The Tavern

More randart properties = more incentive to swap. The subjects are inexorably linked, and any discussion of randart properties should address the actual impact they have on the game. Lasty even pointed out in the original post that swapping is an issue, though clearly I consider it a much bigger problem than he does.

Sandman25 wrote:If you don't like ring swapping interface, don't swap rings. Add =R inscription to one equipped ring and you will not get the prompt, there is no need to remove rings for everyone.

"If you don't like the bad interface, play suboptimally to avoid it" isn't a very good reason to keep a bad interface imo.

Sandman25 wrote:To me it's similar to "Spells are the most picked things in the game and yet they have the worst interface: you should press z, then spell letter and finally choose target. Compare with melee weapons where you can attack by pressing a single arrow key. I suggest to limit all species except Deep Elf to one available spell. If you want to learn another spell, forget previous one first".

Should Crawl let you wear two amulets at once, wield two weapons at once, and wear two helmets at once?

duvessa wrote:Should Crawl let you wear two amulets at once, wield two weapons at once, and wear two helmets at once?

Why not? I don't see any problem (I don't care if I get an extra prompt, thanks to "item_slot" I press keys without looking at currently wielded rings because I know which rings are assigned to which letters). But it is off topic here.

The issue with the gear swap problem is that in an rpg setting your expected to switch gears to better suit your encounter. This was limited by carrying inventory space/weight so you can't stack up on everything. Now you just have your large inventory so carrying a few extra rings is whatever.

Question is what type of play people want in the game, swapping rings anytime you want seems to be a "problem." But people also want the variety of choice to swap gear anytime. They don't want "wear xyz best ring you find for the rest of the game" syndrome obviously.

Only sway to stop "ring swapping" in combat is to remove the ability to change gear during combat or within vision of a monster.

I have always hated jewelry swapping in combat and would much prefer it if all non-wield actions took the same amount of time—say 5 "turns"—to take off, or to switch. But that's a drum that I and others have beaten before, and it doesn't seem that the devs want to change that.

More directly to the topic, I would say that double-edged effects are more interesting than new "these properties are bad." Randarts are already quite bad, on average. It is a very tiny chance that you get a bad property on a randart that is good enough that you might still be tempted to use it. Adding properties that are even worse would be likely to decrease or keep roughly the same, rather than increase, the number of interesting decisions.

However, something that might work is more effects that are strongly advantageous but potentially double-edged, kind of like current guardian spirit, and along the lines of what dpeg and some others suggested (e.g., "this item will hurt you, but every time it does, it deals significant extra damage to enemies at same time"). Or, let's say, something that drains your MP but increases attack power, could—if the benefit were strong enough—prompt me to build my character around the item. But then this really just seems as though, functionally, it is the same as adding more non-random artefacts like Firestarter to the game.

Why not make a macro to swap rings if there are too many keypresses for your liking?

I have no problem with jewellery swapping in general. As far as I understand it, OP was talking about swapping in combat, not in general: this could potentially waste crucial time. I have been banished once while putting on a MR+ ring in combat.

bel wrote:Why not make a macro to swap rings if there are too many keypresses for your liking?

Off topic but macros that involve a separate screen generate a strobe that is intolerable for me.

It seems to me that a huge number of current artifacts have negative properties that are so bad that you would never use them in a typical game (things like -Cast and -Tele come to mind, as well as rF- to a lesser extent). Many of the properties suggested here, e.g. mighting opponents at random or making it impossible to fight in corridors, are in this vein. The Glow+ thing looked more reasonable.

One thing I notice is that many negative properties are irrelevant to certain build types, e.g. -Cast on a berserker, Noisy on heavy armour or Qazlal worshippers, etc. and completely deal breaking on many others, e.g. -Cast on most characters. By the time you're collecting a lot of artifacts, you tend to be fairly committed to a particular game plan, so these negative properties are not really offering you a choice.

It seems to me that the right way to approach variety in negative artifact effects is not as much in adding more effects as in more carefully generating artifacts so that the player will accept the negative effect more frequently. The good thing about the Glow+ suggestion is that it places a curb on casting but doesn't stop it outright so that it is more likely the player will be willing to accept and play around that side effect.

heavy armour and noise are totally unrelated

dpeg wrote:* Overflay
Attacking a monster with this weapon may give it Flay towards you (so you have to kill in order to get the HP back). When that happens, attacking the now-flaying monster damages all monsters in sight.

An interesting idea, but it'd be difficult to communicate to the player in a way that doesn't break the flow of combat, I think.

* Attrition
You lose MP rapidly when not hitting monsters with the weapon. When killing a monster, MP is immediately reset to full.

Either you don't fight with summons/conjurations and this is essentially a complete non-issue, or you do and you'd probably never want to equip it. Even if it was worth it with some numbers tweaking it also comes with the kinda tedious optimal behavior of unequipping it after every fight.

I deleted some off-topic arguments.

I do think that constant item-switching is a problem, especially when it's extremely low-cost (swapping jewellery), and I think that overall artefacts tend to be a more pronounced case of that problem. So, maybe the way to approach this, and also the way to make artefact negative qualities more relevant but less punishing, is to say that the first negative quality on any given artefact will always limit swapping, and the remainder can be from the full list.

We already have Curse and Contam to limit swapping, but a few other options might include:

Fragile: Removing this item destroys it (or has a significant chance to destroy it).
Soulbond: Removing this item drains you significantly.
Flux: Removing this item gives you temporary negative mutations (ala wretched star).

