No poison outside combat

[Marbit]

Problem:
- Outside combat poison presents little tactical choice because resting is almost always better than exploring while poisoned.
- Resting while poisoned is a tedious process as poison interrupts your resting quite often.
- Deaths by poison outside combat are a bit dull; without curing/healing potions the player has little control on whether he dies or not.

Suggestion:
While resting poison has no effect. Resting a number of turns without interruption heals the poison status.

Discussion:
This proposal streamlines the process of healing. Deaths outside combat would disappear but they weren't interesting. I think that much is to be gained with this proposal and very little is lost.

[WalkerBoh]

Agreed completely. It should functionally be handled the same way that the new "Barbs" status is handled.

[Amnesiac]

I don't know, when I proposed poison to stop taking hp at 1, I was opposed by arguments like that I should be careful around poisonous guys in stead of just beating them to death, probably appies here as well. I'm not sure balance wise, but I hate resting out poison and have

  Code:

runrest_ignore_poison  = 1:4
runrest_ignore_message += You feel.* better.
runrest_ignore_message += You feel sick.

in my init.txt and I think this works.

[Leafsnail]

I like this idea a lot. It removes a lot of tedious resting while keeping basically all of the tactical implications of poison.

[Hirsch I]

this would make poisonous monsters much less dangerous, tho. maybe the amount of damage from poison should be raised to keep the balance.

[Bart]

I'm against.

First of all, it is not intuitive and against logic. I haven't heard that poison stops working when you lie down and wait till it stops hurting.

Second of all, such change breaks balance of some monsters who are dangerous and should be treated appropriately because they are designed to kill even after you kill them. Namely, kobolds with blowgun, spiders, snakes in shoals (what is their name?) have now interesting tactical aspect which this change would remove.

If you want to stop poison, that's what your curing potions are for.

[Hirsch I]

First of all, it is not intuitive and against logic

(bingo.)
actually, if you keep moving, the poison will spread faster, increasing the damages. if you stay still, and calm, you body will have more time to deal with the poison until given an antidote. it is exactly the recommended course of action when bitten by a poisonous foo. (source: myself, bitten by a snake and various spiders.)
but that is not the point.
the balance can be fixed by making poison stronger. it becomes more likely to kill you in a fight, but do not kill you while you press 5555555555.
and the logic thing... is not important at all. lots of things make no sense in the game, comparing to the real world. the point is being interesting. and dying outside of combat, while waiting, is not interesting at all.

[BountyHunterSAx]

I am also against, which is unusual since I'm usually in favor of player-buffs .

The reason being that poison is a specific kind of threat to many of my casters that is utterly negated by this patch change. That is: do i deem the threat of potential incoming monsters on this floor severe enough that I need to blow a cure, or am I 'safe' to just regen HP for a bit?

If you could isolate that I am - in fact - on an empty floor or that I've gone back upstairs, that'd be different. But THEN you run into programming hurdles and the fact that poison now tells me even more about my environment that it should. "You stop and address your wound with a quick tourniquet and first aid" would translate to "There are no nearby enemies."


Nice idea in theory, in practice the number of times a Komodo Dragon (long lasting sickness) has *forced* me to blow a cure pot is relevant. Same goes with sa snakes, Spiky Frogs, etc. Having to choose whether to do it during or after combat (can I handled this HP bleed? Will they be able to re apply the status effect?) is interesting, not autopilot.

-AHMAD

[Leafsnail]

As I understand it this proposal doesn't give you any extra info. It's just "if you don't take any actions and don't get hit for X turns poison wears off, and you won't take any damage while under those conditions". The only difference I can see this making is preventing a small number of (boring) early mage deaths, at basically any other point in the game you could cure it anyway.

Under this system you could have it so that poison has a chance of doing damage every time you get attacked or take an action, that might serve to make it more threatening if the chance were upped from what it currently is.

[Rast]

Disagree with the suggestion, but I think taking poison damage shouldn't interrupt resting so much.

[jejorda2]

Just give everyone but DD and bloodless Vp a super loud instant heal-and-remove-poisons-and-glow-and-anything-else-that-can-be-waited-out that comes with ten turns of paralysis, and put it on space bar. "Healing meditation." Involves reciting a really loud mantra or cracking your knuckles or something. And guess it has a hunger cost.

[WalkerBoh]

Second of all, such change breaks balance of some monsters who are dangerous and should be treated appropriately because they are designed to kill even after you kill them. Namely, kobolds with blowgun, spiders, snakes in shoals (what is their name?) have now interesting tactical aspect which this change would remove.

The problem is that 95% (or more) of the time there is no interesting tactical aspect, because you can survive poison by pressing '5' over and over. For example, when you are poisoned by an adder on D:8, the adder is not dangerous, but you still end up pressing '5' a few times to cure the poison. This is tedious, and I assume this proposal aims to eliminate this type of situation.

I agree with you regarding monsters like redbacks and sea snakes, which are dangerous purely because of the threat of fatal amounts of poison. Under the OP's proposal, poison should probably not be cured outside of combat unless it is yellow. Outside of early deaths due to lack of curing potions, I don't think yellow poison is fatal at any other time of the game, nor are these early deaths very interesting anyways (oh look, I'm poisoned, better hope I can rest this off or that one of these unID'd potions is curing).

On a related, but slightly off-topic note, I think poison should work more like sickness (minus the stat rot). I would propose that poison does not actively hurt you while you are poisoned; instead you can no longer heal naturally (functionally the same as slow healing 3). Furthermore, resting should not cure poison. It can instead be cured by a potion, or exploration, or experience gained, or some other method that does not encourage mashing '5'. In my opinion this creates more interesting situations than poison as currently implemented, while also eliminating the associated tedium entirely.

