Give all caster starts a (bad) weapon.

[stoneychips]

I don't think any of these "veterans" is claiming you haven't run into packs of jackals or strings of individual monsters in tight quarters. I'm sure you have, and I'm also sure the other people who have chimed in understand that you have.

The argument is that through proper play, deaths to packs and multiple monsters on D:1 are nearly always avoidable, primarily through careful exploration and resource management. This is definitely the case (in my limited and not-a-great-player experience), and even if I'm not always successful at it, there are a number of excellent players who can demonstrate how to do it consistently.

In that case, it's really not a difference of opinion, because it clearly and demonstrably can reliably be done by players who really understand the management balance of Crawl's early game.

And I think "nearly always" is probably stretching it. But you'll just say I must be a bad manager then.

I'd allow that maybe it's more [edit: well, partly, not sure about exact frequency] of a disagreement about just how often one cares to bother with that particular short-lived feature (as it were, feature of having to kite at length and pray near the entrance).

Fine, some people enjoy it. I enjoyed item destruction (could have been implemented more smoothly but in principle) and encumberance, too. You all have your right to be annoyed and so do I.

[watertreatmentRL]

It is true that it is highly improbable to roll a d:1 entry where you get killed in spite of careful play. You're talking one in a thousand games with a mediocre book combo.

Nevertheless, I like daggers for book backgrounds for a couple reasons. Daggers are largely a convenience in the early game. You want to be hitting things with spells almost every time. You're really just avoiding luring and mp recovery most of the time when you knife rats and so on. I think the same is true in the entrance vault almost all of the time. Using the dagger (as opposed to fists) to finish monsters near the entrance is mostly just avoiding pillar dancing in a not very dangerous situation. The other issue that others have brought up is the item collection part of it. Early item collection at the level of ordinary daggers and short swords is bad because it helps prop up the argument for item curses and identification. Even with a dagger, you're still going to want to upgrade more or less immediately so whatever loss there is is marginal. Picking up and using d:1 weapons is a no-brainer for book backgrounds in that even if it's cursed and bad, you're still okay, yet the prevailing analysis says the possibility of the curse is somehow good.

[Plantissue]

I really don't understand why normal weapons or armour would be cursed except to annoy starting characters. One game, I never found a scroll of uncurse till lair. And I was worshipping Ash.

[WingedEspeon]

I remember a HuFe game that I played where The first thing I managed to encounter was a jackal pack. Only one noticed me, so I retreated until it was in flametounge range to lose the other jackal. 3 casts on flameounge did nothing, so I tried to kite to regain MP. Even more casts still didn't do it and I ended up dying on D:2 after taking an escape hatch to kite for MP haven taken no damage from anything other than the first monster I encountered. An awake giant geko (or whatever they are called now) would have been even worse. Maybe unskilled UC would have been better than running away. Maybe starting with a club would not have helped. But I do think that starting with a club would be a good way to help reduce the possibility unavoidable death while streaking while not being a large player buff past D:1. Bad player that splat un D:1 will just reroll the combo until they get lucky and clear D:1 anyway, so this would only affect streakers/people trying for a good win%.

Flavor reason: You picked up a stick on the way to the dungeon. It isn't like it is hard to find a stick.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I really don't understand why normal weapons or armour would be cursed except to annoy starting characters. One game, I never found a scroll of uncurse till lair. And I was worshipping Ash.

I would personally not worship Ash, if I didn't have 2-3 scrolls of remove curse, or for some reason already several cursed items. Otherwise one can get stuck in a bad situation of getting very little piety and very little benefit for a rather long time.

[Blomdor]

I don't play casters as a rule and therefore don't feel comfortable commenting on the main topic at hand here, but the issue of cursed, negatively-enchanted "normal" equipment is one that has bothered me for a long time.

I think we could improve quality-of-life and reduce unnecessary frustration for more than just caster starts by eliminating the chance of those appearing. We have "enchanted" weapons around to provide players with an opportunity to roll the dice for the chance to obtain a better weapon. Randomly sticking a penalty and a curse on completely average-looking equipment just seems a bit mean-spirited and pointless to me; it's completely arbitrary and punishes the player for a very basic, obvious decision for no apparent reason. Let normal weapons be normal weapons.