Dropping items should be a one turn action

[Sprucery]

Since picking up items always takes one turn, dropping items should likewise. With item destruction gone (and Maurice stealing from the floor) there's not much point in that dropping multiple stacks takes multiple turns.

Well, if someone is chasing you and you want to drop some stuff before entering a portal it might make a difference but that's marginal imo.

[dpeg]

This is true.

There used to be some reason for this behaviour back when item destruction existed: that mechanic would have been completely pointless if you could have dropped all your potions/scrolls in a single turn. So it was necessary to take longer. With that mechanic gone, I see no further reason not to follow the OP.

[Rast]

Picking up and dropping items should take zero turns.

[dpeg]

Rast: I don't think so. Often, it doesn't matter -- this holds for many turns. But in non-trivial battles, it can be a meaningful choice whether to spend a turn to pick up that item (think about a ziggurat level when you're fleeing head over heals). There is no reason to kill off these (admittedly not too common) choices.

What Sprucery has in mind (hope I understood correctly) is adapting the interface to the recent ruleset. You want a gameplay change. Even if that's alright, these two types of changes should not be conflated.

[duvessa]

There is no reason to kill off these (admittedly not too common) choices.

I can think of a very good reason: autopickup. Currently the game has to disable autopickup when monsters are in LOS, and it also has a bizarre kludge to deal with invisible monsters, where autopickup turns off when the monster becomes invisible and turns back on if it dies or becomes invisible while in your sight, but if it turned visible while out of LOS or died or you used stairs or teleported or whatever then you have to turn autopickup back on manually...if picking up items just didn't take time then you could get rid of all that nonsense and keep autopickup on at all times.
If you remove monster invisibility (which should be done anyway) then there is not much reason to get rid of pickup time, though.
Also, your ziggurat example is bad, because there was already a time cost to reach the square with the item in the first place. I can think of exactly one realistic example where pickup time does something meaningful, which is picking up runes and the Orb of Zot on botched or extremely underleveled swagjack attempts. This occasion is still vanishingly rare, since you have to either be doing a speedrun, or screw up in an extremely specific way, and then have bad luck on top of that.

You also don't mention what choices are introduced by making it take time to drop items...

[Rast]

You also don't mention what choices are introduced by making it take time to drop items...

The wonderful gameplay choice of which item to drop to make room to pick up the new item that autoexplore has stopped you on. One of the best parts of zigrunning, and crawl in general!

[Sprucery]

Yeah well my point was just to make dropping and picking up items take the same amount of time.

As to what amount that should be, I don't really care. On the other hand, I don't like the idea of free actions that take no turns. On the other hand, the case with autopickup and invisible monsters who turn visible out of LOS is awkward. I definitely wouldn't like monster invisibility to be removed (and please don't discuss that point further in this thread).

Just let's not do what Nethack does (autopickup is an immediate action but manual pickup takes a turn).

[Lasty]

The downside to making dropping a set of items take a single turn is that you are heavily incentivized to ensure that you drop everything you might want to drop at once -- if you miss something, you then have to spend an extra turn. I prefer to have dropping each item take the same amount of time in order to avoid incentivizing players dropping items to take extra real time pouring over their inventory before confirming a drop command.

That said, I see no reason why dropping an item should take time at all.

As for picking up items, I see the merits to both dpeg's points and duvessa's. Making it difficult to grab loot and go seems good to me, but the interaction between autopickup and monsters, especially invisible ones, is somewhat problematic.

[Malevolent]

The downside to making dropping a set of items take a single turn is that you are heavily incentivized to ensure that you drop everything you might want to drop at once -- if you miss something, you then have to spend an extra turn. I prefer to have dropping each item take the same amount of time in order to avoid incentivizing players dropping items to take extra real time pouring over their inventory before confirming a drop command.

Aside from turncount speedrunning, I don't see how saving that one extra turn is relevant, considering most players I see (myself included) can be much more turn-inefficient (using autoexplore, not taking the shortest paths to a given place, walking back and forth because of indecision, accidentally pressing shift-5 after being fully healed etc.). I don't see how you can seriously say that the player is "heavily incentivized" to drop stuff all at once - like, if you take great pains to drop as many items as possible throughout the whole game, you might reduce your turncount by about 50-100 turns! Oh boy! (And no, I don't think turncount speedrunning should be taken into consideration here.)

Otherwise, I support making dropping items take just one turn, yeah.