[Senban]

Things like poison, starvation and curses are powerfully effective psychological weapons in crawls arsenal. Of course beyond a certain level of nuts & bolts familiarity players will immunize themselves against these mind games and become bored of them (although really some of the things people claim are boring in crawl imply that they need their Ritalin prescription checked out more than anything else). Just turning it in to a brand like freezing with a different resistance or an effect like draining is something I'd find more boring than having to deal with the out of combat consequences of in combat events.
Looking at ways to make being poisoned more stressful on knowledgeable players, such as the possibility of vomiting with an attached nutrition cost or something like that might be worth looking at (although well spoilered players also tend to be more blasé about the hunger clock too), alternatively making it a rarer but more dangerous event and tailoring the amount of curing available post D3 or so accordingly might be a good approach.

[jejorda2]

Make the poison an undetectable delayed effect that shows up after you gain a little experience. So you kill an adder, rest up, have a close fight with a gnoll, and *then* start losing hp. Make it a temporary mutation- "you lose hp when your hp is less than 60% of your max hp." Either put it on the A screen or don't.

[Utis]

Personally, I think there wouldn't be any problem with poison the way it is, if it weren't for the nuissance of having to rest it away after combat: "5 ... 5 ... 5 ... 5 ... DAMN IT! ... 5 ... 5 ... 5 ..."

So, rather than fiddling with the mechanics of poison, I'd prefer an interface change that alleviates said nuissance. I would be fine if I could just specify down to what percentage of my HP I'm willing to go while resting before I quaff !curing. In game, that is, because that changes during the curse of the game and whether I'm resting on stairs or not.

[Leafsnail]

Make the poison an undetectable delayed effect that shows up after you gain a little experience. So you kill an adder, rest up, have a close fight with a gnoll, and *then* start losing hp. Make it a temporary mutation- "you lose hp when your hp is less than 60% of your max hp." Either put it on the A screen or don't.

That sounds awful, what are you trying to achieve with this change? Like am I meant to intentionally damage myself after I fight an adder to check for this mutation?

[Siegurt]

Personally, I think there wouldn't be any problem with poison the way it is, if it weren't for the nuissance of having to rest it away after combat: "5 ... 5 ... 5 ... 5 ... DAMN IT! ... 5 ... 5 ... 5 ..."

So, rather than fiddling with the mechanics of poison, I'd prefer an interface change that alleviates said nuissance. I would be fine if I could just specify down to what percentage of my HP I'm willing to go while resting before I quaff !curing. In game, that is, because that changes during the curse of the game and whether I'm resting on stairs or not.

I think this is the problem most people have with poison, and probably the one that would make the most people happy.

[Quazifuji]

Personally, I think there wouldn't be any problem with poison the way it is, if it weren't for the nuissance of having to rest it away after combat: "5 ... 5 ... 5 ... 5 ... DAMN IT! ... 5 ... 5 ... 5 ..."

So, rather than fiddling with the mechanics of poison, I'd prefer an interface change that alleviates said nuissance. I would be fine if I could just specify down to what percentage of my HP I'm willing to go while resting before I quaff !curing. In game, that is, because that changes during the curse of the game and whether I'm resting on stairs or not.

I think this is the problem most people have with poison, and probably the one that would make the most people happy.

Agreed. Opinions vary on poison overall, but there seems to be complete consensus that the process of resting until poison is cured (the most common response to being poisoned outside of combat) is really annoying, an the option to specify an HP threshold when resting it would solve that. Just make prompt that pops up when you hit 5 while poisoned:

"You are poisoned and may lose hitpoints while resting. How low will you allow your HP to get before it interrupts your resting? (Default is standard low health warning value)"

"5, Enter" would then rest until low hitpoints, "5, 1, Enter" would rest until you have to take curing or risk dying (in cases where you're not concerned about a monster showing up and killing you at low health), etc. Seems like it would resolve the issue without having introduce anything too fancy or convoluted or remove any of the decisions poison currently creates (regardless of where people stand on how meaningful those decisions actually are).

[Arkhan]

I know when I play a low hp race like Sp that I set my HP warning threshold to what seems like a high amount (~60%) to compensate for the lower HP, so resting while poisoned is actually really obnoxious. At the same time, I'm also not a fan of outright ignoring the messages since I'm also fearful of autoresting myself to death (which I don't know if that actually happens if you set those ignore messages from earlier but I'm not going to try it.) I'd love a button to press that would say "unless a monster comes into LoS, attempt to rest and ignore poison messages until X(1) hp."

You feel sick, but hope it will pass. x10
You feel your malady about to claim your life!

[Utis]

Resting is also interrupted when buffs run out. Having to press two keys for poison could be almost as annoying as the current state.

After thinking about it some more while playing, I think I don't necessarily need an ingame option. What I would like to see is an option in the rc file, so I can specify something like.

poison_rest = 50 20 1

So that consecutive presses of '5' will allow my HP to go down to 50%, 20%, 1%

[Patashu]

If poison is changed to be deterministic (as suggested in another thread, leads to benefits like being able to display how much of your HP bar will be lost to poison, warn the user if their level of poison is fatal, or brings them below a warning threshold, etc) then interface improvements to resting while poisoned come naturally.

If you want poison to have random elements, make the amount of poison applied random, not the effect of it. Deterministic-effect poison is less spoilery, more intuitive, more fun to deal with.

[Amnesiac]

tl;dr, but I think if slow regen works only in combat, we could handle poison similarly. something like the effect from staff of olgreb outside the combat?