archaeo wrote:What's interesting about either of those things, Siegurt? The former is a situation you can only get in if you purposefully play suboptimally (and "don't wield unidentified weapons" is hardly some Hypothetically Optimal Player behavior), while the latter is literally just "pick a card" (or "make a spoiler-informd guess at the right card based on your metagame knowledge") in a game with permadeath. Neither jives with the game's design philosophy.
In the former case, it was a "I just killed a bunch of kobolds, one of which had a blowgun" which I *thought* had been unwielded (It looked to me like all the kobolds attacked me in melee), but I was playing too fast and loose and didn't notice that it wasn't actually marked as 'uncursed'.
What was interesting about it was being stuck with a -2 blowgun for a long time and figuring out how to survive long enough to find a remove curse scroll (which I did, much, much later) there were a number of challenges in that game that wouldn't have occurred otherwise. Removing that possibility from the game entirely removes a situation that *when it comes up* is interesting (and yes, a hypothetically optimal player would never get into that situation) I would find it more interesting to find ways to make the possibility occur (infrequently) even in hypothetically optimal games.
The latter is interesting because while I can make some educated guesses about what I might have (and have a better than 50-50 chance of getting it right) I don't *know* and drinking an unidentified potion can have unintended consequences, leading me to play games I wouldn't otherwise play (I would never drink an identified potion of mutation, for example) and there are a number of consumables that can get me out of trouble in interesting ways (for example I read-id'd a summon scroll, lived through a turn, and swapped with a summon critter to block a hit that might have killed me, whereas if everything was Id'd I probably would've used a more certain blink scroll, and had a less interesting result to the combat)
In short I find it 'interesting' when something that you didn't plan for, and didn't expect, and wouldn't have take an action that resulted in you being in that situation if you'd known about it, you would never have gotten yourself into intentionally, provokes you to play a game that's got a different set of challenges than those you'd face in a typical game where you know about and control every variable.