Remove these

[papilio]

Remove identification
Remove curse

Remove scroll of identify
Remove scroll of remove curse
Remove scroll of random uselessness
Remove scroll of noise
Remove potion of degeneration
Remove ring of loudness
Remove ring of teleportation
Remove minus enchantment
Remove negative effects in randarts

[MainiacJoe]

IN general, sure. But negative effects on randarts are an effective way to balance them and create interesting choices. I'd rather have the possibility of artifacts that are really good and have some drawbacks, than a lot of mediocre artifacts. If artifacts can only receive attributes with positive quality values, then the really good attributes will be too rare I'm afraid.

[VeryAngryFelid]

And then next step - don't generate items which are worse than what you have seen so far? Because what's the point?

[papilio]

Then we could leave out only the last term (randart negative options) to don't make game broken

[4Hooves2Appendages]

And then next step - don't generate items which are worse than what you have seen so far? Because what's the point?

I'd be in favour of not generating duplicates or inferior items, but there are some issues.

If I have a +9 DTrident of Draining, I might like to find a +8 DTrident of Draining, if I have a brand weapon scroll.

[watertreatmentRL]

There is a version of crawl that has already done all these removals, namely hellcrawl. TAke a look y'all: gnollcrawl.tk

edit: okay, some of the negative enchantment stuff is still in there... I would like to hear why the OP finds this a crucial issue.

[Majang]

Generally I have no problems with all of these things. But I do groan if the first weapon I pick up in the game is a -3 club or some such, and then I don't get a scroll of remove curse for four levels... That stuff seems to happen to me every third game, and I wish there were some mechanics that would prevent that. Like a guaranteed-no-curse policy on level-1 drops.

[duvessa]

More effects on randarts = more swapping = bad, imo

[watertreatmentRL]

Agree there, but from that perspective positive effects are an even bigger and more prevalent issue. I would like to see some kind of artifact reform but I don't have a lot of concrete ideas about that right now, outside of removing resistances, stats, etc. from weapons.

[Plantissue]

Personally, I would quite like to see curses removed on the plain weapons and armour.

[duvessa]

Agree there, but from that perspective positive effects are an even bigger and more prevalent issue.

They are an issue, but I don't think they're bigger. Compare a ring of {Slay+6 rC-} to a ring of {Slay+4 rC+}. The former ring, you'll wear most of the time but take it off every time a cold-using monster gets near. The latter ring isn't stronger (I'd argue it's weaker), but you'll leave it on constantly instead of swapping it.

Unless you want randarts to be worse than plain +0 base items, you can reach a target power level for randarts without adding negative properties. So adding negative properties means you have more properties, total, to get the same power level. Some people like this, the whole "transforming your character" thing, but I don't because I don't like equipment swapping or lengthy descriptions.
Indeed, the "randart reform" that increased the incidence of negative properties also greatly increased the overall power level of randarts. So clearly the objective of adding more negative properties was not to nerf randarts.

As far as comprehensive reform, I have my doubts as to the ability of randomly-chosen properties to create interesting decisions. Statistically, it's vanishingly unlikely that any two random items will be similar in power. When is the last time you had trouble deciding which aux armour to wear? We can't even manage to make most of the non-randart items difficult to decide between; there are no characters for which gloves of strength and gloves of dexterity are equally valuable. Similarly, while you might have trouble deciding which weapon skill to train or whether you should invest in getting spells castable in heavy armour, at any particular moment it's clear which of your weapons does the most damage and it's clear which one of your body armours is the best to wear at that moment.
The antimagic and vampiric brands do make weapon selection more interesting in the rare event that they appear on relevant weapons, but that's about it.
Randarts exist more as an oddity or a psychological carrot, not something that adds meaningful depth.

[MainiacJoe]

When is the last time you had trouble deciding which aux armour to wear?

Well TBH it happened a lot when I was a new player, and that was recent enough ago that I remember that exploring what the game had to offer and encountering new monsters and items was fun. So I think that variety for its own sake is defensible, as long as it doesn't introduce annoying tedium or win-button brokenness.

As an example of this, just this past week I wear-ID'd the Robe of Misfortune for the first time ever. That set the character back, but it didn't annoy me. It was an avoidable mistake, it's a unique item, and it did make that particular run memorable. On the other hand, cursed non-glowing weapons on D:1 just suck and there's no good reason for them.

[stoneychips]

Most of this stuff doesn't bother me very much generally. However, I might not mind seeing some of it go either.

I'm undecided on the whole role cursed items play in the game honestly. It seems like for me somehow they either have a pretty minimal impact (-1 or -2 items you could at least use half decently for a couple levels) or terribly severe impact (-3 curses on D:1, cursed items on classes that are really better off switching like early missile users, cursed items on mages that didn't start with anything substantial and really needed something non-handicapping when they ran out of MP). The slight reduction in frequency of Remove Curse scrolls early on -- there was one, or else that's the trend of my last several games I believe -- makes the severe cases fairly awful. On the other hand, if you find Remove Curse super frequently, then the whole business starts to feel silly right out of the gate. I'm not sure what I'd do with it all at this point, honestly. It also feels like penalizing players for using varied types of convenience pickup weapons early in the game, when doing so is otherwise relatively helpful for survival in quite a few situations. I can think of flavor reasons for there to be some cursed items on D:1 or certainly by D:2-D:3, but I don't really enjoy the process of basically only having Remove scrolls to solve the severe cases with. It was somewhat more reasonable when Enchant Weapon functioned as remove curse too, imo.

