Selling Stuff

[styrix]

Is there any way to sell stuff?

[MrMisterMonkey]

no. This is in the manual, along with reason.

[szanth]

Though I generally disagree with the reason.

[tcjsavannah]

Though I understand not selling stuff, I'd support a "pawn shop" where you hock an item for like 1/10th or 1/20th of the price. A few GP here and there might actually make a difference, but not game-breaking.

[dpeg]

I am not sure the point will come across but the fact is that just being able to sell stuff (even if at 1/20th of the price) will tempt some players to do so. This reasoning is not academic; many of us have played Nethack and experienced it first hand. The reason why Crawl will never have selling is not about "game breaking", it is about "saving players from boring themselves". In other words: if it is possible to make some money by investing a lot of (real life) time, optimal play will dictate to do so. I.e., it is a no-brainer to sell and you're undertaking a conduct if you manage to not collect stuff and sell. We won't have that. By the way, this insight came already to the originator of Crawl, Linley.

Enough said, this matter does not merit discussion. It is also on the "won't do" list of the development wiki.

[szanth]

I am not sure the point will come across but the fact is that just being able to sell stuff (even if at 1/20th of the price) will tempt some players to do so. This reasoning is not academic; many of us have played Nethack and experienced it first hand. The reason why Crawl will never have selling is not about "game breaking", it is about "saving players from boring themselves". In other words: if it is possible to make some money by investing a lot of (real life) time, optimal play will dictate to do so. I.e., it is a no-brainer to sell and you're undertaking a conduct if you manage to not collect stuff and sell. We won't have that. By the way, this insight came already to the originator of Crawl, Linley.

Enough said, this matter does not merit discussion. It is also on the "won't do" list of the development wiki.

While technically true that selling doesn't require any strategy, it's still silly that you can't. It just is. By the time you can buy all that lovely awesome stuff you saw in the early shops, you've found better stuff later and you don't need it anymore.

[joellercoaster]

This reasoning is not academic; many of us have played Nethack and experienced it first hand.

While I follow the public Crawl development reasoning avidly, and I like the results thereof (which is to say, great game!), I disagree with this one bit.

I've ascended all the Nethack classes, and never once been tempted to grind and sell stuff. Not entirely sure what the big deal is there.

[mageykun]

Yeah, I kinda fail to see how nethack shops were scummy. Shops had a finite inventory, and shopkeepers had a finite, pre-generated amount of gold. You could use shenanigans to build up infinite store credit, but what's the point? That wouldn't net you anything physical you couldn't get by just [img]killing[/img] the shopkeeper and taking everything. Technically, murder actually nets you more, since you get an added corpse.

Now altars, those were scummy.

(Not that I'm arguing for crawl shops to accept sales. If anything crawls' "no returns" policy is much more logical than the ubiquitous "we'll buy anything- for half price!" ).

[danr]

I'm not clamouring for it, but I think it could be done in ways that would not encourage players to bore themselves. Maybe they only take artifacts or extremely valuable items. That way you're not going to be scouring the dungeon of darts and rocks for every last GP. It would be nice to cash in on the GDA you find with your SpEn. However, I don't think the game needs this feature, and the devs aren't keen, so I wouldn't waste too much energy pursuing this idea.

Anyhow, this is a game design issue, so I'm moving it to the appropriate forum.

[MrMisterMonkey]

troves are bad enough

[dpeg]

troves are bad enough

Do you think troves should just go? They're one more step towards power creep, we may have gone overboard.

Everyone else: I don't think you tried to understand what I wrote. I assume that's the diffence between designer and player.
The fact that some of you (claim to) not grind selling does not mean that everyone else would do the same. Believe me or not, some players inevitably will hover the dungeon and accumulate money that way, even if it is mostly a pointless operation. (It's even worse in those case where it is not pointless.)

If you claim that not selling is "just stupid" or something, fork or play another game. Crawl comes without selling for ten years and we won't change that.