[Sar]

I'm pretty sure Lasty meant precisely turncount speedrunning. As long as scores exists you kind of have to take it into account.

[Malevolent]

I'm pretty sure Lasty meant precisely turncount speedrunning. As long as scores exists you kind of have to take it into account.

There are many other features included and removed in the game that affect both turncount speedrunning and real-time speedrunning from version to version. This is a fact of life one must get used to. I absolutely oppose taking any kind of speedrunning into account as far as the evaluation of any proposal is concerned. That's like... I don't know, not introducing a new race that would otherwise be very fun because someone might be able to speedrun the game with it a little faster than before?

[infinitevox]

Just out of curiosity, how long does it take to swap weapons?

If this change was made, would it be quicker to drop your current weapon and wield one from your inventory?
If so, obviously it has the downside of no longer being in your inventory, but there are occasions where every aut matters.

[genericpseudonym]

To drop an item you first have to unequip it anyways. Unless you're trying to tactically drop a ring by sacrificing your hand to Ru or something. (Does that take a turn?)

Swapping between two weapons takes 0.5 turns, according to the time readout in-game.

[infinitevox]

Ah okay, I never paid attention while dropping stuff that was equipped.
I just assumed you dropped it directly since it doesn't force you to un-equip first, good to know, thank you.
Crisis averted.

[duvessa]

The downside to making dropping a set of items take a single turn is that you are heavily incentivized to ensure that you drop everything you might want to drop at once -- if you miss something, you then have to spend an extra turn. I prefer to have dropping each item take the same amount of time in order to avoid incentivizing players dropping items to take extra real time pouring over their inventory before confirming a drop command.

Can't this argument be equally applied to picking up items?

[Lasty]

The downside to making dropping a set of items take a single turn is that you are heavily incentivized to ensure that you drop everything you might want to drop at once -- if you miss something, you then have to spend an extra turn. I prefer to have dropping each item take the same amount of time in order to avoid incentivizing players dropping items to take extra real time pouring over their inventory before confirming a drop command.

Can't this argument be equally applied to picking up items?

Your inventory is usually many times larger than a pile of items on the ground.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

[crate]

I really don't see the argument against making pickup/drop take 0 turns.

Zigs already have problems, so I'm not going to talk about them. If there are problems caused in a ziggurat by this change, I would suggest fixing the problems by altering ziggurats, instead of making crawl worse to make their silly arena sidequest slightly better (except it's not actually making zigs better since you can just fix zigs anyway). (An easy fix is doing something like in the slime levels and always putting the loot in a room that is not on the route to the exit.)

Outside of a zig, you have already made a commitment to picking up an item when you either walk over to the item's location or apport the item. So there's your choice; it's no different from before. Occasionally the player gets some "free loot", hey, cool, people like free loot, and this doesn't change anything important. It will almost never matter.

The only situation where you are not in a zig where this matters is when picking up runes or the orb, in which case you might have enemies around you and that one extra turn really is very valuable. The orb actually gets around this problem on its own by delaying the teleport that you've already started (right? I think that happened at some point); the 1 turn is still important but you still have to deal with the monsters around you for several turns. I think the problems that 0-turn pickup solves (things like autopickup disable) improve crawl enough that making runes slightly easier to pick up without killing all the dudes is fine.

--

As for dropping, as long as dropping items takes time, you are pushing the player to only drop items when the player would otherwise be doing nothing. This overwhelms any other concerns about item dropping taking time, since usually when you want to purposely do nothing you want to purposely do nothing for many turns in a row (resting), so it doesn't matter if it takes you ten or twenty trips to the inventory screen to get everything figured out. Any turn where you could be doing something useful you would rather be doing something useful. If you remove this, then you can actually drop items whenever you want without being penalised. It means that I don't have to think about my inventory every time I am going to rest (if I have 50 items, then I should probably drop some right now to save valuable turns later, whereas I can safely wait if dropping items is instant).

Crawl inventory management isn't fun, so let's make it a bit less of a hassle.

[johlstei]

Making pickup take 0 turns would make it easier to pillar dance/kite with arrows. Not sure that matters much but it's the only case I thought of.

[ion_frigate]

I'm pretty sure Lasty meant precisely turncount speedrunning. As long as scores exists you kind of have to take it into account.

History has suggested this is not how the developers think. Point in case, the Beogh ally item-use changes that, I gather, completely destroyed a means of accomplishing speedruns.

[Sar]

People speedrunned with Beogh? I don't understand, I didn't know he was a popular speedrun god.

