The Tavern

I had this idea earlier today, and I would like some feedback. When worn, an amulet of unbreathing would provide rDrown and !silence. I'm thinking of this as a regular amulet type, not an unrandart. There are a few things I'm not sure about:

Should the rDrown allow the player to survive in deep water, like grey draconians can? I doubt that this would be overpowered with an action delay penalty like grey draconians, but I don't know if it's desired. Player mummies and gargoyles do not need to breathe but still currently drown in deep water, after all.

How strong would !sil as a player attribute actually be? Silence would make for a very effective tool versus living or undead spellcasters, but having silence available consistently requires training Hexes and/or Air Magic for a level 5 spell. I honestly can't tell if this would be considered overpowered or not.

Clearly this would become just a swap item if it lacked some kind of limitation, but what should that be? Needing time to charge up after putting it on would be too much like "Gourmand. Perhaps it could auto-curse itself when worn? (The amulet tightly grasps your neck!)

Any thoughts on this?

I think the amulet of unbreathing could have its uses, but coupling it with silence seems overboard.

magicpoints wrote:Should the rDrown allow the player to survive in deep water, like grey draconians can? I doubt that this would be overpowered with an action delay penalty like grey draconians, but I don't know if it's desired. Player mummies and gargoyles do not need to breathe but still currently drown in deep water, after all.

What's the distinction between being able to survive in deep water and just flying over it? The only one I can think of is being able to pick up items that have been dropped in the water, and I don't know if that particular distinction is quite enough to justify adding an amulet of unbreathing when there's already multiple sources of flying.

nicolae wrote:What's the distinction between being able to survive in deep water and just flying over it? The only one I can think of is being able to pick up items that have been dropped in the water, and I don't know if that particular distinction is quite enough to justify adding an amulet of unbreathing when there's already multiple sources of flying.

Indeed, there are so many ways to handle liquids that adding one more would be a bad idea. Furthermore, I think that the number of current sources should be cut down, such as by removing rings of flight.

I generally think !sil is a bad idea, for both player and monsters. The binary "ha ha your powers cannot effect me lol" gameplay it creates isn't very deep, and like high magic resistance it has to be added to every single extended threat in the game. I think it was insightful of you to notice that tactical use would be even worse, but any attempt at strategic equips is awkward and hacky, definitely not worth it for an already iffy proposal.

Would the silence be constant or an evokeable ability? Either way I think it would be a to powerful an effect for a regular amulet. Giving Trog worshipers a fairly common, repeatable source of silence is a boost I don't think they need.

If the amulet didn't let you move through water I think it would be to narrow to be useful. It would only grant protection from your own Mephitic Cloud, Swamp Drake/Dragon Breath, Water Elementals, and Spores Right? With water movement it would be the type of item you keep around somewhere for when you need it but not something you'd normally carry.

That being said, with water movement and some type of silence, I do think this would make a cool unrand. For a set back removing the amulet could leave you gasping for air, unable to cast spells or use god abilities for a short while.

!sil means resistance to silence for the people who misunderstood.
This amulet would be just as useless as most of the other amulets.

actually, casting silence and being not affected by it seems pretty broken.

Wahaha wrote:!sil means resistance to silence for the people who misunderstood.
This amulet would be just as useless as most of the other amulets.

I see, that makes sense. !sil is not a good effect for players to have access to. Only two enemies can silence you right, Silent specters, and Mennas? So its way to narrow for that purpose. If it let you cast spells while under your own silence effect it would be way to powerful, and make silence a must have spell.

If casting spells while silenced is too powerful then we got a grossly overpowered combo in the game right now. If you cast silence, there's nothing actually preventing you from hitting things with a weapon, while silenced! And you don't even need to wear an amulet to do it!

you could just recast silence forever, and it would not matter, because scrolls, god abilities, and spells would still be avaliable.
oh, I guess you are joking. sorry.

magicpoints wrote:Any thoughts on this?

The argument below contains several blind assertions for which the underlying reasoning has been snipped out in the interest of clarity of the overall point:

rDrown overlaps with Flight.
rSilence is uninteresting for several reasons.

rSilence is the more relevant attribute of this item (outside of LairWaterBranch), and its application would be primarily tactical. Amulets in DCSS tend to fill the space of strategic use rather than tactical use, thus if this item were added it would be better as a ring.

There are already 24 (!) rings in the game. Increasing the amount of rings increases the associated information load on players, which is already quite high.

Inventory limits are also a thing, and rings do not stack. Increasing the amount of rings thus increases the amount of time players are forced to spend micromanaging their inventories.