[szanth]

Point being, if someone wants to scum and grind, they'll find a way to do it, selling or no selling. It's the player's choice whether they want to make the game "boring" or not, not the developer's.

[dpeg]

Point being, if someone wants to scum and grind, they'll find a way to do it, selling or no selling. It's the player's choice whether they want to make the game "boring" or not, not the developer's.

Maybe for your games. But not for ours. If the forum keeps being stupid like this, I'll withdraw.

[joellercoaster]

Re: Troves. I'm not sure I'm in the group of players to whom power creep is relevant, so all I'll say is the last one I found indirectly killed me

About shops, I have no quarrel with the way they are now and no great desire to sell anything to them. Just that I didn't find the Nethack shops particularly scummy!

It's an interesting point you make about some people grinding and hoarding gold no matter how (nearly) pointless that might be - but, for those people, I guess that is fun. DCSS does seem to have no qualms about saying "we don't allow your kind of fun around here" as a design philosophy... which I also have no issue with, I like a game with a set of principles it tries to stick to when it makes changes.

Anyway, this is neither here nor there really. Pray, keep on with the glorious experiment

[MrMisterMonkey]

On troves, while I understand that they aim to offer a good chance at good loot for a meaningful price, the price is usually (though not always) more impractical than meaningful, turning it into a grinding festival (need a robe of resistance? try on every robe. need a bunch of potions of brilliance, especially when they aren't on autopickup? better get to finding them and picking them all up, and in the horrible worst case, grinding pan/abyss for them (please kill pan/abyss grinding).), though, assuming it actually is possible to generate meaningful prices, this is a fault of troves' price generation algorithm, rather than anything fundamental. Any infinite resource can fuel a trove, too, but that isn't troves' problem, and troves are usually more useful before that point, anyway. I didn't originally consider the power spiral, but I imagine that's true, as well.

some other things I consider at least somewhat grindy (I consider anything tedious, mostly mindless, and at least beneficial (though often required and usually optimal for some means, including normal play) grindy) for at least a bit:

• pandemonium and abyss (even without trying to scum them)
• nemelex xobeh (especially right after beginning worship, where players have the choice of tidying previous dungeon levels for piety) and elyvilon a bit less so (though only for the weapon sacrifices)
• hive (free food and piety for a little bit of autofight mashing; I support the idea of making it into a portal vault, and axing it otherwise)
• searching for a fancy robe, usually of resistance (try on every glowing/runed/embroidered robe)
• mummy potion decay
• popcorn and popcorn summoners (another test of autofight)

I forget any others, but they probably exist.

[dpeg]

On troves, while I understand that they aim to offer a good chance at good loot for a meaningful price, the price is usually (though not always) more impractical than meaningful, turning it into a grinding festival (need a robe of resistance? try on every robe. need a bunch of potions of brilliance, especially when they aren't on autopickup? better get to finding them and picking them all up, and in the horrible worst case, grinding pan/abyss for them (please kill pan/abyss grinding).), though, assuming it actually is possible to generate meaningful prices, this is a fault of troves' price generation algorithm, rather than anything fundamental. Any infinite resource can fuel a trove, too, but that isn't troves' problem, and troves are usually more useful before that point, anyway. I didn't originally consider the power spiral, but I imagine that's true, as well.

This is also my definition of grinding, we're on the same page.
The aim of troves is to create meaningful choices. This won't happen all the time, but it should occur often enough. The choice should be: give away something very good or very expensive in order to possibly get something very good?
It's a non-choice (which means that the troves don't fulfill their role and should be improved or removed) if there are obvious answers. For example, a wand of fire as entry fee is always a no-brainer, it is just too cheap. A robe of resistance is not: at least if you are a caster, you will ponder about handing over your robe. Likewise for wands of healing or hasting (always assuming you don't have a spare item). In other words, we need to tweak the entry fees.

some other things I consider at least somewhat grindy (I consider anything tedious, mostly mindless, and at least beneficial (though often required and usually optimal for some means, including normal play) grindy) for at least a bit:

• pandemonium and abyss (even without trying to scum them)
• nemelex xobeh (especially right after beginning worship, where players have the choice of tidying previous dungeon levels for piety) and elyvilon a bit less so (though only for the weapon sacrifices)
• hive (free food and piety for a little bit of autofight mashing; I support the idea of making it into a portal vault, and axing it otherwise)
• searching for a fancy robe, usually of resistance (try on every glowing/runed/embroidered robe)
• mummy potion decay
• popcorn and popcorn summoners (another test of autofight)

I forget any others, but they probably exist.

