Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 6454
Joined: Tuesday, 30th October 2012, 19:06
IDing and scrolls
There's a couple reasons for this, but chief among them are:
1. Important tactical scrolls aren't rare (And therefore aren't a big deal to waste)
2. Important strategic scrolls aren't rare (And therefore aren't a big deal to waste)
3. Bad scroll effects are temporary (or at least easy to remove)
4. Rare scrolls aren't that important (And therefore aren't a big deal to waste)
5. Important and rare scrolls aren't really wasteable (Acquirement is always useful the moment you get it, and should you happen across an EW3 early enough to 'waste' it on an early weapon, it's still not a terrible waste, because there's plenty of EW1 & 2, and having a more powerful weapon early is a good thing)
What I propose is this:
We make there be some categories of scrolls which *are* a big deal to waste. What i would like to see is for the enchant scrolls to become altogether rarer, and have larger effects (They don't have a large enough effect individually to become rare as is)
If each enchant scroll was 5 times more powerful and occurred 1/5th as often, it would be a rather important scroll, and wasting it by read-iding it early would be a fairly large oppourtunity cost.
The problem I see with this, and what I think would be a good solution:
1. Currently, ID scrolls are pretty taxed on IDing your potions in a timely fashion, if it became important or relevant to use ID scrolls on scrolls as well as potions, you'd deprive yourself of some very important scrolls and/or potions early, making yourself dead a lot more often. This could be fixed by increasing the number of ID scrolls, but that pretty much defeats the purpose of having them in the first place, and at some point everything is ID'd and your still flooded with ID scrolls, which is annoying. My preference here is to introduce additional situation ways to ID scrolls/potions, similar to how you can ID jewelry by getting into the right situation. For example taking fire damage could ID immolation, being teleported or fighting a blink frog could ID blinking and/or teleport, etc. This allows you to gradually learn what the consumables are, without either tediously use-IDing them in a safe situation or having to flood the game with ID scrolls (In fact with sufficient ID mechanisms in place ID scrolls could be reduced to uncommon or rare, and used for more unusual items)
2. With read-ID being a poor choice, it's hard to ID scrolls of identification, of course if situational-mechanism-based identification were in place, Scrolls of Identification could simply identify themselves whenever you had an unidentified item in your inventory.
3. Situational, mechanism-based mechanics have a possibility of having the exact mechanism being hidden from the user, which invites "Spoiled" behavior (Where out of game knowledge can be used for gains) of course the easy solution to this is to simply document the mechanisms in-game (presumably in the help section and in the description of the item itself)
4. Mechanism-based mechanics have the possibilty of being tedious, if "take some fire damage" is a way to identify a type of scroll, some players will inevitably attempt to take some fire damage every time they get a new type of scroll, to see if that might be it. To discourage such behavior, the conditions of mechanism-based identification either need to be ones that aren't easily arrangeable by the player, or ones that would simply happen normally when progressing through the game with no extra tedium needed. "Step into shallow water" would be an example of a bad mechanic, because it's not one that comes with any risk for the player, and can be directly caused by the player with tedious travelling. Those types of conditions would need to be avoided.
I'm sure there's other problems with this that I haven't thought of, and a lot of people just don't like the ID game at all, but I'd rather see it provide interesting choices than be removed bit by bit, personally. There's also some question of whether we could find enough mechanisms for identifying that were not "bad", I would also personally like to see the difficulty of auto-IDing something raise with the usefulness of it, and ideally be thematically appropriate (If I could ask for everything that I want:)