Leafsnail wrote:Having to put all your consumables on different tiles sounds horrible
As long as you don't fight monsters near your stash, you don't have to worry about stacking things there; the idea was rather to make it harder to drop everything in the last minute; like harpies steal food from the tile players stand on. [I just saw the post by RBrandon that that got removed... aww, might as well remove that attack from harpies altogether, what's the point.. if you ask me, they should actually seek out food stacks in preference to the player, haha]
and that formula would encourage players to find some breakpoint where your items are never/rarely destroyed.
Like they are encouraged to train weapon skills until they reached min delay, or spellcasting until the main spells are hungerless? That's not a fly in the soup, that's fly soup, and part of the point IMHO, to make informed choices about priorities which actually have an effect on the outcome. But still, people who don't want to min/max don't have to, and people who do will do that anyway, always.
There's no need to have them guessing or reading the wiki though, it could simply be stated that if you carry more than X potions/scrolls, the likelihood of them getting destroyed in elemental attacks increases, and that preservation cloaks can help with that.
And finally, that breakpoint exists already anyway, it's just at zero right now. How is that better? It just means if you find a potion of cure mutation or a scroll of acquirement you don't want to use yet (maybe because you want to equip a shield first to lower the chance of getting one), you basically "have" to drop them whenever there is the slightest chance of elemental attacks, running back and forth a lot - instead of dropping 10 of the 20 potions of curing you are carrying around, and keeping the cure mutation potion.
I don't really see what your proposal fixes, carrying a lot of needless items is already punished under the current system
I'm not sure it is punished, at least not for characters with even a modest amount of strength. If potions and scrolls only stacked to a certain amount that might help though.
It's supposed to fix the preservation ego forcing the choice between boring cloaks and a modicum of safety, or interesting cloaks and either running a risk or running back and forth a lot, even when you have very few potions and scrolls. The idea is to make it possible to weigh between stuff like a cloak with good preservation and nothing else, and a cloak with little preservation but other resistances etc., or going without preservation altogether, without having to be paranoid as long as you're restricting yourself to items you will actually need, and/or to at least not losing every last scroll/potion if you run into some elemental damage that repeatedly hits you for 1 hp before you can react. I get that crawl is about the sadism of the RNG first and foremost, but too much of that is not difficulty so much as rather a disconnect between player actions and what is going on on the screen.
(and also gives you no real advantage other than saving time anyway).
Running back to your stash to get a scroll of holy word or a potion of haste is not an option when you're surrounded, fell through a shaft, are in the abyss, in pandemonium, in a ziggurat - which means you'd have to decide beforehand what you really need, and leave the rest at your stash, or risk losing some of it. I would like the game to be more playable without using a stash at all... that being stingy with things you have an abundance of requires boring play is okay IMHO, that's up to the player. As I said, I think people bring that to the game, instead of the other way around. And utter randomness when it comes to loosing items just means you have to either use them up right away, or run back and forth between stashes. It encourages everything *but* sensible play.