Roderic wrote:Let's say that every other trait of your play: skills, stats, resistances, weapons... experiement variability along the game, sometimes you lose them sometimes you gain. But the slot inventory is fixed as if it were a dogma and currently is very dettached from the interaction with the dungeon.
A lot of other things are immune to being messed with by enemies and game effects. No enemy effect changes the fact that the yuhjklnm keys move my character. No enemy effects change the spells I have memorized (orange crystal statues used to do this but don't any longer, and for good reason). No enemy effects reassign the spell or ability slots to try to prompt miskeying.
In terms of game play, the "inventory" is just a menu, it is an interface that separates "stuff that is 100% accessible to me" from "stuff that is accessible to me when no enemies are present." (For speedruns that separation matters more but let's ignore that.)
The reason item destruction was bad was not because it was painful—it is also painful when I lose a character I've invested an hour or two in—but because it mucked with that separation in ways that were more frustrating than actually challenging in 99 out of 100 cases. You could squirrel away whatever you wanted and make it 100% safe, and still have access to it at any moment when an enemy was not in your face. So long as you carried one or two of each consumable—whatever you felt comfortable with—every encounter was exactly the same as carrying all your consumables in your inventory, you just had to trek back to your stash continually in order to resupply.
All the stuff you are suggesting is not just like the more recent (now removed) item destruction, which is bad enough. It looks more like old item destruction, when you could do stuff like carry around extra unneeded scrolls to limit the chances that good ones would be burned up. All the stuff you suggest encourage workarounds that intrude on game play.
Locked slots means you have to carry various different food types around and items that produce similar effects, so that if one thing gets locked you have a fallback. Removal of slots means that you just roll with less slots filled, obviously, because having stuff in your inventory fall out of it randomly is really bad because it means you cannot ever fly over lava or deep water (unless merfolk in latter case)—the corollary of this is that you have to wrangle with auto-pickup even more than usual, which doesn't sound very fun either. Incapacity to grab items doesn't matter unless combined with removal of slots, but as pointed out above there's a workaround to that; besides, the game already has a great way to discourage picking up items—namely, by having enemies around. When enemies are around you don't want to waste turns picking up something, and when enemies are not around, why on earth wouldn't the game allow you to pick something up, except to annoy (not challenge) you? The "take item(s) from your inventory and scatter them over the level" idea is far and away the worst and I really hope I don't have to explain why.
I don't mean to be harsh and I don't intend any of this personally, but I fundamentally fail to see how any of these proposals would add to the game. So long as the floor is an "infinite bag of holding" in Crawl, and you can freely travel back or forward, I think the inventory must be treated as simply an interface convenience. The only times when inventory concerns
might even approach significance are those few instances in Crawl when your ability to backtrack freely is curtailed, e.g., Pan, Abyss, and some portals. Things that randomly screw with inventory are attacks on the player's time and patience, pure and simple, rather than challenges to his or her actual ability to play Crawl.