Replacing bad potions with lignification-like potions

[bcadren]

Now that evaporation is no longer a thing...what if all bad pots were replaced like this; some effect that has a risk/reward instead of just...bad potion. I mean there's no real need for (Degeneration, Decay, (Strong) Poison, etc.) when their only effect is to make blind quaffing more annoying.

[Skrybe]

Now that evaporation is no longer a thing...what if all bad pots were replaced like this; some effect that has a risk/reward instead of just...bad potion.

Strongly in agreement with this.

[reaver]

Now that evaporation is no longer a thing...what if all bad pots were replaced like this; some effect that has a risk/reward instead of just...bad potion.

Strongly in agreement with this.

So are the developers. If you code up 4-5 interesting risk/reward potions which do not significantly affect game balance I'm sure they would be accepted. (!fungus and other form potions were explicitly rejected)

[Hopeless]

I won't code them but here are a couple of ideas:

Oil of Sharpening: (targets weapons)
xx% to add +1/+1 to your current weapon's enchantment for a duration. xx% to dull it instead (-1/-1)

Potion of Food Preservation
xx% to add to a food stack's duration before rotting (or alternatively cause it to be permanent if that isn't too op). xx% chance to fail and instead rot the food immediately.

Hook of Grabbing (tool)
Apportation attempt on an item. On a miss it pushes the item in the opposite direction 1 tile.

Potion of Clarity
On a successful quaff it may prevent confusion, paralysis, etc for a duration. On a fail it may cause those effects.
*********************


OK so ==edit== above as follows:
Hopefully slightly more in-tune ideas
Oil of Sharpening: X duration = +1/+1 to your weapon's enchantment and when it wears off -1/-1 for Y turns.
Potion of Hunger: You immediately gain a level of hunger and multiply all food/blood effects x2 for 5 turns. (Won't have any effect at all if you are starving or bloodless)
Hook of Grabbing: 1x use apportation. (evocation) (no drawback but better evocation skill helps it pull the item closer to you.)
Potion of Clarity (prevents not cures) confusion, paralysis, etc for X turns. When it wears off user gains Slow for Y turns.

Some more ideas:
Elixir of Aqualung (no effect on Grey Draconians or Merfolk) allows you to enter deep water tiles (with all the associated penalties, to be expected). When it expires you will drown if you are still deep water. ==Scratch this== same as flight. :/ Bad idea.


Potion of Contingency: gives you the contingency status. When you take damage that would be lethal you lose this status and all but 1 hp and gain regeneration, and haste (Chei won't like this) and mr++ for 5 turns. At the end of that 5 turns if your hp are less than the damage that was dealt when this was triggered you die.

Location/Tile
Pedestal of the Lost & Found: Stepping on this (deliberately) will randomly transport an item from the level to your feet and send one of your non-equipped items to where that item was.

Slippers of Spider Climb, slows your movement by 1 aut and allows you to cling to walls.

Ring of Hedge Wizardry: Lowers the spell fail of low level spells (3 or <) and also lowers their spell power.

[sgrunt]

I don't think we're looking for an either/or; we want ideas that have good and bad effects at the same time.

[bcadren]

Hopeless...you can't really fail a potion. The risk/reward is more about something positive along with something negative. Here are a few thoughts of mine:

[Replaces Poison] Potion of Acid - Direct damage to you + Oklob's B.Vitriol (5 charges; 2000 turns).
[Replaces Strong Poison] Potion of Death - Your HP is reduced to 1. You are given death's door and death channel status for 100-200 turns.
[Replaces Paralysis] Potion of Freezing - You take a small amount of cold damage. You are slowed, surrounded in a Ring of Freezing Clouds, get rF--, rC+++ and get an Ice Enhancer.
[Replaces Decay] Potion of Revive - Perma-Rots 1/16th of your current max HP. Heals you completely. (!Borg's basically, the PermaRot is more than the spell though)
[Replaces Degeneration] Potion of Divinity - You are given a huge stat-boost (close to Demigod levels); but it only lasts for 100-200 turns and after you get Stat Rot.
[Replaces Confusion] Potion of Instability - You get severe blinkitis and confusion and a huge boost to EV. Your UC is distortion branded. All effects blocked by Stasis. Confusion NOT blocked by clarity.

