More cards for deck of oddities!

[ololoev]

Deck of oddities should be odd!
My suggestion is to return some removed cards to the deck of oddities. It may be Experience, Genie, Sage (where player can choose a skill), Trovel, Vitrification. It won't change balance and can hardly affect scumming rate. But a player will definitely be pleased by a random effect.

[kuniqs]

Those cards were removed 'cause they were extra scummy with Nemelex.
Right now Nemelex doesn't award decks of oddities, I think.
Cards you mentioned - Experience (potion of experience), Trowel (randomly generated portals & Gozag's speciality), Genie (scroll of acquirement), Sage & Vitrification (Ashenzari's shtick) have either consumable equivalents or are powerful enough to be restricted to god abilities.
Since deck of oddities are now avaliable only as random items, and since those cards mentioned have random item equivalents, adding those cards to this deck is redundant.

[ololoev]

Cards you mentioned - Experience (potion of experience), Trowel (randomly generated portals & Gozag's speciality), Genie (scroll of acquirement), Sage & Vitrification (Ashenzari's shtick) have either consumable equivalents or are powerful enough to be restricted to god abilities.

Why do everybody think that every single effect or item in the game should be restricted to a single source?
We don't remove wands and Makh abilities because they are nearly the same as spells. Because casting spells and worshipping Makhleb are a litthe different things. Some randomness in decks won't break balance and I don't think many players will be forced to scum Nemelex as it was somewhere in 0.14-.
And deck of oddities never appears as a real deck, but cards from it may spawn in any real deck with a very little chance. Thus Nemelexers face ~3-5 cards from this deck during the game.

[njvack]

Why do everybody think that every single effect or item in the game should be restricted to a single source?
We don't remove wands and Makh abilities because they are nearly the same as spells.

Restricting the number of sources for identical (or very similar) effects has been happening on a large scale for a long time (eg: old rods -vs- new rods, and when Okawaru used to have two invocations: Might and Haste). Partly it's because having a bunch of sources of an effect makes the effect less "rare" (and gives fewer choices), partly it's because different effects may combine in interesting ways.

The various sources of Haste strikes me as really being a holdover from old versions of Crawl and I would not be surprised to see some of them go away. !HW and /HW being the same thing, similarly.

The differences don't need to be major (Elixir, Trog's Hand, and Ambrosia all do vaguely similar things) but giving another rare item that's literally just !Experience or ?Acquirement would be kind of lame. (I think !Experience is lame to begin with, though, so yeah.)

And AFAIK, Nemelex does gift Oddities -- it's just that Oddities doesn't spawn as a deck, but 1% of cards in any deck will be drawn from Oddities instead of the base deck type. So adding these cards back in would mean that Nemelex would eventually gift unbounded numbers of them, unless they're special-cased.

[bcadren]

And AFAIK, Nemelex does gift Oddities -- it's just that Oddities doesn't spawn as a deck, but 1% of cards in any deck will be drawn from Oddities instead of the base deck type. So adding these cards back in would mean that Nemelex would eventually gift unbounded numbers of them, unless they're special-cased.

Xom gives an unbounded number of potions of Experience. It's one his strongest (good) abilities. Xom randomly gives you XP at XL 8- is a huge early game boost for CK. Not that Xom and Neme should have the same ability; just to indicate precedence.

[mps]

I'm always amazed by this sort of reasoning. The above poster reasons that a Nemelex worshipper can expect to see 3-5 oddities cards in a game. Sounds reasonable to me, though I'm not sure about the numbers exactly. The response is that, no, actually there's a theoretically unbounded number. What does that mean? That if you play a game forever you can get an unbounded number of oddities cards? While technically true, how can this be a reasonable input for game design decisions?

I understand that these arguments relate to the idea of scumming and that a key goal is to avoid any benefit from scumming, but the reasoning is terrible. To continue to collect decks in arbitrary numbers, you need arbitrary amounts of generation or exploration, which requires pan/abyss/ziggurat scumming. If you can do this kind of thing, you already win. There's no benefit to be had there. There's no utility to the player. It cannot be optimal play or even close to it. So how can this matter from a game design perspective?

Rarity of items and effects does control their availability in all regimes of gameplay where those items or effects could actually matter. Characters that reach infinite pan/abyss/ziggurat escape velocity have already won for all intents and purposes. All they can do by scumming is waste time.

[duvessa]

Can you think of a single interesting thing that would result from having these cards back? Are they even odd except for Sage (which is a really bizarre, awkward mechanic that any player who started playing post-wonders-removal will be confused by; why do you think Bargain card was removed)? kuniqs covered why they're redundant (and you get plenty of vitrification from Xom already).

Yes, deck of oddities had and has some do-nothing or beneficial cards, but oddities really just exists to fuck you up. Its other cards are secondary to that. It's supposed to be the tier 3 card miscast that occasionally punishes you for drawing an unidentified card, not a way to get permanent benefits from Nemelex, something that the devteam recently, and very, very specifically, attempted to remove. (Why does it still have helix and focus)

[mps]

To clarify, I have no strong feelings about the proposed change, I'm just reacting to the argument made. I'd feel no worse about removing decks altogether.

[njvack]

I was replying to the "Nemelex doesn't gift oddities" post; he does. I agree that scumming oddities cards would be silly.

Vitrification is actually *in* oddities now (and it's the oddest effect there), as it's a Xom effect and Xom card.

I don't get what the Sage card was for. Maybe it was useful when victory dancing was a thing?

[duvessa]

Sage card is from when XP pool was a thing, yeah (also it multiplied the experience at nonzero power).