Players have a finite amount of time to spend playing, and any increase in the requisite time for inventory micromanagement necessarily decreases the amount of time spent killing dudes. Inventory micromanagement is less fun than dudekilling. (This is an assertion that may not hold for all of the playerbase, but I feel comfortable making it here.) Thus, commits that increase the amount of inventory micromanagement necessary to play Crawl directly make the game less fun to play. To avoid this, the amount of jewellery in Crawl should be reduced rather than increased, with ring types combined or flat out removed.

In order to override the concerns above, potential ring effect additions would have to be both unique enough and potentially fun enough for a large subset of characters as to make adding said effect worth the decrease in fun incurred by the associated increase in inventory micro and information load. I do not think that this Amulet of Unbreathing fits these criteria, thus I think it would be a bad addition.

it is an amulet, not a ring.

Not getting confused by spores, etc. Definitely a bit useful here and there.
Silence doesn't really make sense imo. Unless it's a magic-based 'silenceeeee', I don't think not-breathing would hold back your clunky armor.

Hirsch I wrote:it is an amulet, not a ring.

Implojin wrote: Amulets in DCSS tend to fill the space of strategic use rather than tactical use, thus if this item were added it would be better as a ring.

Implojin: Note that the whole "Amulets are strategic rings are tactical" thing was a vague correlation noticed by dpeg that has been sort of picked up by the community because it makes Amulets and Rings different. Clarity, Guardian Spirit, Rage, Inaccuracy, Stasis, and Warding are tactical amulets while there are several rings can influence strategic decisions like how you allocate your skills (Invisibility, Wizardry, Slaying, Magical Power). I cannot recall any time it has actually effected a design decision, although it may have happened once or twice. I think power level and complexity of the effect are far better indicator of whether a new jewelry effect should be a ring or an amulet.

Edit: Change the phrase "build your character around" to something more clear.

reaver wrote:there are several rings you can build your character around (Invisibility, Wizardry, Slaying, Magical Power)

What do you mean?

Wizardry makes sense at any rate, since people often do train magical skills less than they would otherwise.

That is not what I would call "building character around", but okay.

Well, the interesting part of this amulet would be !sil but I don't think it would be a very good addition as a player attribute. Basically because there aren't many enemies who can silence you at all and being able to ignore that silence by swapping on an amulet would make them a lot less interesting/threatening in a pretty simplistic way.
On the other hand there's player casted silence and yes sure being able to call upon gods and using magic under it would make it stronger, but given how the silence field works and the questionable melee threat most things you'd want to silence pose, I think the way to go would still be beating everything up after silencing. The thing is, casting silence locks you out of most escape methods for a good while and thus you have to judge well if you can kill everyone you want to silence; just having an amulet you can put on to fix misjudgements when choosing when to silence feels a bit cheap and I think it makes the spell overall less interesting.

reaver wrote:whether a new jewelry effect should be a ring or an amulet.

For simplicity's sake I chose to highlight the utter mess of ring effects in DCSS. Dismissing for the moment the notion of consistency in effect type per body slot (which is a topic for another thread), the reasoning is unchanged whether you paint the effect as an amulet, ring, body armour, or prince albert:

If it increases the information load on the player and takes up another inventory slot, you had better have a compelling reason for adding it to the game.

rDrown has been addressed by nicolae's post above.
rSilence has been addressed by dck's post above.

I see no compelling reason for an item with these properties to exist.

Instead of resisting silence, if it's a non-breathing amulet, make the player silent while it's worn, but you're immune to drowning and cloud effects (other than LOS blocking). It's situational this way, but provides a use when you need it, at the exchange of being unable to cast.

Or, make it the amulet of flat-face. No drowning while wearing it, but no breathing, quaffing, or eating either. Wearing it makes your mouth scab over like Agent Smith did to Neo near the beginning of the Matrix.

Hirsch I wrote:you could just recast silence forever, and it would not matter, because scrolls, god abilities, and spells would still be avaliable.

You're right, it literally would not matter because there are only a few enemies in a 3 rune game worth silencing and when they're silenced they're easily dispatched with a melee weapon anyway.

Wahaha wrote:You're right, it literally would not matter because there are only a few enemies in a 3 rune game worth silencing and when they're silenced they're easily dispatched with a melee weapon anyway.

If the cost of being silenced were nil, I really don't think you'd say that there are only a few enemies worth silencing. And saying "3 rune game" is ridiculous, since Tomb is the only part of extended where silence is useful in the slightest.

IronJelly wrote:Instead of resisting silence, if it's a non-breathing amulet, make the player silent while it's worn, but you're immune to drowning and cloud effects (other than LOS blocking). It's situational this way, but provides a use when you need it, at the exchange of being unable to cast.

Or, make it the amulet of flat-face. No drowning while wearing it, but no breathing, quaffing, or eating either. Wearing it makes your mouth scab over like Agent Smith did to Neo near the beginning of the Matrix.

Yes I think we need another completely useless amulet too.