Other thoughts:
Potion of Elemental - You get an enhancer and immunity for (your highest elemental spell school) and may draw MP from your HP. But, you can't heal (at all) until the effect wears off.
Potion of Archmage - (opposite of berserk) Brilliance + MP Boost/MP Regen + Haste. But, you can't do anything except cast spells and eat food. Duration extended on Conjurations and Summoning kills. Causes Exhaustion after.
Potion of Stasis - Grants Stasis for 50-100 turns.
Potion of Alcohol? [Honestly the effect I thought of was basically Berserk + Confusion without the Exhaustion later; but...I don't think anyone would use it and it's too similar to Berserk at that point.]

Also a few Scroll ideas:
Scroll of Sorrow - A profound sadness consumes everything. You (and everything else) is slowed. Rain Clouds spawn for your entire LoS. Your slowing is resistible by Stasis.
Scroll of Xom - Makes Xom act now. (Even if you are of a different god and have never seen his altar.)

[NessOnett]

I don't think we're looking for an either/or; we want ideas that have good and bad effects at the same time.

So like potion of temporary stasis? Can't be paralyzed, but can't blink away either.
Potion of wild magic. Increased spell power, with increased chances of failure.

Plenty of things already exist in the game that could be adapted(lignification itself seems to be a take on statue form). But I'm sure more creative ones could be generated if the idea of adaptation is unimpressive.

[GlassGo]

[Replaces Strong Poison] Potion of Death - Your HP is reduced to 1. You are given death's door and death channel status for 100-200 turns.

Looks like end-game unique-fight potion.

[reaver]

Plenty of things already exist in the game that could be adapted(lignification itself seems to be a take on statue form).

I'm pretty sure lignification is a take on treeform.

(Treefrom was already in the game as something enemies could polymorph you into, it received buffs when lignification was added though.)

But I'm sure more creative ones could be generated if the idea of adaptation is unimpressive.

The problem with adapting things which are already in the game is that those things are already in the game. !stasis steps on the toes of =stasis, both items being acceptable solutions to many situations

Example: You have a slowing monster completely alone with no other monster in sight. You are either not wearing an amulet or wearing one which has currently irrelevant effects. You could either quaff the potion or wear the amulet and it wouldn't matter.

Maybe an intrinsic creates different decisions when moved to a enchantment, in which cause adaption would be fine, probably even better than starting from scratch.

Example: a !faith which increased piety gain for a period of time would be interesting. For example, a Dith worshipper would want to drink it just before a volcano.

(Note !faith would actually be awful because it would encourage luring monsters to some safe room so you could kill them all quickly in the time the potion has it's effect. This is why Faith is on a strategic item.)

[duvessa]

I'd prefer just getting rid of the potions, since Crawl has had an awful lot of item creep, and making slowing/poison/etc distinct actually makes that worse (since there are more effects players actually have to learn about).

[Klown]

Lignification > Might

[NessOnett]

The problem with adapting things which are already in the game is that those things are already in the game. !stasis steps on the toes of =stasis, both items being acceptable solutions to many situations

The problem with that logic is that adaptation already heavily exists in the game. A potion of heal wounds and a wand of heal wounds will have an overlap in usability 99% of the time(barring mummies and a few other things).

In fact most potions and scrolls are just one-time uses of effects that exist elsewhere in the game(usually in spell or ring form). Blinking, Fear, Fog, Silence, Teleportation, Berserk Rage, Flight, Invisibility, Speed, etc.