Over time, I have become more convinced that the infinite areas are inherently problematic. There are ideas to keep Abyss and Pan in nature, but reducing grinding potential. I have learnt from Erik (co-founder of Stone Soup) that some access to grinding is good, and that Angband players would love it. However, I believe that grinding is really no good after all.
The Abyss is interesting early and mid game. It should become harder later on. I think we can remove the rune. The Abyss has tons of flavour with the god by now.
Pan could turn into a macro version of ziggurats, where each new level increases (statistically) HD of random pan lords.
Nemelex has been recently improved to make partial sacrifices much easier (only consumables, say). This is not really a solution to your problem, of course. Hoovering is part of Nemelexism and our remake did not attempt to change that. Do you have an idea here?
For Elyvilon, I have proposed that the god should tell you "don't bother with mediocre weapons like these", so that you know further destruction of daggers will not do anything.
Hive will be turned into a race. (I usually get little support on these ideas, but I know what I am doing.) It should be a single level where entering it will trigger the race: larvae starting to crawl around and eat honeycombs (thereby turning into bees). The player has to spend resources in order to collect as much food as possible.
Do we want to reserve special adjectives (e.g. "(heavily?) embroidered") for ego robes?
For mummy potions, my pet idea is to curse future potions: "The mummy curses potion drinkers like you." The next good potion you _find_ turns into a bad one. (I.e. the moment you see it, it will change appearance, together with flavour blurb.)
Popcorn and summoners: I believe that tiny monsters shouldn't even be generated later on, they are then only interested in groups (tactically, or corpse etc.). Summoning is a bigger issue (also valid, of course).

Many thanks!

[MrMisterMonkey]

On nemelex, I don't have any good ideas.
On special ego armour/weapon adjectives, it'd certainly reduce the tedium, but the extra information might also ruin things like risk of curses (though there wasn't any to begin with, save early game; more relevant curses than "it's stuck to you" might wreck Ashenzari, though, unless he does something about them, or uses them interestingly)
On mummy curses, I also had an idea for them: the most interesting property of current curses is the inability to use potions (or risk decay) when fighting lots of mummies (particularly in storming or tornadoing Tomb and Ziggurats), so to preserve that, turn it into a status effect ("Curse" or something) that has a chance of making quaffed potions act as decay.
On monsters summoning popcorn, capping monsters' summons would be a nice first step, and removing useless popcorn spells (e.g. summon imp from 1s) would be a nice second.

Oh, and I remembered I also think labyrinths are grindy.

[Mike255]

Labyrinths are very much grindy, but I love the flavor they add regardless! Adding another lost adventurer or two might help with the tedium? Maybe the occasional vault besides portal to the Abyss?

[dpeg]

Regarding labyrinths: We have added glass, blood, monsters (at the moment only hungry ghosts) and vaults in order to make labyrinths more interesting. If you want more vaults, draw some! It is easy, just look at them in dat/des/portal/lab.des.

Do you mean by "grindy" that labyrinths are too easy? It would be easy to make them more challenging (both in the encounter with the minotaur as well as on the nutrition level).

[MrMisterMonkey]

I mean that most everything about them is mindless (current labyrinths are rather analogous to nethack's sokoban):

• the food cost is usually negligible (and entirely meaningless for mummies)
• the maze is mostly wallhugging until finding a good passage into the next layer (while remembering the maze; the shifting usually deforms dead ends, rather than cutting off actual passages, and the maprot is really annoying) or it opens up on its own (though I'm curious what measures there are to prevent scumming shifting)
• and the minotaur isn't even a concern for anyone past Lair.

