Bring back itemdest

[Sar]

Changing unequivocally bad potions into sometimes-not-bad potions means strengthening the player, as they get a few more options.

That would be a great reason to bring back itemdest.

[Lasty]

Item destruction wasn't removed because it was limiting player options; it was removed because it was failing to limit player options while also encouraging extremely tedious behavior.

[Sar]

A lot of solutions for that were suggested, but none of them were implemented. Also no, it was actually limiting the player, hence the cut to consumable spawn rates when it was removed.

Edit: anyway, this thread isn't about itemdest so let's not turn it into a thread about itemdest.

[Lasty]

My read on the situation is that the consumable spawn rates were cut because that was an effective way to do what itemdest never did: actually limit player consumables somewhat.

A bunch of alternate itemdest and soft-itemdest ideas were thrown around, but none of them appealed to any devteam members enough that they were implemented. That's not to say that no such proposal could ever be made, of course.

[Sar]

Itemdest very clearly did limit the player consumables. Like, yes, okay, you would just drop ench scrolls etc., but you wouldn't drop your scroll of blinking because you could've needed that, and then it could've been destroyed by an enemy. Consumables were cut to compensate for itemdest removal, though it ended up being more of a nerf to early game (itemdest was rare at first level of Dungeon) and insignificant in lategame, where you face lots of elemental attacks but your stacks of !hw and ?blinking are now completely safe.

[MainiacJoe]

But even if we were to increase consumables spawning on just the early floors to item-dest levels they would still less accessible than later because of the ID game, which itself is also a problem only in the early game.

[Sar]

That wasn't what I was talking about at all!

[Tiktacy]

Don't even JOKE about bringing back item destruction. I've seen plenty of things exaggerated by people in GDD, but I don't think its possible to undersell how horrible item destruction is.

I have literally had multiple minmay style nightmares of having my entire inventory of potions get destroyed because I forgot to set a stash. Imagine that sad sight, a grown man having a nightmare about sitting at his computer losing potions in a video game, that's how fucking awful item destruction is.

Or maybe I'm just that boring...

[adozu]

raise your hand if you ever started dropping your important scrolls after a mottled dragon ignited you

o/

sure, you would stash the strategical consumables and the "surplus" of tactical ones... but you would always have 1-2 blinking/teleport/fear/whatever (and potions ofc)

also you had a stash

#saynotoitemdest2016

[Sar]

I don't want to talk too much about it because there is literally no chance anything I say will actually influence anything, because I already did talk about it and because I am aware that nobody likes the idea of itemdest except for me and a few other people. Here's a thread where I voiced my position on it: https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13507&start=0. Anyway, I was just making an off-hand joke, not trying to start a campaign or something, that's it.

[duvessa]

A lot of solutions for that were suggested, but none of them were implemented.

But the best available solution was implemented: removing item destruction.

[Wahaha]

Has anyone ever suggested making scrolls and potions permanently undroppable in some way? I think that might work well.

by the way Rise up fellow item destruction supporters! We've been oppressed for too long. Now it is time to reclaim what we lost!

[ontoclasm]

by the way Rise up fellow item destruction supporters! We've been oppressed for too long. Now it is time to reclaim what we lost!

Don't you mean "lose what we reclaimed"

[dynast]

Has anyone ever suggested making scrolls and potions permanently undroppable in some way? I think that might work well.

What is gonna prevent you from just not picking them up?

But item destruction is still in the game. The most common forms are:

Natasha's extra lives that end up with her exploring most of the map before you do, therefore stealing your potions and possibly a wand.
Zot traps triggered by enemies emptying your wands.
Howler monkeys awakening jellies.
Lava, deep water.
More silly stuff i cannot think of.

[Wahaha]

What is gonna prevent you from just not picking them up?

Your desire to use consumables.

