The Tavern

As long as your inventory has a space limit stashing items in some form will be part of crawl. Stashing creates tedium, whether you pile your stuff in one place or leave it strewn about the dungeon you have to run to get it. Stashing is also fairly spoilery. Where is it safe to leave gear? will monsters pick up my gear? and are jellies active when i'm off the floor? are all questions that an unspoiled player will find hard to answer.
I propose that to lessen tedium, the need spoiler knowledge, and the potential frustration of jellies eating you gear the Ecumenical Temple be given multiple entrances spread throughout the dungeon. Each of these entrances would act like the gates into hell, no matter which one you enter you are brought to the same place, leaving brings you back to the door you used to get in.
The locations would roughly be D:4-7, to serve its current purpose and take care of the upper dungeon, D:12-15 or V:1-2 for the end dungeon and extended, and L:2-5 to deal with mid dungeon, lair, and the lair branches.
This would lessen tedium by reducing the distance you would need to travel, Reduce the necessity of spoilers by giving a clear place to leave your gear, and enhance the flavor of the temple by making it your safe heaven/ home base.

The only con of this I can see is reduced difficulty. It would be easier to get to your stash, and give you a safe place to rest in the later dungeons. I don't think either of these are very major as the danger of heading to your stash is already low, and heading into the temple is not much different than heading up stairs.

I am in the minority here, but I don't even use stashes. Never found them to be worth the tedium.

I am not sure it is minority now, in 0.15 and trunk. I believe most players don't use stashes. Artefacts are not destroyed by jellies, no items can be picked up by monsters and you can have 30+ potions of every kind in your inventory just fine.

I see where you are coming from, but I think your proposal is not the best way to address that.

For what it's worth, monsters don't pick up anything you've seen. Since this includes stuff you dropped, the newbie needn't fear monsters rummaging around in her stash anymore. Of course, he wouldn't know but he wouldn't have known the pre-0.15 rules either, so he's just better off now.

That leaves jellies as a potential problem. I'd much rather tackle that in other ways than by promoting a universal stashing place (none of which include getting rid of jellies, of course).

Can jellies be generated as random monster spawns after level creation? Jellies are good when created at level generation -- they are nontrivial to kill in the early D and if you run away from them they'll eat loot/corpses and reproduce; but if a jelly is created after level creation (for example when travelling through the level) in a cleared part, it can eat stashes (or simply junk weapons to reproduce) and the small chance of this is annoying and makes stashing somewhat useful. Maybe special-casing them to be only generated at level creation would be a good change.

That doesn't solve anything because there's no way to know if you've killed all the monsters that originally generated on a level (jellies, unfortunately, can move around).

You could prevent jellies (and necrophagi etc) from eating items seen by the player; that's consistent with the behaviour for every other monster.

I used to be for this proposal, but now I find it unnecessary.

Ever since item weight restrictions were removed, I only stash an average of 3 items in Temple (excess permafood, books, and overflow ranged ammo types), then I move it all to Lair:2, if I really need to. Sometimes I get to Lair: 2 before I even need to establish a Temple stash.

I dont think eating items you have not seen is the good part of jellies design.

Then what is the good part of jellies design? Eating items you have seen isn't it, because that encourages stashing, so either jellies eating things you haven't seen is good design, or jellies eating things is 100% bad design.

Eating items currently in your LOS is the good part.

"You hear a distant slurping sound" is an excellent feature of jellies. Even though the correct, rational behavior is probably to ignore the message (or mute it in your .crawlrc) the feeling of "OH NOES THE JELLY IS EATING MY ACQUIREMENT SCROLLS" has definitely changed my behavior.

Other things that are good about jellies:

* They eat doors
* They hurt you when you melee them
* They introduce corrosion
* They eat most launched ammo

Now that you can't just kite them with rocks, I like them a bunch as monsters go.

they eat doors? THEY EAT DOORS? this is awesome, how the hell did I never notice that?

probably because it never does anything meaningful in practice

I'll join the "stopped stashing since 0.15 and it hasn't really been a problem" camp.

Personally, the one case where I think stashing is still helpful (i.e. it prevents a valuable item from getting lost without it taking up inventory space) is purely strategic items (books and strategic consumables). Excess permafood and ammo types make sense to stash in theory, but in practice it's rarely necessary.

Personally, I think the problem isn't stashing, it's all three of these things taking up so much inventory space. Permafood has already been condensed considerably but I'd be happy to see it condensed even more (on the other hand, you can basically ignore all permafood except one type of ration and be fine for 99% of characters, so it doesn't matter much). Ammo taking up so much space if you carry around different types is a huge annoyance to me, especially when it's throwing ammo or sling bullets, which I believe come in more varieties than arrows or bolts do, but I'm not sure what the best solution to this is.

Strategic items just shouldn't take up space, as far as I'm concerned. I'd be in favor of books just disappearing the moment you get them and adding to the list that appears when you hit M, and enchant armour, enchant weapon, and cure mutation potions (and possibly others) no longer taking up any inventory space (and possibly becoming a new non-potion, non-scroll consumable to differentiate them).

But that's a different discussion in many ways. The end result is that I agree with what seems to be the general consensus of this thread: the problem isn't that going back to your stash is too much of a pain, it's the mechanics that encourage (or appear to encourage) stashing in the first place.

When there was item weight playing a character who had little strength made stashes prerequisite. Its a bit less important now however I've found that playing gods like sif or any style which entails many items (ranged fighters) then a stash is almost always needed.

I disagree. Prior to item weight removal, you could just drop items wherever and it would be fine -- all this hand-wringing about jellies eating your stuff is psychological. If it's in a corner, it's fine. If it's on or near the downstairs (so when you come back up, you're right there) it's fine. Need to get something you dropped, use ctrl-F.

edit: w/r/t multiple temple entrances, it could be useful for mitigating this problem if we deem the flavor important enough to keep. A lower D or U temple entrance is more accessible for a character that wants to take advantage of a brand gift.

I always just drop stuff whenever I need room, wherever I am, and if I need it later I just ctrl+F. I've been doing this since item destruction and monsters taking items was a thing, and I never have lost an item I wanted later.

You basically never lose your items to jellies unless you drop them off on a jelly-infested floor, which only happens in layouts with insane amounts of doors.
In which case you just put them on another, non-infested floor and drop excess items wherever instead of one central place where a stray jelly actually could cause mayhem if it happened to spawn.