The Tavern

Labyrinths, while boring, are very well balanced. There's only two dangers in there, and one of them is immensely predictable. Your hunger clock ticks, and you have to get out before you starve.
The other danger has some serious issues with it however.
The Minotaur at the end of the labyrinth can pick up and use the loot, which can result in vast differences in difficulty depending on what dropped. Furthermore, the difficulty doesn't always relate to how good the loot is. An artifact claymore isn't going to be very useful to a caster, but the minotaur will have fun with it. Likewise, the amount of damage a rod of the swarm can cause is much greater than its utility.
On top of that, there's no way to escape the labyrinth other than the stairs out, so whereas in a normal portal vault you can just leave if you aren't strong enough to finish, in a labyrinth one is forced to throw themself at the minotaur until someone dies.
My solution to this is just to put a runed door inbetween the minotaur and the loot, preventing it from picking up that +5 Crystal Plate Mail of Invulnerability (rElec rPois rRot rNeg rF+++ rC+++), but still allowing players to get that loot after killing the minotaur.

Agreed. This should be true in general. Antaeus wielding a the Sceptre of Torment happened to me. O_O;
At very least if something picks up HUGELY improved weapons it should get an XP bonus; not just...lol boost!

I'm actually OK with that happening outside of Labs because you can always just run away, but Lab is the only place in the game where retreat isn't an option.

While I do dislike monsters picking up weapons in general since "grabbing all glowing and runed weapons and stashing them on a floor above/in lava" is not a very fun activity, I actually don't mind when minotaur or Elf:3 elves grab some of the loot for themselves. Yeah it can make them more dangerous, sure. It can also make them easier (I've had minotaur zapping me with one of weak wands while I was using my bolt wand).

khalil wrote:An artifact claymore isn't going to be very useful to a caster, but the minotaur will have fun with it. Likewise, the amount of damage a rod of the swarm can cause is much greater than its utility.

The premises of both statements are incorrect. An artifact claymore might be amazing for a "caster" for all but the most absurdly challenge-condition-restrictive definitions of the term. Rod of the swarm allows any character (not felids?) to get access to a summoning tool that ranges in power from summon butterflies to murdering anything not rPois+.

Aside from that, labyrinths are mostly free loot, and the minotaur is the only meaningful danger. That the danger of the minotaur might be very slightly proportional to the quality of loot they drop is the only thing that makes it not exactly equivalent to a very slow treasure trove.

khalil wrote:I'm actually OK with that happening outside of Labs because you can always just run away, but Lab is the only place in the game where retreat isn't an option.

Could you elaborate? In almost all cases you can lead the minotaur outside the vault, run around, and then go back into his vault and grab the remaining loot. It seems at least a little cool that you get a choice whether to kill him and get his loot or just avoid him.

I was thinking "Deep elf" when I said caster, and the large amount of investment required to use a claymore combined with their terrible melee attributes would make it mostly useless unless it gave some nice resists.

wheals wrote:
khalil wrote:I'm actually OK with that happening outside of Labs because you can always just run away, but Lab is the only place in the game where retreat isn't an option.

Could you elaborate? In almost all cases you can lead the minotaur outside the vault, run around, and then go back into his vault and grab the remaining loot. It seems at least a little cool that you get a choice whether to kill him and get his loot or just avoid him.

I mean that in Lab, the only exit is the one the minotaur is sitting on. There's no way to leave without going through the Mino's vault except for the occasional abyss portal.

I am wondering whether I should propose "monsters don't pick up items at all" as a 0.15 rule change (one of the issues that complicates this a little is the resulting Beogh care). However, if that happened, then I would also suggest some exceptions, and the minotaur would be one of them. To explain, I don't agree with the statement that labyrinth loot can make a minotaur dangerous out of proportion -- somewhat more dangerous sure, but it's the same order of magnitude.

This is sort of a different conversation, but I'd like to advocate for "monsters don't pick up items that you've seen" rather than "monsters don't pick up items except some special cases". I think it's potentially interesting (read: unexpectedly dangerous) for them to pick up loot in general, but it's not interesting to have any benefit associated with hauling/hiding items that could be dangerous in monster hands, since it forces a lot of tedious behavior.

Lasty: Yes, that is one version I am considering for proposal. Good you mention it!

khalil wrote:
wheals wrote:
khalil wrote:I'm actually OK with that happening outside of Labs because you can always just run away, but Lab is the only place in the game where retreat isn't an option.

Could you elaborate? In almost all cases you can lead the minotaur outside the vault, run around, and then go back into his vault and grab the remaining loot. It seems at least a little cool that you get a choice whether to kill him and get his loot or just avoid him.

I mean that in Lab, the only exit is the one the minotaur is sitting on. There's no way to leave without going through the Mino's vault except for the occasional abyss portal.