I think the problem from a design standpoint is that if a !sil amulet existed, you would want to have Silence up all the time. Further, you'd want to recast it regularly for big radius. I think a lot of this thread is really underrating how useful Silence would be if it didn't remove so many of your capabilities.

wheals wrote:
Wahaha wrote:You're right, it literally would not matter because there are only a few enemies in a 3 rune game worth silencing and when they're silenced they're easily dispatched with a melee weapon anyway.

If the cost of being silenced were nil, I really don't think you'd say that there are only a few enemies worth silencing. And saying "3 rune game" is ridiculous, since Tomb is the only part of extended where silence is useful in the slightest.

To be fair, the addition of Demonspawn packs means silence is actually useful in Pan now.

Wahaha wrote:
Hirsch I wrote:you could just recast silence forever, and it would not matter, because scrolls, god abilities, and spells would still be avaliable.

You're right, it literally would not matter because there are only a few enemies in a 3 rune game worth silencing and when they're silenced they're easily dispatched with a melee weapon anyway.

did you know silenced enemies dont shout? and that you can cast quiet shatter while silenced? or LCS? or Lightining Bolt? what about a nice and quiet fire storm?
the point is NOT enemies not casting spells.

You can also silence titans, fire giants, frost giants, deep troll shamans, deep troll earth mages, all the elves, hell knights, draconians, nagas, merfolk, Vaults monsters, and the rest. But sure, silence has nothing to do with enemies casting spells.

Silence is extremely strong up to and including zot, it used to be very situational in Hells and nearly useless in Pan but with those demonspawn added maybe it is decent there now. (Haven't tried since the change.)

I feel like if there are strong effects like silence, there shouldn't be ways to get around them by players. It reminds me of dudes using berserk with amulets of resist slow back in the day. Also note that player-caused silence was already buffed fairly recently—indirectly, but non-trivially—by the addition of the elemental evocables.

wheals wrote:You can also silence titans, fire giants, frost giants, deep troll shamans, deep troll earth mages, all the elves, hell knights, draconians, nagas, merfolk, Vaults monsters, and the rest. But sure, silence has nothing to do with enemies casting spells.

yeah, it is strong, but the broken and boring part is that, with that amulet, spells that have huge noise as a drawback would become insanely powerful. shatter stabbing would become a thing, can you imagine that?

Hirsch I wrote:
wheals wrote:You can also silence titans, fire giants, frost giants, deep troll shamans, deep troll earth mages, all the elves, hell knights, draconians, nagas, merfolk, Vaults monsters, and the rest. But sure, silence has nothing to do with enemies casting spells.

yeah, it is strong, but the broken and boring part is that, with that amulet, spells that have huge noise as a drawback would become insanely powerful. shatter stabbing would become a thing, can you imagine that?

Something that dampened noise could be fun, but that seems better as an unrandart. Something like

The Muffler
+4 scarf (counts as cap)
"Though it keeps one's surroundings eerily quiet, many find this strange headgear stifling. Others describe it more charitably as merely 'snug.'"
+ rC+
+ Any non-instantaneous action may take longer to complete while wearing The Muffler [something like (1d4-1) auts added to any action that normally takes at least 0.1 auts]
+ All actions in LOS have their noise drastically reduced
+ Optional: Immunity to poisonous clouds and miasma (it doesn't just keep you warm, but filters your breathing!).

wheals wrote:If the cost of being silenced were nil, I really don't think you'd say that there are only a few enemies worth silencing.

It's not a question of whether you would use silence more often or not. The answer is yes. The question is "is it too powerful?". To answer this you have to answer this question:

titans, fire giants, frost giants, deep troll shamans, deep troll earth mages, all the elves, hell knights, draconians, nagas, merfolk, Vaults monsters, and the rest

Would you silence these enemies if you knew silence but didn't have the amulet?

If the answer is yes, how much of a difference would having the amulet make? You would STILL be killing these enemies while they're silenced. The only thing that the amulet changes is it lets you have worse tactics because you don't need to separate enemies from their friends, something you should be doing anyway. Is this useful? Yeah. But it's not too powerful.

If the answer is no you wouldn't silence them, then they weren't a real threat to your character to begin with, and silencing has only a small benefit. Again not too powerful.

This is what I mean by "enemies WORTH silencing". If you can silence every hell knight, well good for you, but they were harmless anyway. If this amulet existed I wouldn't get silence more often.

And saying "3 rune game" is ridiculous, since Tomb is the only part of extended where silence is useful in the slightest.

Elf is not a necessary part of a 3 rune game for people who want to win. Crypt is entirely optional too. Pan has demonspawn spellcasters.

Anything that can make auto-exploring shoals less weird is something I like.

The Tavern

Jewellery idea: Amulet of Unbreathing

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