To simply retain the function of labyrinths (but remove flavour and grinding), charge some food and a turncount increase to battle a minotaur and get loot; alternatively, for a more flavourful smooth labyrinth, remove all costs and rewards, so there's no desire for maze haters like me to grind through them for the free loot, and everyone else gets their bloodied walls.
I can't think of anything actually good for actually improving them, but increased rarity would make them feel a bit less tiresome.

[dpeg]

I mean that most everything about them is mindless (current labyrinths are rather analogous to nethack's sokoban):

• the food cost is usually negligible (and entirely meaningless for mummies)
• the maze is mostly wallhugging until finding a good passage into the next layer (while remembering the maze; the shifting usually deforms dead ends, rather than cutting off actual passages, and the maprot is really annoying) or it opens up on its own (though I'm curious what measures there are to prevent scumming shifting)
• and the minotaur isn't even a concern for anyone past Lair.

To simply retain the function of labyrinths (but remove flavour and grinding), charge some food and a turncount increase to battle a minotaur and get loot; alternatively, for a more flavourful smooth labyrinth, remove all costs and rewards, so there's no desire for maze haters like me to grind through them for the free loot, and everyone else gets their bloodied walls.
I can't think of anything actually good for actually improving them, but increased rarity would make them feel a bit less tiresome.

Comparison with Sokoban is evil, even if spot on. There is at least one difference, however: the sokoban maps were fixed (I consider this to be a grave defect in a roguelike game) -- I didn't have to memorise them (I am good at solving puzzles like this), but I had all but the final maps finger-memorised.
So as I understand it, the points are these: Labyrinths are fairly bad when it comes to portal vaults: they pose little threat, no action and are outright horrible to some players. Why not simply cut them?
I have to admit right away that my reply is not satisfactory. (1) Labyrinths are the origin of all portal vaults. (2) Labyrinths are the mythological background of minotaurs (player or monsters). If we remove labyrinths, I would cut the Mi species as well. (3) We have put a lot of effort into the new labyrinths.
I hated the original labyrinths of DC 4.0b26 and before (they had almost no braiding and were a matter of seconds to solve). DC 4.1 had much better ones and Darshan created the new builder for DCSS being inspired by this. After we saw players (ab)using the fact that the maps don't change (at least two players drew maps of labs by hand; one player wrote a script to solve mazes by wall-hugging), we had to react, the options being: remove labyrinths; remove maprot (which makes them trivial with autoexplore); make them self-changing.
I really like labyrinths (I already liked the original DCSS version) and I have never needed more than a couple of minutes to solve them.
What options do we have (apart from cutting)? Smaller maps. There could be more threats in labyrinths: harpies, hungry ghosts, stuff like that. It would be possible to make labyrinths very food-intensive, making players actually starve. Make the minotaur battle more interesting. Have the minotaur search you and, if wounded enough, retreat to the lair. Go back to 4b26 style trivial labyrinths.

[KoboldLord]

re: troves
I'm willing to assert that troves are too good. If you have the cash on-hand to get in, you should spend it on the spot no matter what your situation because you'll get enough gold acquirements from the trove itself to make all that money back anyway. And if by some chance you don't, then all the better because that means you got jewelry or armor acquirements instead, which are almost invariably better.

I'm also pretty sure that the trove never asks for items superior to its typical contents. Sacrificing the only robe of resistance in the game? Slap on a leather armor with rF+ in its place, and you're almost certain to get several pips of some important resistance from the trove contents, and end up ahead. Sacrifice a wand of healing? Sure, with the contents of that trove you'll be less likely to need to spam healing charges.