Actually it's quite possible to escape though the exit, leaving the minotaur behind - like it is from any other speed 10 monster (you may use energy randomization or just some consumables)

Anyway I'd be really happy to see normal monster to stop to pick up items, at least consumables - it's terrible annoying to see a kobold on d:12 waste a potion of haste/might/heal wound/whatever - because most of time a player can't do nothing about that (he can't even know beforehand!) and it's terribly crippling for him.
On the other hand I don't think it's a bad idea let a selected pool of monster use items - for example, weapon/amulet/rod - it may led interesting situation, albeit unexpected and potentially dangerous (oh hello orc warlord with amulet of rage!).
I totally think the minotaur should be one of those - he's a plain boring easy monster guarding a potentially very good loot, increasing his threat in a unpredictable way is a good thing for me, plus it may led a player to spend more consumable to try to kill it rather than just escape away.
The idea of Lasty could be a very good solution

Minotaur with a rod has been a pretty nasty event the few times it's happened.

khalil wrote:I was thinking "Deep elf" when I said caster, and the large amount of investment required to use a claymore combined with their terrible melee attributes would make it mostly useless unless it gave some nice resists.

Any game mechanic that punishes people for playing an Elf should be vigorously encouraged.

khalil wrote:I was thinking "Deep elf" when I said caster, and the large amount of investment required to use a claymore combined with their terrible melee attributes would make it mostly useless unless it gave some nice resists.

Are you referring to their -1 apt in Long Blades? I wouldn't roll a DEGl, sure, but if your DECj gets the +8 Claymore of Winning {elec, rF+, Dex +4}, it's really easy to train it down to a decent delay and kill yaks with it in mid-to-late game. Kind of wasteful not to, really.

HenryFlower wrote:Minotaur with a rod has been a pretty nasty event the few times it's happened.

Sorry for the self quote here, but on re-reading, I realize that "Nasty minotaur with a rod" has interesting connotations.

But if the player never sees monsters pick up items (because of the proposed rule change where they only do it off-screen), how will they ever learn that it's a thing that exists without a very specific spoiler? (It means how you spend your time exploring/waiting on a level matters, for example.)

dpeg wrote:I am wondering whether I should propose "monsters don't pick up items at all" as a 0.15 rule change

Making it safe to just drop stuff wherever instead of having to trudge back up to Temple/Lair:2 every two seconds, thus eliminating one of the most tedious parts of Crawl? Please, please, please do. Preventing the odd monster with overpowered equipment is just a minor bonus.

What if the monsters that can use potions/wands/rods etc. just had a chance to spawn with one? The chance for truly powerful items like rods should be really small, of course. Monsters that guard treasure should spawn with treasure-type items! Then, monsters picking stuff at all would be unnecessary.

I do find this proposal a bit strange, this seems like one of the few areas where monsters picking up loot is basically completely harmless (all the loot is in one temporary location so there's no incentive to horde it/keep it away from monsters). The minotaur will get a go at that loot regardless of what you do (other than stabbing I guess), and I think that potentially makes the fight a lot more interesting.

Patashu wrote:But if the player never sees monsters pick up items (because of the proposed rule change where they only do it off-screen), how will they ever learn that it's a thing that exists without a very specific spoiler? (It means how you spend your time exploring/waiting on a level matters, for example.)

I agree, doing it that way is needlessly unintuitive. Just make it so that monsters can spawn with floor loot in their "inventory" if you want to retain the possibility of enemies with dangerous items.

I brought up this area because the loot is really good and can really screw with the difficulty. Rods are a big change, especially rods of swarm and shadows. Normally, monsters don't find those because they are really rare. In the Lab, the Mino is guaranteed to pick it up if it spawns, and then he summon a bunch of monsters in a one tile wide corridor, thus preventing you from doing anything other than slowly fighting your way to him or burning a teleport scroll. (Or casting abjuration I guess)

And yet most people still consider doing Labs to be a no-brainer.

Seems better than leaving the minotaur as a sack of HP, to be honest.

I actually like that the minotaur uses items. Anyone who has made it to the end of a labyrinth once should know that it can use the loot, so it's a "known unknown". If the minotaur's actions are completely predictable, then the whole endeavor is the equivalent to a gear-check boss in a MMO (if it's not already). While I like the idea overall of more loot in the hands of monsters, there are times when I've had to consider my tactics because I don't want that monster to pick up a potion of heal wounds.

If anything, I might propose the opposite: that a monster picks up items off the ground ONLY if it can see you (and is possibly smarter about doing so). That would also essentially prevent the tedium of throwing items in lava, plus a monster with a potion of heal wounds that you have no way of knowing about is really just a monster with extra HP unless you can kill it in one hit.

Tiber wrote:If anything, I might propose the opposite: that a monster picks up items off the ground ONLY if it can see you (and is possibly smarter about doing so). That would also essentially prevent the tedium of throwing items in lava, plus a monster with a potion of heal wounds that you have no way of knowing about is really just a monster with extra HP unless you can kill it in one hit.

On the other hand, some enemies with !might or !rage (or !invisibility to a much lesser extent) can become more dangerous, sometimes ridiculously more dangerous, for certain characters in an entirely unpredictable way. It is basically the potion equivalent of weapons of distortion, which is to say, it is like how weapons of distortion would be if their special status were "hidden" and they weren't described as glowing/runed in monster's hand.

Overall I like that enemies can become more dangerous, it makes item-using enemies (which are fairly recognizable as "all human-ish stuff") have greater variance and means that even lowly orcs and kobolds can provide some unexpected challenges. The problem is that some degree of danger for unfairness lurks there.