[Skrybe]

I've had an idea for a while for a buff that scales with poison severity. Something like, you quaff the potion and get severely poisoned, and the buff is applied. As your level of poison drops, so does the effectiveness of the buff. Curing the poison removes the buff immediately. The problem is, I can't think of an appropriate buff. Making it a kind of glass cannon effect with an offensive buff feels appropriate, but ideally it would be something that would apply to most builds. A brilliance-type effect would be useless to berserkers, and something like Might would be unfair to casters.

Also, I think !Decay can be justifiably removed. The effect is small enough to be largely negligible, they're so incredibly rare to find on the floor that it's entirely possible to win a 3 rune game without even seeing one, and with Fulsome Distillation gone, there aren't any effects left that intentionally generate them.

[duvessa]

The problem with adapting things which are already in the game is that those things are already in the game. !stasis steps on the toes of =stasis, both items being acceptable solutions to many situations

The problem with that logic is that adaptation already heavily exists in the game. A potion of heal wounds and a wand of heal wounds will have an overlap in usability 99% of the time(barring mummies and a few other things).

In fact most potions and scrolls are just one-time uses of effects that exist elsewhere in the game(usually in spell or ring form). Blinking, Fear, Fog, Silence, Teleportation, Berserk Rage, Flight, Invisibility, Speed, etc.

"The game already has something bad" isn't a good reason to add more bad things.

[NessOnett]

The problem with adapting things which are already in the game is that those things are already in the game. !stasis steps on the toes of =stasis, both items being acceptable solutions to many situations

The problem with that logic is that adaptation already heavily exists in the game. A potion of heal wounds and a wand of heal wounds will have an overlap in usability 99% of the time(barring mummies and a few other things).

In fact most potions and scrolls are just one-time uses of effects that exist elsewhere in the game(usually in spell or ring form). Blinking, Fear, Fog, Silence, Teleportation, Berserk Rage, Flight, Invisibility, Speed, etc.

"The game already has something bad" isn't a good reason to add more bad things.

So your argument is that the concept of scrolls and potions as a whole is "bad" since the vast majority are in fact single-uses of things that exist elsewhere? I'm not sure many people would share that view with you.

But it goes beyond that. You could take most mechanics in this game, like say...curse. And find a dozen different ways that things get cursed. Overlap and redundancy exists in this game in spades, it was designed that way(largely to offset the randomly generated nature of the genre). To say that redundant effects are bad...is basically saying that the game is bad.

[and into]

Easy change would be potion of poison gives olgreb's toxic radiance. Potion of strong poison causes you to continuously emit poison clouds all around you for a period of time. (Or just keep one of those effects and merge the two potions into one.) ... Though potentially there is a bad interaction with Beogh to be worried about here.

Potion of decay/degeneration/paralysis should probably just go. If you want, throwing in a "potion of spontaneous combustion" that gave a buffed ring of flames effect, including the rC-, but without the fire enhancer. (Same problem with Beogh though. Might be weird to justify in terms of flavor, but you could just have those potions auto-ID for Beoghites.)

[Sandman25]

If we remove all bad potions, optimal behavior will be to quaff unknown potions during fights. Do we really want to encourage it?

[and into]

If we remove all old potions, optimal behavior will be to quaff unknown potions during fights. Do we really want to encourage it?

It would not be optimal to do that, and in fact it would be highly unreasonable. Lignification can kill you in the wrong situation anyway and !mutation would still exist. Wasting !magic, !resistance, etc. in situations where they aren't useful is also bad enough that you would only quaff ID when in a desperate situation. Which is exactly what you do now, anyway, just there is a higher chance of it going awry because !paralysis and the like still exist.

But fine if it is something you really want to keep in check via bad potions, just leave in !confusion. That can also be the token "funny" bad potion that is used in certain vaults and occurs frequently in Ossuaries.

[TeshiAlair]

I have a deep love of conditional items (immolation being my favorite scroll, and getting weirdly happy every time I accidentally treeform), and I think potions are a great space to do it design wise.

Some ideas:

Wild Magic potion that makes spells cost one more
Potion of impitis
Potion of Gore- All attacks (yours and enemies') cause bleeding.

