The Tavern

In one way I get this commit - supposedly armour scrolls are of no use to octopodes, so no interesting decision has to be made. On the other hands ...

A) Octopodes still need to hunt down one or multiple(!*) dragons for the hide. On early (dungeon) troves that can mean dipping into depths, very exciting high risk/high reward incentives.

B) Only a fraction of games do have troves, and only a fraction of these troves ask for armour gifts. If such a rare trove is then relatively easy accessible, thats to me is absolutely acceptable as part of the inherent randomness of the game. Do we want to remove the arbitrary chance that Ring of Robustness drops? To equip it is a no-brainer if I ever have seen one.

C) Once we start with racial/situational item/environment generation, we go down a rabbithole. Should armour-sacking Ru-worshippers also not get treasure troves? Should felids have it easy? Trog and Oka worshippers have a rich supply of highly enchanted weapons, so forbid them from weapon troves prices?

D) Most trove prices are currently very much no-brain binary situations. Piety troves: easy yes except on Ru. Fully charged wand of hasting/heal wounds? easy no. 3 scrolls of acquirement? easy no. Removing the single no-brainer in question seems like a bad bandaid to the trove-price problem in general.

E) A big part of fun in the game to me is not just about the hard decisions, but about luck. When I get an early +5 slaying ring or an easy early trove, I have fun, am excited to play. The most boring games I have played in crawl had no lucky drops and no portals at all.

TLDR: Dont open Pandoras box by single-casing trove prices by species. Let poor squishy octopodes feel lucky by having their no-armour trait in rare cases be benefical. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages by far.

(* why is random hide dropping even still a part of the game?)

Dungeon generation shouldn't change depending on your character. Troves have no right to be an exception to that.

Also, generally speaking, the races where this is an issue are the weaker races anyway, with the exception of like... Draconian, which still isn't OP in the slightest.

OP have a good use for enchant armor scrolls. Usually they want to use some kind of shield...that's 5 to 8 scrolls right there.

It'd be cool if useless items weren't even displayed though, and just poofed on the ground or something if a monster dropped them. What is the point of telling the player that there are boots on a tile if that character will never be able to wear them? The fact that they might switch to Jiyva and heal with them?

Yes, it's weird that devs don't want to display useful info as "distracting new players" but still display noise from useless items, especially in shops.
Artefacts cannot be eaten by jellies so there is no reason to show that orange crystal armour to Felid player. As a side effect it will make some troves better (you will have to think about giving up the item because it is potentially useful for your character since it was generated)

It doesn't really hurt that they're there, though. Seeing that super-sweet artefact you can never use might make you think "damn, wish I could use that" which is something.

And what's "useless," exactly? Boots are useless if you have hooves 3. Should boots vanish when you get that mutation? What if you lose it again? Is it different if you get it as a Ds? Potions if you're in lichform? What if you plan on spending a lot of time in lich form?

You could probably think up a bunch of rules that would work, but it would add a bunch of code for no actual gameplay benefit. And the code might have bugs that *would* have gameplay consequences.

The code is already there.

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/mas ... er.cc#L695

At the very least, "never useful" is a sufficient condition to not display something. Felids should not be shown armour or weapons. A DS with hooves 3 should not be shown boots. A character who gets hooves 3 randomly should still show them, because it could be cured. A gargoyle shouldn't be shown a Yred altar. Worrying that we might miss *some* useless stuff is no reason not to try at all. Characters sometimes leave lich form so potions aren't useless. Mummies have no reason to show potions though, hide them for them, etc. The gameplay benefit is not having the ui cluttered with mentions of items that will never be interacted with intentionally, and may be interacted with unintentionally.

That would make it much, much, much harder for unspoiled players to approximate the rarity of items.

Come on, it's always funny to find a great randart you can't use. People screenshot that all the time, it's fun.

Alright then keep the artifacts, fine by me! Duvessa has a decent point but...the new players picking felid have bigger problems. Maybe it could be a default-off rcfile option but I'd rather it be on by default.