Typical trove loot seems to be better than half of the typical Tomb 3 loot, or better than all of Cerebov's loot put together. An exceptional all-jewelry trove can rival Vaults 8 with respects to actually-useful equipment. Risk is nearly zero; generally just some vault guards or random monsters to zip past once you've spotted the trove portal, and these are generally less challenging than the outside guards for some ice caverns and wizard labs.

re: labyrinth
I rather like the labyrinth, and I think some of the other posters have missed part of the their challenge. The labyrinth starts not when you enter the portal, but when you get that first announcement as you enter the level. The loot is good enough that missing the portal is a punch in the gut, so there's a strong incentive to deviate from the standard practice of inching through an unexplored level and simply blast straight through the gauntlet without killing anything unnecessary. There are few situations in the game that result in the challenge of juggling an entire swarm of pursuing monsters without simply diving into the nearest tunnel or stairwell, and I think the game would suffer if this didn't happen occasionally.

Once you're in the labyrinth itself, it's basically a breather level. It's extremely easy to solve, and you're safe from the horde of monsters that were just chasing you. You'll be in here long enough for most of them to wander off or go to sleep, so you can resume clearing the old level when you're done without needing to fight off every monster on the level at once. The end minotaur is an evocative mini-boss that feels like a milestone the way even a D2 orc priest or D6 centaur warrior do not, even though the latter two are obviously going to be harder for the character running into them.

If you were going to change them, it might be worthwhile to play to this tone. Reduce the length of the timer before they disappear, but have the announcements include a hint as to the portal's direction as well as distance. This would make it less feasible to kill off monsters on the way to the portal, but an attempt to run the gauntlet would be less likely to be foiled by the dumb luck of starting the search in the exact wrong direction.

[MrMisterMonkey]

On troves accepting cash, they don't anymore, but can still ask for shop items, which is essentially the same thing (and should go).

On the rush to labyrinths, this wouldn't be lost with their removal, as bazaars share this feature.

[Mike255]

Firstly - "grindy" to me is essentially everything that MisterMonkey described!

What options do we have (apart from cutting)? Smaller maps. There could be more threats in labyrinths: harpies, hungry ghosts, stuff like that. It would be possible to make labyrinths very food-intensive, making players actually starve. Make the minotaur battle more interesting. Have the minotaur search you and, if wounded enough, retreat to the lair. Go back to 4b26 style trivial labyrinths.

And secondly, I think that these are each great ideas, with the exception of extra hunger - that much resource drain seems like it would just be frustrating. Smaller maps could be a good idea, but I'd rather they be too big than too small! I'd also hate to find the treasure vault without encountering the Minotaur - maybe have a roving Minotaur and a sleeping one? Kind of counterintuitive... Also, I'd love to see a Labyrinth - specific unique Theseus

[jpeg]

Adding more minivaults will make labyrinths both more interesting and easier (because they need to have a spaced border around them to guarantee connectivity). I still think the minotaur should be scaled with the level, not just by increasing its hd but also by adding variant types: minotaur berserker, minotaur spellcaster. Adding more monsters is okay, but I absolutely do not want to provide a reliable food source. Monsters should be rare and thematic. Currently you can meet a hungry ghost and/or trap spider. I don't think harpies really fit the bill, though both manticore and sphinx (also greek-themed) might.

[RangerC]

I actually like labyrinths as a change of pace - the only exception being when I find 3 or more in the same game right after another. The committed change seems to be a good one (1 lab per game, more likely to generate early where food/Minotaur might be a problem); I think with some tweaks to minotaur difficulty labs are fine now (it's not like the loot is so great that you HAVE to do a lab if you absolutely hate them).

Troves are fine when they ask for something good. It seems like in most games recently I either never find a trove or can't find the entry items, which is good (it's not like there is a guaranteed trove and you have to loot it to survive in Zot), so actually getting to open a trove seems like an accomplishment.

Pan/Abyss/Hells need better monster differentiation - I think that's why they feel grindy (IMO, the worst grind in the game is escaping the Abyss for the 7th time after being banished by hell effects). The idea of making the Abyss more chaotic in monster set is good, but the best Abyssal proposal is one on the wiki - make it get much nastier over time. It should actually start out slightly easier than now (so weak banished characters probably still die, but not quite as frequently) but get MUCH nastier if you keep showing up or spend a ton of time there. I think the Abyss can keep its rune - the mechanism for getting it just needs to change from randomly wandering the Abyss hoping for it to show up, into something more meaningful.