A simple warning message about enemies having some type of scroll/potion would keep the good and delimit the bad sufficiently, IMO. This is also good because, if you were on the fence about fighting something that you can probably handle but might be a bit tough for your level, if said thing is known to have a potion/scroll that might push you into using a few wand charges to take it out rather than just running, in order to get a (potentially) helpful item. Basically you should know what items are in your enemy's inventory, with exactly same information that you would have if those items were on the ground. Also note that if the enemy uses an unknown item before you kill it, you still get something useful out of it (one helpful consumable is now IDed), so it does provide incentive for taking on dudes who spawned with potions and scrolls early on, when those items could potentially have much more impact on the battle.

For 0.15 I also agree that monsters should spawn with rather than pick up stuff, but I'd like for there to be some exceptions. Elf and Labyrinths being the big ones, probably (at least some) Baileys too. For labs in particular, if you are worried about minotaur strength being too swingy, I guess you could have him spawn separately with equipment in addition to whatever loot is there. This punishes a "haste and run, loop around, grab loot and exit" avoidance strategy, as the minotaur has some stuff on him, while also putting some limits on what the 'taur can have.

Sar wrote:And yet most people still consider doing Labs to be a no-brainer.

I always used to go; now I decide whether I can take on unseen horrors because someone decided it would be cool to add a vault with several of them in it.

Invisible stalkers? You mean, unseen horrors?
I don't know, generally if I can deal with a minotaur I can deal with an unseen horror in a corridor.

If there was a change that would get more rods into the hands of monsters without then getting those rods into the hands of the player, that would probably be a good change. If the minotaur is occasionally spawning with instant-death equipment, either the player's whole plan was faulty from the start or the equipment in question needs to be looked at.

I assume the reason that most monsters don't spawn with consumables or wands or the like (only vampires with blood potions, gnoll sergeants with curing/heal potions, and uniques being the exception) is that it would be scummable -- instead of merely getting xp from hanging around a floor and killing stuff, you could actually get loot.
You could argue that only monsters generated when you first go downstairs should get stuff, but then the situation would be the same as the suggestion to not pick up items you've seen (which I'm probably going to try to implement once the tourney is over) in most cases. I suppose if you're not waking up offscreen monsters but you are waking them up when you come onscreen, the situation might be different.

It's also pretty bad that you are actively punished for not killing every potentially item-using monster as soon as it enters LOS (since when a monster uses a potion/scroll/wand it goes away). And that using fear makes you randomly lose scrolls of blinking.

Here's a compromise: When monsters use carried consumables, they don't consume them.

Code:: Orc knight takes a sip of an orange potion. Orc knight seems to move a little bit faster!

I've always thought there should be a possibility of a monster's loot being destroyed when you kill them. I would bias this slightly toward loot which causes problems - consumables or +0 uncursed armour you want to always try on. This does cause some flavor problems but no more than entire corpses disappearing 2/3rds the time, more so for mutagenic enemies.

Sar wrote:
Code:
Orc knight takes a sip of an orange potion. Orc knight seems to move a little bit faster!

Sure, maybe the consumable becomes unusable when a monster uses it, but it doesn't get destroyed.

Sar wrote:
Code:
Orc knight takes a sip of an orange potion. Orc knight seems to move a little bit faster!

Code:: You drink the potion of experience (sipped by necrophage) You gain 1 level. Acquired mutation: Herpes

reaver wrote:I've always thought there should be a possibility of a monster's loot being destroyed when you kill them. I would bias this slightly toward loot which causes problems - consumables or +0 uncursed armour you want to always try on. This does cause some flavor problems but no more than entire corpses disappearing 2/3rds the time, more so for mutagenic enemies.

Could be flavoured as 'The equipment was destroyed in the scuffle', which is pretty similar to the flavour for not always getting a corpse anyway.

Sar wrote:Invisible stalkers? You mean, unseen horrors?
I don't know, generally if I can deal with a minotaur I can deal with an unseen horror in a corridor.

Also shadow wraiths, who I guess aren't all that tough either, but I was surprised by one once and had to tele away...

0.02CZK:
While the minotaur in Lab can become way more dangerous if he picks up some of the loot, this mostly happens when you already _see_ him picking up and equipping it. Seeing him pick up those items serves as a fair enough warning that the fight may quickly turn nasty. I found myself on the business end of a wand of paralysis + some cruelbrutal weapon combo more than once when I did not take heed of this warning.

On a side note, some monsters find and equip weapons when out of sight. No problem with that, but one notices the weapon's brand only when the monster equips it and is in your sight. I'd say that some brands could be clearly visible when a monster wields it, instead of being displayed as a "glowing whip" or the like (flaming brand springs to mind as the most obvious, freezing and elec quickly follow).

distortion should be marked as such. one hit banishing you with a dagger is no fun. at all.
it encourages a terrible paranoia.

2Hirsch I
I'll be honest, what prompted this was rods. Mino + rod of shadows = me being eaten by trolls.

The Tavern

Proposal: Don't let the Mino use lab loot

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