Re: Trunk update on the 24th, no more racial weapons
Posted: Thursday, 6th March 2014, 10:48
The patch on mantis said that "all armour will be treated as dwarven for acid resistance purposes", is that correct?
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Forum
https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/
MarvinPA wrote:Squashed (minus the corrosion change) and pushed, thanks!
If you want weapons to generate with more enchantment, just generate weapons with more enchantment.
Ataraxzy wrote:If you want weapons to generate with more enchantment, just generate weapons with more enchantment.
I agree, from a purely mechanistic viewpoint. From other viewpoints though, this change is not so good.
In terms of meta-game reasoning:
Flavor matters. In-game knowledge and experience matters. Taking flavor out is almost always a bad idea - vanillifying the in-game world means fewer people will be interested, and some of those that are interested will lose interest faster. You need to give people stuff to hang their imaginations on. Is there other stuff for them to do so? Sure, but that stuff isn't this stuff. As we'll see below, racial weapons don't actually subtract anything from the game, they don't make anything harder, they just add variety, especially to an early-game that's all 'g's with clubs, 'k's with darts, 's's that constrict, and 'w's that hit like trucks.
In terms of early-game reasoning:
Racial weapons are a great idea that adds to the game, while subtracting nothing. A 'racial' dagger is better than a 'standard' dagger, when you find one, you switch! (unless it's a cursed dagger, of course!) They've always been the first level of 'enchantment', a bit of a helping hand to low-level players who won't have any safe ways of identifying items: Dwarves make durable stuff, Elves make accurate stuff, Orcish stuff hurts more &ct. Demon weapons don't show up until later in the game and their description should say 'if you're a demon, you get extra benefit out of it', to avoid any problems of the 'you shouldn't have to read the wiki to win' type.
There's no need to add trash like 'rusty' daggers, but having some small percentage of weapons drop be of a make other than 'vanilla human-ish', not only makes a lot of sense from a background perspective but it lets people upgrade their starting gear while searching for their first ego weapons.
So, perhaps a revamp of the idea is in order.
One thought would be a minor buff that could apply to any weapon, branded or not:
Elvish +xAcc, -yDam
Orcish -xAcc, +yDam
Dwarvish +xAcc, +yDam [of lesser extent than either Elvish or Orcish]
The item would then be reported as a 'racial' [WeaponType], visible from the ground or while wielded by a monster.
So the game, when generating a weapon could do so like such:
1. Determine weapon type.
2. is unrandart or randart? No? Continue w/ step 3.
3. Determine plusses, if any.
4. Determine ego, if any.
5. Determine racial make, if any.
Elves should racially negate the damage 'penalty' of Elvish weapons,
Orcs should racially negate the accuracy 'penalty' of Orcish weapons and
Dwarves should get a small bonus to both stats for Dwarvish weapons.
All in all, it gives EVERYONE a small boost early game (find a racial weapon, switch out, first upgrade!), gives racially matched weapon/race combos another - small - boost (it makes sense that Elves would really prefer to use an Elvish long sword over an Orcish one, all other things being equal, right?) and it gives min-maxers a choice: all other things equal, is it more important for my character to connect (Elvish) or to damage when connecting (Orcish), or, on the gripping hand, do I need a good balance (Dwarvish)?
Now people have an interesting choice to make, perhaps an elven weapon is more suited to a stabby type and your typical SpEN will nearly always want an Elven dagger, but that HOFi could really use a +1,+3 Orcish War Axe {Flame} when surrounded by hydras on Lair:7 - the problem with hydras isn't hitting them, it's killing them before they kill you!
My $0.02.
and into wrote:The only unique thing about them would still be that Elves, Orcs, and Deep Dwarf get a little bit of a bonus on a specific sub-type of weapons, but the bonus is so small that it will almost never be a factor in deciding between which weapons to use.
Well, except that elvish weapons would just be worse all around because +acc and -damage is generally going to result in poorer average damage over time, so you'd have some weapons randomly be that "rusty dagger" you dislike, unless you are an elf at which point it becomes a "very slightly better than a vanilla dagger" weapon.
Good flavor is good, but only if it is actually flavor, rather than a minor game play difference that is almost never meaningful. "Flavor" should not be considered a characteristic of game play ideas ("This feature has good flavor and thus should stay"); rather, things that affect game play need to be justified on their own basis,
Siegurt wrote:Actually dwarven/elven/orcish weapons used to have a slightly higher chance to generate with enchantments/maluses much as you suggest. As such, if you collected 10 things and two of them were dwarven, they had a slightly higher chance of being enchanted. Back when weapons didn't auto-ID this was a valuable way of playing the odds and "guessing" that you might have found an upgrade to your vanilla starting weapon.
adozu wrote:the fact that it's a rather significant nerf to beogh stands btw, and it's not like beogh is insanely strong either.
RBrandon wrote:If the primary complaint with racial weapons (and armours) is that they do not have a great enough effect, perhaps increasing their effect would be a better mode of action than simply removing them.
This removal also nukes a swath of tiles that I found very aesthetically pleasing and flavorful, especially in areas where they were most likely to be found (i.e. the Elven Halls and Orcish Mines). I suppose you could just repurpose the old tiles, but there was something nice about orcs hitting you with orcish things and elves hitting you with elven things, instead of assuming that they are all plain.