outside of those two areas and Hell 7s(where they save a walk back to the exit portal after grabbing the rune).

It must sound especially silly in hindsight.

[Pollen_Golem]

Mod edit: shifted to CYC, since this ends up discussing lots of separate proposals all at once. Feel free to split into individual, more focused threads (eg for potions, scrolls, wands).

Oh, and this - what, would a dozen or so threads be preferrable? Historically lots of GDD threads discuss lots of completely disconnected suggestions for improving crawl, straight from the OP, whereas here the focus is tightly centered on consumables, so I don't get it.

[archaeo]

I'm not the mod who moved it, but your OP was nearly 2,400 words; if it was an APA or MLA formatted paper, it would be 13 pages in length. Now, I'm the last person to criticize a long OP, but I think the other mod was correct in suggesting not a dozen threads, but three, for each subtype.

[Pollen_Golem]

Subtype like what, scrolls/potions/wands? There's not much reason to divide into those categories - that's rather arbitrary.

I'm splitting off the consumables that got no discussion past the first post.

[ontoclasm]

Don't make a single thread for discussing several unrelated topics. Such threads usually degenerate quickly into several discussions and are very hard to keep on-topic (since there are several topics). If you want to address a transverse topic (eg. documentation, clarity,...) while giving several unrelated mechanisms as examples, state clearly what the topic of the thread is (see above rule). A thread which degenerates in several unrelated discussions is hard to follow and moderate and will be Yiufed.

As for your suggestions, like 3/4 of them are just "if we changed this, X would happen. Let's do that!" or "This causes Y. That's bad!" without any justification. Why is it bad for people to have to remember to use consumables? Why is it better for berserk to always be either infinitely renewable or completely unavailable? Why is it bad that brilliance improves your spellcasting in several ways? How does Silence (a dual-school, level six spell) count as low-level? What makes paralysis "trickier" than confusion? Because Pollen Golem says so, I guess.

[duvessa]

How does Silence (a dual-school, level six spell) count as low-level?

he probably meant that silence sucks (because it does)

[CanOfWorms]

Silence is also level 5, unless it was bumped up in trunk.

[njvack]

I'm actually going to take this one step further and lock this thread -- I got a report on it and really, it's going to be awfully hard for constructive stuff to come out of this mess. To the OP: If you want to break this up into separate threads (there's no reason these need to be bundled) feel free to do so, either in CYC or GDD.

Also regarding that report: game design change ideas often get harsh feedback. (God knows mine have.) Don't take it personally, or get personal with other tavern-goers.