Pan should get Demonspawn enemies (this would solve other problems, as well, by putting living enemies with a corpse into Pan), and more frequent exits to the dungeon. The idea of escalating Pan lord power is good, and could also apply to the Demonspawn as well.

Hells shouldn't banish you to the abyss until banishment becomes meaningful to late game characters. Right now banishment is a hell effect that forces you to dive through fear of tedium, not of danger to your character.

[MrMisterMonkey]

Aside from the ease to high-level characters, the required (escape and rune) parts of abyss are grindy because it's so long and monotonous; while wading through masses of abyssal monsters would help, banishment (particularly from hell effects) would still be grossly tiresome as long as it takes so long to undo. Aside, again, from that, simply being an infinite area with infinite exp and items is an invitation for grinding, so long as there is some way to sustain presence (finding more food than needed to avoid starvation and consistently being powerful enough to handle difficulty increases (note that so long as it remains possible to complete a hard Ziggurat:27, like Tomb- or Pandemonium-flavoured floors, abyss will have to be able to match that, or it will remain possible to scum abyss forever)).

Pandemonium shares all of abyss' problems, except for the potential tiresomeness of repeated banishment, which crawl conveniently replaces with increased ease of scumming and incentive to scum (ziggurats and tons of demonic runes), but again, increasing the difficulty of these beyond that easily handleable by the craziest characters, or at least causing more resource drain than loot provided, would remove any mindlessness; Ziggurats should probably scale with Pan depth, too, such as not to be an easymode break with free mountains of loot (and feel grindy in comparison).

[Danei]

Point being, if someone wants to scum and grind, they'll find a way to do it, selling or no selling. It's the player's choice whether they want to make the game "boring" or not, not the developer's.

It's the developers' decision (and a very good one) to attempt not to make optimal play boring.

If you want to play a boring game of crawl, you can definitely do it. But ideally that isn't the best way to win.

[danr]

Sorry, can someone post a link or explanation of troves? I'm not sure what's being talked about.

[Twilight]

Sorry, can someone post a link or explanation of troves? I'm not sure what's being talked about.

A treasure trove. It's a portal that doesn't time out, but when you try to enter, it asks for items (At least in trunk. 0.7 might ask for money) before you can enter. The items are, at least in theory, somewhat hard to find, and depending on your character build, hard to give up, such as a robe of resistance +1, or 3 potions of cure mutation, or 13 scrolls of remove curse.

Once given, you enter the portal, and find a selection of items/artifacts, somewhat similar to the items in a branch end. The last one I entered had about as much stuff as one of the four sections of treasure guarded by the Royal Jelly. Sometimes it's a variety of things, sometimes they're all the same type (such as all jewelry).

When you visit one, it's recorded on the Overview of the dungeon (Control O) along with the required item(s). On a recent game, one asked for a robe of resistance +1, so I spent most of the game keeping an eye on possible robes and trying them out, along with keeping an enchant armor scroll in reserve. I finally got one near the end of the game, and while there was some very nice stuff, including some Golden Dragon Armor, most of it was no better than what I had at that point. Of course, I had been through everything except Zot, Tomb,the Hells, and Pandemonium, so I had some pretty nice stuff. Also, as a heavy armor fighter, I had no need for a robe of resistance .

I hope that helps clear it up a bit. I personally find them a lot of fun, since it can sort of work like a mini-quest, in that you're looking for the item and/or it affects how you play the game. For example, on another game, I had it ask for the 13 scrolls of remove curse, and I actually used an enchant weapon III scroll to uncurse a spiked flail I was using, instead of a remove curse scroll, so I could stockpile them (I died a few levels later, so it didn't matter ).