As far as resistances, I think they play too heavy a role in the whole game. You can have pretty solid tactics and get hammered suddenly because you lacked a single one, or weren't paying attention to switch items at just the right time. So personally, I'd like some reduction in the whopping power of at least some of the damage sources where resistances are checked. If it were balanced favorably, perhaps then there would be less need for oodles of weapons with resistance brands and all the switching and storing in pack that goes with that. Does the game have enough other ways to challenge players tactically, even if players retain several different offense brands and less frequent or no resistance brands? Can the floors be interesting enough, often enough without constantly testing resistances as a major way of killing me? I don't know; I'd like to think so and I suspect more people who play only 3-5 runes might say yes. Probably people who know all the extended tricks would say no. (I tend to think it's time for Crawl to get some new Extended content for the pack of restless veterans who it seems keep suggesting massive overhauls to the early Dungeon too.)

I do sometimes get tired of the game generating endless duplicates (hmm, particularly Oka giving lower enchantment gifts of things otherwise identical to previous ones) and to a lesser extent, generating lots of items that have no apparent use for my class/background/stats. While it wouldn't be super realistic to remove all of these (and it would also shut down some of the community "reporting" fun that goes with noticing stuff you've seen even while being unable to use it), it might be interesting enough to try a fork that did and see how it felt for flow. Or there might be some middle ground where the number of duplicate/similar items would be more limited. I'd be tempted to both limit replication and ask for some new classes/abilities for items to fill the void, even. But I suppose people might go for just a "less redundant/less often useless stockpile" even without adding more positive variations.

[watertreatmentRL]

@duvessa: I take your point. My impression remembering recent games is that I more often carry middling rings with two or three resistances and marginal or negative stat bonuses as swaps than swap around a good artifact with a bad property. The latter situation strikes me as kind of uncommon, though I agree that when it comes up it creates a greater swapping incentive. The middling artifact rings are probably no worse than ordinary resistance rings. On some level the real problem is resistances themselves.

re: Randarts, that's about where I'm at.

[Shard1697]

WRT resists, I would rather that they scaled 33%-66%-100% to be more consistent and easily understandable from pip to pip, or 30%-60%-90% if immunity should not be possible.

Aside from that I don't have strong feelings about them. I think they're never required, but that's fine.

[luckless]

Randarts exist more as an oddity or a psychological carrot, not something that adds meaningful depth.

Honestly, I can't think of a single computer RPG in the history of the medium whose appeal was both (a) designed to support an indefinite number of playthroughs (and hence didn't mainly consist in narrative/discovery elements) and (b) wasn't based overwhelmingly on giving the player psychological carrots over meaningful depth.

I doubt this is an accident; I suspect it's a basic constraint on any game that's easy enough to constitute a form of relaxation. Past a certain point, if you're looking for meaningful depth as opposed to just a nice dopamine delivery system you have to do actually hard stuff, like chess or math or poetry or whatever.

So, while maximizing meaningful depth in Crawl is obviously a worthy aspiration, the fact that randarts mainly exist as psychological carrots probably isn't a bad thing in the context.

[stoneychips]

Randarts exist more as an oddity or a psychological carrot, not something that adds meaningful depth.

Honestly, I can't think of a single computer RPG in the history of the medium whose appeal was both (a) designed to support an indefinite number of playthroughs (and hence didn't mainly consist in narrative/discovery elements) and (b) wasn't based overwhelmingly on giving the player psychological carrots over meaningful depth.

I don't dispute that there are psychological carrots. I'm not sure i buy the carrots v. depth claim as such, though. Or at least, I think it could be based on arbitrary standards for deciding which consitutes each and why they should have to be mutually exclusive.

People love to tell stories. Some say that doing new things with more varied stuff/situations is meaningful. Some say that doing varied things with the same stuff is meaningful. Who's to say, really?

Personally, I think the more you celebrate chess as an absolute ideal and some reason to drastically cut content from Crawl, well the closer you should be to playing chess instead of Crawl to begin with. I realize there is a lot of debate about what would be "drastic," and you may feel this simply supports your point that Crawl has a bunch of fluff that doesn't take any serious thought. Perhaps I'm just a ditz, but it seems to have enough complexity to keep me busy dying for years on end in all these supposedly 'meaningless' pursuits created with so many combinations of varied gear and monsters/positions.

It's certainly slammed me plenty of times for doing pick-up things to hack the early levels rather than following suggested "expert" tracks to prepare "key" skills and save consumables religiously for the next branch at the expense of using what's in front of my face. Is adapting to that problem also dealing with depth, or is people only following the tracks proof of a lack of depth of thought? I don't think it's all that simple to call.

And... I'd still be open to possibly seeing a few factors removed from randarts to reduce constant swapping on many of my characters -- more because I think that tests concentration to an extreme I don't always enjoy (particularly, feeling a need for swapping resistances left and right). I wouldn't go so far as to claim it must be a sign of depth or lack of depth in itself, though.