[amaril]

I kind of like the idea of fire attacks occasionally giving -Scroll and ice attacks giving -Potion (I'm sure I've seen this mentioned before), but I am unconvinced that the game needs any sort of further mechanical complication. If this were tied to resistances in some way it would at least make resistances more important--again though, I am unconvinced that this is a positive thing, just because ring swapping is so lame. I like the impact of elemental damage / resistances when you don't have access to all of them or when you have to make a gear choice that involves sacrificing a resistance--powerful characters with weaknesses are interesting. But when that 'weakness' is just a memory check--i.e. "remember to swap your rings when you see a frost giant"--it is 'uninteresting' in the way that "remember to cast phase shift prior to each fight" or, more specifically "remember to cast insulation when you see an eel/stop flying when you see a wind drake" is uninteresting.

Wahaha wrote:
Has anyone ever suggested making scrolls and potions permanently undroppable in some way? I think that might work well.

This is just horrible because of the way it interacts with autopickup/autotravel (which are really wonderful conveniences). Sure, remove the inventory restraints and make items undroppable, but first make sure that picking up an item has no consequences.

[Wahaha]

Wahaha wrote:
Has anyone ever suggested making scrolls and potions permanently undroppable in some way? I think that might work well.

Sure, remove the inventory restraints and make items undroppable, but first make sure that picking up an item has no consequences.

That was implied (only for scrolls and potions, not all items). Along with the usual package of making strategic scrolls and potions indestructible, possibly by making them a different item type.

To prevent "more scrolls -> more scrolls getting burned, therefore I will not pick up scrolls right away", each type of scroll would separately roll a chance to be burned. The amount of scrolls burned would not be influenced by the size of the scroll stack.
There's still an edge case where you have for example 0 or 1 scrolls of blinking, you see a scroll of blinking on the ground, and you're about to fight a fire monster, so you don't pick up the scroll of blinking in case it gets burned. This only works in the extremely short term because otherwise you're playing the game without scrolls of blinking in order to save a scroll of blinking, not smart.
To kill my own idea: a scroll of silence is something I would leave on the ground until it's needed to fight a unique.

[amaril]

a scroll of silence is something I would leave on the ground until it's needed to fight a unique.

Similarly, I would leave a ?recharging / enchant armour/ enchant weapon on the ground. If item destruction really is a desirable part of the game, it would make sense to implement a duvessa-style trap solution for consumables--you have unlimited inventory, cannot drop items, and you automatically pick up an item the moment it enters los.

[bcadren]

One of my first offline wins was back in the time of itemdest...it didn't use any potions past lair, except cure mut once...and didn't use any scrolls nearly at all, excluding ?Acquirement and ?Enchant Weapon when I first got them...got covered in sticky flame too much to keep any scrolls on me...and I...was using Ozo's Fridge so keeping potions on me was completely pointless...

[dynast]

Your desire to use consumables.

Thats a crawl myth right there.

[Sprucery]

I kind of like the idea of fire attacks occasionally giving -Scroll and ice attacks giving -Potion (I'm sure I've seen this mentioned before)

Yes it has been mentioned and I think it would be a good idea (and definitely without any connection to resistances).

[crate]

It's notable that -scroll and -potion are very much not item destruction. They work completely differently and serve completely different purposes.

[tabstorm]

If you want players to have less consumables one natural solution is to decrease the density of consumable spawns as a function of depth, so that at some point, almost all consumables will be found in vaults. This avoids the unpleasantness of item dest but makes the game a little less of a joke.

[Sprucery]

It's notable that -scroll and -potion are very much not item destruction. They work completely differently and serve completely different purposes.

Of course they are different but they can cause a similar situation as itemdest: you would like to read ?blinking or quaff !HW but you can't because you just got hit by a bolt of fire/cold.

They are like itemdest which always hits the scroll/potion you wanted to use, but is only temporary.

[ydeve]

Itemdestr using up some of your !/? isn't the same as blocking !/? usage. Itemdestr uses up some consumables, restricting usage in the long run, but it doesn't do anything here and now (unless you only have one copy). -!/-? blocks your usage here and now, but it doesn't affect your long-term usage.

