Wednesday, 26th February 2014, 16:21 by Quazifuji
I'm gonna go in the "sparkling fountains are a fun concept but need a rework in the execution" camp. Right now, drinking for a sparkling fountain is kind of like Quaff-IDing a potion, except it doesn't use up a potion. In combat, you probably only want to use it in emergencies, because the risk of a paralysis or confuse would usually outweigh the chance of something nice - I think in most situations where you could survive a paralysis, you could survive with no effect too. Outside of combat, it's basically a mutation roulette that usually does nothing. Neither of these effects are very interesting.
Personally, I think Sparkling Fountains have a lot of potential to be something fun and exciting to stumble upon. We just need to make them more likely to be useful. I think mainly, they should either be purely tactical, or purely strategic.
If they're purely tactical, I would make them very heavily weighted towards good effects, and possibly remove the particularly nasty tactical effects like paralysis. As I said, the problem with including extremely dangerous effects in there is that you usually have to be desperate to drink one. Most of the time, it would probably be safer to teleport or fight without the fountain or quaff a known potion than to quaff the fountain. Sure, we can always take the "it's just for fun, it doesn't need to be tactically useful" approach, but I'd say the fountain's more fun if it's more tactically interesting. There should be more cases where drinking from a fountain hoping for something that turns a fight around is better, or at least comparable to, trying to escape.
Personally, I think balancing that would be tough, and I'd rather see them changed to be purely strategic. Letting them stay as a mutation roulette, just increasing the odds of the mutation-related potions (maybe make it evenly divided between nothing, cure mutations, beneficial mutations, or random mutations) would be the simplest way to do this, and would still be fun, although I think a lot of people would rather avoid the risk. It would still be more fun for people who enjoy using the fountains as a mutation roulette, though, which I think outnumber the people who like to quaff them mid-fight hoping for a good tactical effect.
It's possible we could come up with more interesting effects, though. There are a lot of fun strategic effects out there, both good and bad, although not all fit with quaffing from a fountain. At the very least, we could include temporary-but-still-long-enough-to-be-somewhat-strategic effects like stat drain, rot, or opposite effects. But there might be other neat things too. Granting a Vehumet-style one-time random spell memorizaton would be interesting. Affecting the enchant level on your weapon or granting an item or permanent ally would also be neat if we could come up with a reasonable flavor explanation. Some tactical effects that could still be a risk outside of combat could also included as possible negatives, like teleportation (although, come to think of it, teleportation would just encourage clearing the whole level before drinking it, which isn't too interesting).
Either way, I think a dungeon feature you can find that you can use for neat effects is a cool concept. The fact that some people still quaff them for a mutation roulette just for fun even though they're usually useless and sometimes harmful kind of shows that. And I think there's a way to take that concept and make it more tactically or strategically compelling for the people who find the current fountains useless/too risky.
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