[Klown]

Paralysis -> Potion of Shafting: Instantly shafts you 1-3 floors down.
Confusion -> Potion of Shadows: Temporarily drops your LOS to 1.
Decay -> Potion of the Wizard: Temporarily takes away 20 from your max HP and adds 20 INT.
Degeneration -> Potion of Demonic Mutation: Tries giving you a demonspawn mutation, then hits you with holy word, damaging you as if you were a demon.

[Bloax]

Replace paralysis with fungus form.

[duvessa]

So your argument is that the concept of scrolls and potions as a whole is "bad" since the vast majority are in fact single-uses of things that exist elsewhere? I'm not sure many people would share that view with you.

But it goes beyond that. You could take most mechanics in this game, like say...curse. And find a dozen different ways that things get cursed. Overlap and redundancy exists in this game in spades, it was designed that way(largely to offset the randomly generated nature of the genre). To say that redundant effects are bad...is basically saying that the game is bad.

Yes, I do think redundancy in games is bad, and that Crawl's array of similar items/spells/species/backgrounds is bad. This is not really an uncommon viewpoint - the games that are most lauded for their design tend to have very compact rules (Go, for example). Obviously it is impractical to make Crawl's design anywhere near that neat, but it can certainly still be made better.

As for your last sentence, what the fuck? Let's say I dislike stomach acid. Ellen Page probably has stomach acid inside of her. Does that mean I dislike Ellen Page?

[TeshiAlair]

I mean, the beautiful thing about crawl is that it is a game of choices, tempered by chance, and not a random game with some meaningful choices. Currently, potions are almost entirely binary good or bad. I think that making them solely good makes them even less interesting than they are now, but making what potion you pick in a bad situation more meaningful is very beneficial. At least for me, which admittedly isn't saying much, my combat potion choice is almost algorithmic. Is this a tough fight where I need haymakers? Might. Tough fight against bees? Agility. Fight where I need to escape? Haste/invis. Fight where I need to survive? HW.

I feel like scrolls are in a healthier place in some ways in that Fear, Blink, Tele all have valid reasons for any kind of bad situation, Vuln, Silence, Immolation are all interesting risk/reward choices, and scrolls like amnesia just work well as scrolls, period.

Though, stuff like Noise and Random Uselessness should be flat out removed or tweaked, and Holy Word and Summoning either made common enough to be interesting or removed.

[cerebovssquire]

I mean, the beautiful thing about crawl is that it is a game of choices, tempered by chance, and not a random game with some meaningful choices. Currently, potions are almost entirely binary good or bad. I think that making them solely good makes them even less interesting than they are now, but making what potion you pick in a bad situation more meaningful is very beneficial. At least for me, which admittedly isn't saying much, my combat potion choice is almost algorithmic. Is this a tough fight where I need haymakers? Might. Tough fight against bees? Agility. Fight where I need to escape? Haste/invis. Fight where I need to survive? HW.

Using a potion is a bad thing because you won't have the potion for later. You're presenting this as a simple choice where the consideration actually is an "what is the chance that I will die in this fight if I save the potion, compared to the chance that I will die later on because I don't have the potion", which is one of the more complicated decisions in crawl.

Removing bad potions has absolutely no impact on how you use potions - I guess you could consider lignification to be an exception to this. It only affects what potions you find, and that can be adjusted by potion spawn rates rather than adding useless items.

"Lignification-like potions" would have to be a lot better than lignification - at least situationally - to have an impact on most games. Lignification is irrelevant for most games and as such clutters the game up like completely bad potions, just not to the same extent. ?silence and ?immolation are examples that are better designed imo.

[TeshiAlair]

I agree that Lig should be buffed to make it interesting, but it is a step in the right direction over purely negative potions, or a world with only positive potions.

[Bart]

I don't think we're looking for an either/or; we want ideas that have good and bad effects at the same time.