Of course, all of these are the same idea: removing this item makes something bad happen to you, so arguably we could combine all of these as possible outcomes of a single property called "Curse" or "Contam" or "Soulbond", which 1) reduces the number of distinct flags we need to add that do more or less the same thing, and 2) makes it harder to be sure removing the item will be safe.

I am not sure if we should discuss item swapping in this thread or create a new one but why is item swapping a problem? IMHO it adds decisions to game, with item swapping there are more variants of default gear. For example, in my current game I am wearing 2 MR rings in Vaults (one of them has rF- also) but I am switching to +5 ring of evasion and +6 ring of evasion vs Deep Trolls etc, ring of protection from fire for Fire Giants, ring of ice for Frost Giants, ring of invisibility vs Yaktaurs, ring of see invisible vs boggarts, ring of teleportation when I need to teleport away... The game would be boring without item swapping.
The same with weapon, I have 3 rods and am MuAr, why should we have contam on weapons?

Also I find that artifacts are the things I want to swap the least, generally I find artifacts with good properties, and leave those on, and swap plain jewelry to make up for situationally useful resistances that I don't have, and when available, I swap in a decent plain ac or ev ring when I don't need one of my more situationally things.
I don't find that this happens with sufficient frequency that it becomes tedious, and adding more no swapping negative artifact properties just makes artifacts even less useful and interesting than they already are.

I replace plain rings with artefacts late in the game. For example, (rF+ and Dex+3) instead of ring of protection from fire. Some artefacts allow to save item slots [example, (Wiz, MR) or (rF+ and +Inv)]. If we want to make artefacts less swappable, we need to change plain rings as well IMHO. And what's the purpose of having so many different plain rings when you can't swap them anyway?

Yet again, Duvessa and Lasty have terrible opinions.

Swapping items to face particular threats is an enormous part of the crawl experience. If anything, swapping should be easier. And more encouraged - probably by having fewer, weaker artes. An endgame character shouldn't have 3 pips in every resist and never need to swap anything. They should have 5 pips total that they're constantly swapping between resists - at the cost of a turn or two.

Lasty wrote:I deleted some off-topic arguments.

I do think that constant item-switching is a problem, especially when it's extremely low-cost (swapping jewellery), and I think that overall artefacts tend to be a more pronounced case of that problem. So, maybe the way to approach this, and also the way to make artefact negative qualities more relevant but less punishing, is to say that the first negative quality on any given artefact will always limit swapping, and the remainder can be from the full list.

We already have Curse and Contam to limit swapping, but a few other options might include:

Fragile: Removing this item destroys it (or has a significant chance to destroy it).
Soulbond: Removing this item drains you significantly.
Flux: Removing this item gives you temporary negative mutations (ala wretched star).

Of course, all of these are the same idea: removing this item makes something bad happen to you, so arguably we could combine all of these as possible outcomes of a single property called "Curse" or "Contam" or "Soulbond", which 1) reduces the number of distinct flags we need to add that do more or less the same thing, and 2) makes it harder to be sure removing the item will be safe.

As I said above, I am not sure at all why jewellery swapping is considered bad. But even if it is, putting fragile etc. egos on jewellery will not matter to the most common case of my jewellery swapping, plain old ring of ice/fire/protection from cold/protection from fire/magic/poison resistance. Wearing randart jewellery with fragile/soulbound/flux etc. would basically mean that you are playing Ash and have cursed your equipment slots (this is basically how I treat contam right now).

Swapping it in combat already takes a turn (or is it 0.5?), that is good enough in my opinion.

As a side note, is soulbound etc. stuff supposed to be ID'ed on pickup (or wear, like vampiric weapons?) Because I can still handle a contam ring I wear accidentally by using !cancel, but the others seem unavoidable.

if I had to extensively item swap on every single endgame char I would probably stop playing Crawl and start doing something more productive, like drugs

also that would ruin Ash and Ash is the best god so

Some of the bad randart effects are similar to some bad mutations:
TELE (teleportitis)
RAGE (berksetitis)
Noisy (shoutitis)
Hunger (fast metabolism)
+/- Str Dex or int (reduced attributes)

This, in my opinion, seems to work well. Perhaps adding some more of the mutations as artifact properties might be interesting:
- Forlorn
- Low mp
- Frail
- Slow healing

In the same way, I think that some of the effects that Lasty suggested for randarts could make interesting mutations.

Marbit wrote: Perhaps adding some more of the mutations as artifact properties might be interesting:
- Forlorn

A property that cuts into piety when removed, like the amulet of faith, would work to discourage swapping.

Properties to discourage swapping (names are bad as usual)
*Mana-fueled
PC loses 20% MP when equipping/removing the item

*Barbs
PC loses 10% HP when equipping/removing the item

*Poison
PC is poisoned after equipping/removing the item (red poison level probably).

*Ring removal
When removing the item, all ring slots become empty automatically (Op removes all 8 rings)

*Gloves removal
Applies to rings only. When removing the item, gloves are taken off automatically.

*No scrolls
PC cannot use scrolls during some time after removing the item

*No potions
PC cannot use potions during some time after removing the item

Sandman25 wrote:*No scrolls
PC cannot use scrolls during some time after removing the item

*No potions
PC cannot use potions during some time after removing the item

I can see these working if the duration was tied to XP gain.

The Tavern

New randart negative properties

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