[Stormfox]

Sorry, can someone post a link or explanation of troves? I'm not sure what's being talked about.

A treasure trove. It's a portal that doesn't time out, but when you try to enter, it asks for items (At least in trunk. 0.7 might ask for money) before you can enter. The items are, at least in theory, somewhat hard to find, and depending on your character build, hard to give up, such as a robe of resistance +1, or 3 potions of cure mutation, or 13 scrolls of remove curse.

It's a timed portal vault that does time out after a very long time. In 0.7, if you have a big pile of cash (about half to two-thirds of a typical zig entry fee), you can enter immediately. Or you can pay a small fee (a couple hundred) up front to lock the portal timer in place, but you need to come back with a pile of random items.

[Kate]

They don't time out at all in trunk, and just ask you for items straight-up instead of messing around with gold.

[Nobody]

On the original topic: I completely understand the decision to forbid selling items, because I'm the sort of person that would be seriously tempted to sell EVERYTHING.

On the many side-topics since then:
- I'm with KoboldLord in regards to labyrinths. The greed factor is a good way to induce carelessness/danger.
- Troves should probably either be consistently harder to enter, or else easier but with significantly less loot.

[Bim]

as far as selling, I completely understand, however I think trading, or at least selling randarts could be interesting. Although we all love and cherish crawl and find the work the devs do is absolutely mindblowing, it seems to be a bit of a taboo issue that gets 'NO SELLING OR ANYTHING LIKE SELLING EVER' whenever its brought up, which I don't think it should get.
I can see the ramifications and HATE the whole 'oh I found another robe! Back to the shop for 3gp!' but I really can't see how rewarding a player with something more useful in exchange for a rubbish item (executioners axe for spriggan anyone?) being a game breaking mechanic. Especially if the trade wasn't a great one, so you weren't trading the +4 exe axe of chopping for a +4 quick blade of speed, but just maybe a +2 dagger of venom or something. Same with selling, if you could sell off only randarts for a small amount of gold, then I can imagine it being a fun twist without scumming and grinding through everything.

I personally think that the shops are too infrequent, and a bit unbalanced. By the time I get to about 13/15 levels down, I've normally got stacks of gold so can buy anything in the shop. However, not much seems useful as I've got most things (except spell books, scrolls and potions which are obviously useful always) however if they're sooner, I never have enough money to get much, and they seem a bit pointless.

[Danei]

however if they're sooner, I never have enough money to get much, and they seem a bit pointless.

Early shops are far from pointless. Think of it this way; you know where some guaranteed stuff is.

Even if that ridiculous awesome randart in the shop on D:4 is 3600 gold, you know where it is and you can come back for it when you can afford it. Shops don't go away, so any good item you find in a shop should be thought of as a good thing even if you can't buy it yet.

Just in case you don't already know this, the game keeps track of all the shops you find and their contents, making it easy to find that stuff again. It doesn't cost you anything but food, assuming the trek back up to the shops isn't dangerous for you due to skipped levels or whatnot.

[Mychaelh]

Just some brainstorming:

The manual explains the *NO SELLS !!!* policy of Crawl with the hard grip the Guild of Dungeon Procurers executes.
So, why not actually make 'Dungeon Procurer' a playable background?

- abysmal aptitudes in everything
- instantly detects traps (because The Guild has installed them and has handed out plans to him)
- can sell things in shops for gold
- Special ability: recruit mercenary as bodyguards
-> mercs must be payed with gold in timed intervalls
-> not enough gold -> mercs leave or even get hostile

[Bim]

I agree that if its a 'straight off trade' then it would make it too straight forward, I should have emphasized the 'just maybe' part of it more. I was thinking that there's a possibility you get something good in return instead of a straight off. Although it can be argued that 'well obviously you'll do it' perhaps it could have an additional cost (a merchants fee or something)?
Also lot of randarts and artifacts have powerful resist properties and whatnot that even if they are useless to you in a fighting way, maybe that bit of resistance is what you need for a mad dash to a staircase. Perhaps its not a perfect idea, but I don't think it'd make the game instantly boring.