Maybe some of these proposals would work then?
- potion of decay: causes decay as it used to do, but also grants temporary rN+(+)(+), possibly torment resist (ghoulish potion)
- potion of confusion --> an ale: confuses for a short period, but for a longer time grants also resistance to fear and DD's damage shrug (drunkards just ignore pain).
- potion of paralyze --> potion of healthy dreams. Character falls into deep sleep counting as para for the first two-three turns, being just sleep afterwards. Grants temporary troll regeneration.
- potion of strong poison --> potion of acid: strongly poisons, grants monster detection and scrying for a short period of time. You might yell occasionally, waking nearby monsters.
- potion of poison --> serum: mildly poisons, grants immunity to further poison. Curing does not remove poisoned status, but only restores damaged HPs.

The biggest disadvantage of having dual-effect potions is that since they could be useful, people would like to keep them, causing even more pain with inventory management. I already want to keep most of good potions all the time with myself and having e.g. three more types to carry would be just plain horror.

[TeshiAlair]

I think if you took out a potion or two and "collapsed" together some potions (aka, made some of the more boring ones like might, brilliance, and agility into double ended) you'd even out pretty well.

[Sandman25]

If I didn't know about interface issues, I would suggest to replace all good potions with double duty potions. For example, potion which gives either might or agility depending on player choice. It would slightly help with inventory management and would add some interesting choice. Do I need haste or heal wounds from the potion? Do I need invisibility or berserk?

[cerebovssquire]

- potion of decay: causes decay as it used to do, but also grants temporary rN+(+)(+), possibly torment resist (ghoulish potion)
- potion of confusion --> an ale: confuses for a short period, but for a longer time grants also resistance to fear and DD's damage shrug (drunkards just ignore pain).
- potion of paralyze --> potion of healthy dreams. Character falls into deep sleep counting as para for the first two-three turns, being just sleep afterwards. Grants temporary troll regeneration.
- potion of strong poison --> potion of acid: strongly poisons, grants monster detection and scrying for a short period of time. You might yell occasionally, waking nearby monsters.
- potion of poison --> serum: mildly poisons, grants immunity to further poison. Curing does not remove poisoned status, but only restores damaged HPs.

None of these potions do much outside of very specific situations, with the exception of the ghoulish potion which would be useful in many situations in extended. The ghoulish potion would clutter up your inventory before extended, and the other potions would do that all the time. None of these items have an impact on the game close to potions like !hw, !curing, !might or !speed - or even the less useful ones - thus they mostly just add inventory management. Potion of healthy dreams, for instance - regeneration isn't particularily strong, especially if you can only use it in situations where you can safely heal up. It is, essentially, the potion of take a few turns less pressing 5 in a safe place.

Depending on how much damage shaving the ale gives, it might be a useful item, but how does resistance to fear and confusion make it better designed? The first is gimmicky and the second doesn't have much of an effect either, given that you just quaff !curing for it to go away. I think it would be more elegantly designed as a simple potion of damage shaving. (The flavour is strange as well, since you feel pain less when you're drunk but the injuries are the same, but that's tangential)

[Klown]

Paralysis -> Potion of Shafting: Instantly shafts you 1-3 floors down.
Confusion -> Potion of Shadows: Temporarily drops your LOS to 1.
Decay -> Potion of the Wizard: Temporarily takes away 20 from your max HP and adds 20 INT.
Degeneration -> Potion of Demonic Mutation: Tries giving you a demonspawn mutation, then hits you with holy word, damaging you as if you were a demon.

[Viashino_wizard]

Paralysis -> Potion of Shafting: Instantly shafts you 1-3 floors down.
Confusion -> Potion of Shadows: Temporarily drops your LOS to 1.
Decay -> Potion of the Wizard: Temporarily takes away 20 from your max HP and adds 20 INT.
Degeneration -> Potion of Demonic Mutation: Tries giving you a demonspawn mutation, then hits you with holy word, damaging you as if you were a demon.

Potion of shadows is interesting but there's pretty much no downside to having a reduced LOS for most character. Shafting would make more sense as a Scroll. The other two are terrible.