[njvack]

The only situation where you are not in a zig where this matters is when picking up runes or the orb, in which case you might have enemies around you and that one extra turn really is very valuable.

If this is really a problem, a solution could be to have picking up the orb or runes dispel all current player effects. So yeah, picking up the thing is free time-wise, but it has other costs.

Even if that doesn't happen, I would honestly love picking up / dropping items to be instant.

[genericpseudonym]

Making pickup take 0 turns would make it easier to pillar dance/kite with arrows. Not sure that matters much but it's the only case I thought of.

The biggest buff would probably be to throwing, since javelins or large rocks are in short supply (unless you meet the shoals or the cyclops end in orc, respectively), and the player is much more likely to run out in a fight than with arrows or needles.

[Sprucery]

I think it looks like 0-turn picking up will have to wait until ammo is removed / always mulches. In the meantime, dropping should always take one turn.

[crate]

0 turn ammo pickup is not actually a problem. It is much, much less important than 0-turn rune or orb pickup. The situations where it actually enables something you could not do with 1-turn pickup (as current) are very rare; you can, after all, just make sure that during your pillar-dancing you always throw your ammo at exactly the same location, and if you can't spare 1 turn every 8-10 throws or whatever to pick up your ammo you can't kill whatever you're attacking anyway.

In fact 0 turn ammo pickup is a huge interface benefit for non-mulching ammo (since you pick up so many things) so I think that non-mulching ammo is actually a reason to implement 0-turn pickup, not a reason to avoid it.

[Sprucery]

0 turn ammo pickup is not actually a problem. It is much, much less important than 0-turn rune or orb pickup.

Yeah I tend to forget this as I don't usually steal runes (and rarely do much of extended). But njvack's suggestion seems fine to me.

make sure that during your pillar-dancing you always throw your ammo at exactly the same location

I guess it's things like this that separate the really good players from the rest :) Didn't cross my mind. However, if you're fighting a crowd the ammo tends to get scattered around. Also monster movement can make it impossible to throw at the same location while still hitting the target (if you're not in a corridor).

In fact 0 turn ammo pickup is a huge interface benefit for non-mulching ammo (since you pick up so many things)

A benefit in the presence of hostile monsters, yes. Otherwise autopickup gets it for you, of course. Personally, I like it more when you have to decide whether to spend a turn picking up that ammo if something hostile is around. And ranged surely does not need a buff, right :)

[ion_frigate]

People speedrunned with Beogh? I don't understand, I didn't know he was a popular speedrun god.

See here. It was a strategy that involved precisely managing your orcs' equipment (giving them spears, etc), which the Beogh changes pretty much obliterated.

As the OP in that thread describes it:

Have any devs ever seen the Beogh speedruns? They are really quite something, and are totally eliminated by the mon-pickup removal. The basic strategy, as I understood it, was to gather about 4 orcs, give them one-handed polearms (holy wrath, antimagic, and similar brands), shields, and decent armor. They would then train up those orcs and micromanage them to beat the game in very few turns.

[dpeg]

Okay, I am convinced. Pickup and drop should be instant actions. I'll mention this in a 0.19 email.

ion_frigate: at least this developer has never seen a Beogh speedrun. I wasn't aware of it. Now that I am, I'm sure we would've made the change anyway. Beogh got changed because of micromanagement. We always want to avoid micromanagement and, obviously, allies are always prone to this (nothing special about Crawl, this is very general in games). So it happened that precisely this micromanagement enabled Beogh speedruns? Then that has to be sacrificed for a better game for everyone else, sorry. As always: if people have ideas how to improve Beogh ally management using *global commands* (and these people can have speedrunning on their minds), then please tell us.

[Shard1697]

My beogh gripes still revolve around not being able to get the kind of orcs I want, which does lead to micromanagement, ex: telling my orcs to wait a floor above, going down and recalling, rinse and repeat because recall is not consistent and sometimes gives me the orcs in a different order or gives me a type of orcs I don't want, so I end up doing the thing where I let them wander away from me until only the ones I want are nearby and then tell them to follow and go down stairs before the ones I don't want get close enough to follow me down, or making orcs I don't want(wizards/priests) stand in steam made by vaults until they die...

I think Beogh is fundamentally a very micromanage heavy god, and there's really just no way around it. I don't feel like Beogh really got significantly less micromanage-y, at least not for me, since the issues I had with Beogh are still very present.