On shops:
I understand it not being pointless to go back, but how many times do you get 3600 gold, and not already have similarly good stuff/ziggurats and whatever to spend it on?? I like the idea of the god of greed that can create shops for you or perhaps a higher chance of special stuff in the shops?

The dungeon prospector sounds great also, obviously if it was anything was for sale that would be grinding, but being able to sell special stuff, or even sacrifice it (with piety related to how good the item was) could be a nice take on selling, without it 'ruining' the game.

[MrMisterMonkey]

Mychaelh, did you read the philosophy section? Selling really doesn't jive, for reasons specifically detailed there, and again repeated many times in this thread. By the way, selling is on that list of things that will never be done.

Bim, on good items in early shops, it's really quite common, in my experience.

[fnwc]

I can say from my experience with roguelikes that allow selling is this: for "optimal" play (so you can afford certain things later), it forces you to haul things back and forth to sell them. Because selling is a valid action in those games, costs have to be balanced against it, which in turn strongly encourages selling.

I'm glad selling is not in the game.

[Mychaelh]

@MrMisterMonkey:

Of course I've read it. I'm just playing mindgame how selling could actual be made a playing option, that fit's with this philosophy.
As I understand it, the amount of gold a character has affects highscore and gives the option to buy better stuff. Gold is found for free. To give the possibilitiy to additional turning useless stuff in gold invites grinding for better stuff or highscore. That's the reason' traditional' selling is not implemented. I'm fine with that.

My idea is to implement an 'exotic' background, that must use gold as an evanescent resource like food. It's a kind of not-magic summoner, who can nothing do on his own, but is in constant need to hold or expand his gold-level, to function well. He should not be able to BUY in shops. ->> Or even better: He can buy, but ONLY his mercs and only there. For Dungeon Procurers shops would have a function like pentagramms had in Wizardry IV
-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry_4
That should make them very hard and interesting to play. and would fit with 'Crawl philosophy'.
Just a idea of course not a demand.

[jpeg]

My idea is to implement an 'exotic' background, that must use gold as an evanescent resource like food. It's a kind of not-magic summoner, who can nothing do on his own, but is in constant need to hold or expand his gold-level, to function well. He should not be able to BUY in shops. ->> Or even better: He can buy, but ONLY his mercs and only there.

Note that the manual also states "The choice of character background is definitely less decisive than that of species in Crawl. Basically, the background determines what the character has learned prior to entering the dungeon (i.e. the starting skills), and also helps determine equipment and hit/magic points at start."
In particular, this means that we won't be introducing background-dependent abilities other than ones everyone else can gain once they get to the appropriate skill level. Characters should only be able to get special powers via:

• intrinsic species attributes
• mutations
• evocation of (misc.) items
• gods

However, your idea has some overlap with the gold god that is being planned. Followers will get a lot of gold and will have to spend it to use their divine abilities, e.g. for bribing monsters or creating new shops.

[dpeg]

http://crawl.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=generaldev&action=display&thread=119
This is a thread in an ancient forum, for an ancient version of Crawl.

[danr]

Wow, that was 2005, and even then the comment was "this was discussed before"...

Good idea or not, it's not going to happen. Be happy with the game you've got.

What I'd like to see is just plain more shops, maybe just a few guaranteed shops early on that provide something like the Ecumenical Temple - the chance to make some relatively early decisions about your character's direction. So e.g. if you really want to do long blades you can buy yourself a long sword without waiting until D:10 or whatever to find one..

[galehar]

Wow, that was 2005, and even then the comment was "this was discussed before"...

Good idea or not, it's not going to happen. Be happy with the game you've got.

What I'd like to see is just plain more shops, maybe just a few guaranteed shops early on that provide something like the Ecumenical Temple - the chance to make some relatively early decisions about your character's direction. So e.g. if you really want to do long blades you can buy yourself a long sword without waiting until D:10 or whatever to find one..

New portal vault : The Mall