It's like old Corr and new Corr. Old Corr would slowly make your equipment permanently worse, but new Corr temporarily gives you a debuff. The two effects are just different.

[crate]

As ydeve says the effects aren't actually similar, other than people want to attach them to particular damage types.

they can cause a similar situation as itemdest: you would like to read ?blinking or quaff !HW but you can't because you just got hit by a bolt of fire/cold.

This situation never happened to me, except in rare cases where it destroyed my final consumable (in the entire game) of a particular type. Being identical to 1% of the effect but completely different from 99% of the effect is not similar. Instead, the thing that is actually the same as item destruction is simply not generating the consumable in question in the first place, which is the current system.

Item destruction is functionally very similar to generating fewer consumables in the first place, except that item destruction tends to benefit already-strong characters and punish already-weak characters, since weak characters lose more items to item destruction for a few reasons. I will suggest that in fact this means that the current system is actually better than the old one, though this isn't really the place to argue about that. So, for an average character (and since preservation was such a huge effect and is binary, I'll assume "average character" does not have preservation), it's possible to make item destruction and reduced item generation pretty much indistinguishable to the player from an end-result standpoint.

Item destruction was also somewhat abusable. Blink scrolls are so much more valuable than any other tactical scroll, for instance, that realistically you should drop--or throw--them in any "safe" encounter involving fire that might destroy them (not all fire could destroy scrolls). This is behaviour the devs explicitly want to avoid. This was less of a big deal with potions because there are many potions with similar tactical value, but you'd still probably want to do the same thing.

Also, most players hated item destruction, so it's better to make fewer players mad by just destroying the items before the player ever sees them. This increases player enjoyment in general, which is obviously a good thing when it doesn't really come at a cost.

The arguments about "the player just gets too many consumables now" arise not from the removal of item destruction but from the tweaks (or lack thereof) to item generation that were intended to compensate for item destruction removal. I think it's pretty likely that in the current state of crawl you have more consumables on a given character than you would have in, say, 0.10 on that same character. But if you think that's a problem that's just an argument for adjusting item generation, not an argument for re-implementing item destruction. It's certainly possible to adjust item generation by depth, and to some degree this is already done (you cannot get artefacts on d:1, for instance). I make no claims about how easy it would be to make proper adjustments to the code, however.

---

If you want -scroll or -potion as effects, fine. They're not replacements for item destruction, but that doesn't mean they're automatically bad ideas to implement. -potion has been tried in the past (retch) and didn't work, though I would say that was probably more of a problem with that particular implementation than anything else.

[Sprucery]

If you want -scroll or -potion as effects, fine. They're not replacements for item destruction, but that doesn't mean they're automatically bad ideas to implement.

Yeah, I should have mentioned that the situation I described is in my opinion the good and interesting part of item destruction, even if it was a rare case. That's why I think it would be a good replacement for item destruction. The other parts of item destruction (stashing, throwing stuff etc.) was not fun or interesting imo.

(edit: If something is described as "replacement for item destruction" I don't think it should be "similar to item destruction", because then what's the point?)

[Jeremiah]

Something about itemdest that is often ignored in this kind of discussion is that it meant that there were some areas of the game where you basically had to go without consumables of a particular type because they were almost guaranteed to be destroyed - eg scrolls in Gehenna and potions in Ice Caves.

I guess this could be replicated by making these areas -scroll or -potion, but overall I agree that removing itemdest was the best solution.

[ZipZipskins]

what it comes down to for me is that when I have potions and scrolls in my inventory, I own them, and something comes along and erases those potions or scrolls, that feels shitty. way shittier than if I never had them. this is of course what crate is talking about- if I have to call in sick and don't make my paltry wage, that kinda blows, but if someone beats me up and steals my wallet with $10 inside, that's much more "the worst"

[dowan]

When itemdest was in the game I hated it. When itemdest was removed I was very happy. Hooray, no more stashes for me!

#stashessuck hashtagitemdestistheworst harshbagSaristhedevilfortryingtobringitback cashgrabGivemeallyourmoney