Siegurt wrote:If you define a lower threshold for what is too trivial, then the interactions below that threshold need to be eliminated as possibilities first. And a lot of those "trivial" interactions have strong proponents.
I was speaking in broad terms only with no specialized definition of "uselessness," which is distinct from grey items (I was perhaps not explicit enough about this.) "Useless" items for me include, most egregiously, negative stat items (ring of foo -x, slaying, protection, amulet of reflection -x, amulet of inaccuracy) and trap/filler consumables (scroll of noise, scroll of random uselessness.) I think it's notable that many items of both categories (e.g. rings of hunger, scrolls of paper, potions of poison) have already been removed.
(I was not talking about e.g. halberds on felids or bardings because you can just ignore them completely - they probably shouldn't exist, but I don't have to interact with them so it's more cosmetic than anything.)
Because of the complexity of crawl, some or all of these items have fringe uses - i.e., they are not strictly useless. Some items that are prima facie useless (e.g. ring of teleportation) are even plausibly useful in circumstances that aren't fringe hypotheticals, even if they're generally negative. I would say (and this is a separate, distinct argument that I'm not going to make here) that such items should be balanced from the ground-up to offer useful choices in many games, as opposed to being intended (presumably) as solely negative items and having potential utility is a byproduct of unforeseen scenarios.
With regards to "thresholds," it seems to me that the threshold should be evaluated on the backdrop of a gradient balancing the depth afforded by having items or mechanics that potentially contribute to meaningful player decisions with the additional investment of mental energy needed to effectively master, catalogue, and understand them. If something is useful one out of ten thousand games, and is generated and autopicked-up one out of ten, you have a problem (these numbers are arbitrary.) You can either make it more useful or generate it less or never.
Vis-a-vis eliminating the interactions of elements that are considered "too trivial," I don't see why a bad solution would be to just disallow the player from interacting with them (which disintegration would accomplish.) Items like negative stat rings and the robe of misfortune exist because they give the id minigame some kind of meaning (whether or not they are successful at that.) If all items were identified by default, how often would players pick up rings of loudness or amulets of reflection -4? Surely they would be removed; it wouldn't make sense keep them in the game solely for the fringe utility that they potentially exhibit. Yet in the current game, once they have finished their role in the id minigame, they still exist and need to be manually disposed of.
Siegurt wrote:(Moreover who gets to decide which interactions are too trivial to keep around?)
Who gets to decide whether Mountain Dwarves are interesting enough to occupy design space?