reform ?acquirement
Posted: Thursday, 9th June 2016, 00:12
Acquirement is going through a lot of discussion and changes lately. I'd like to look at its basic form instead of the details. It has issues.
Acquirement is pretty deep. It weird and spoilery, influenced by a whole host of things, many (all?) of which are completely non-obvious. But acquirement scrolls are rare and very random, so trial and error is unlikely to give a good picture of the usefulness of different acquirement categories. Even if you have access to all acquirement-related information, it takes some brainwork to process, but it is not very fun because acquirement is just guided by arbitrary hidden parameters, knowledge of which is useless whenever you're not reading a scroll of acquirement.
On the other hand, once you figure all that out, acquirement is quite shallow, as duvessa recently showed by making an acquirement flowchart.
As a result, the process of acquiring actually isn't very fun. You know your choices before you read the scroll - even before finding the scroll. Then once you acquire the item, it's not much different from finding it on the floor.
Note that unbalanced acquirement categories (e.g. jewellery acquirement being rather poor) is not part of the problems described above, so "making player choices more even" is not exactly a solution, although it does improve acquirement.
Proposal that hopefully "solves" acquirement:
when you read a scroll of acquirement,
1. the game randomly chooses 3 different, valid acquirement categories
2. the game generates an item for each of the 3 chosen acquirement categories
3. the game offers you to select 1 item with the [a]/[b]/[c]-type prompt
4. if acquirement thus offers you an unrand, but you don't take it, it can still be generated later
5. it's up to discussion whether the items should be identified (use coinflip()?)
Acquirement is pretty deep. It weird and spoilery, influenced by a whole host of things, many (all?) of which are completely non-obvious. But acquirement scrolls are rare and very random, so trial and error is unlikely to give a good picture of the usefulness of different acquirement categories. Even if you have access to all acquirement-related information, it takes some brainwork to process, but it is not very fun because acquirement is just guided by arbitrary hidden parameters, knowledge of which is useless whenever you're not reading a scroll of acquirement.
On the other hand, once you figure all that out, acquirement is quite shallow, as duvessa recently showed by making an acquirement flowchart.
As a result, the process of acquiring actually isn't very fun. You know your choices before you read the scroll - even before finding the scroll. Then once you acquire the item, it's not much different from finding it on the floor.
Note that unbalanced acquirement categories (e.g. jewellery acquirement being rather poor) is not part of the problems described above, so "making player choices more even" is not exactly a solution, although it does improve acquirement.
Proposal that hopefully "solves" acquirement:
when you read a scroll of acquirement,
1. the game randomly chooses 3 different, valid acquirement categories
2. the game generates an item for each of the 3 chosen acquirement categories
3. the game offers you to select 1 item with the [a]/[b]/[c]-type prompt
4. if acquirement thus offers you an unrand, but you don't take it, it can still be generated later
5. it's up to discussion whether the items should be identified (use coinflip()?)