The Tavern

My proposal is as follows:

1) The player can only hold a certain number of each consumable (generally, one).

2) Consumables only generate by being dropped by slain monsters

3) After a consumable drops it will disappear after X number of turns (short enough to avoid hypothetical-optimal strategies like exploring close to a dropped consumable).

4) Any consumable dropped by the player will be destroyed instantly

Benefits:

1) Veteran players will no longer accrue stockpiles of consumables that basically trivialize the game (large #s of blink scrolls, tele, sources of haste, fog, fear, etc can get you out of virtually any situation in crawl)

2) Less-than-veteran players won't be shafted by the change, as they'll continue to acquire (and likely use) consumables at a steady rate

3) Less item clutter/micromanagement because it's no longer possible :3

4) "race to the item" in the middle of dangerous fights will become a thing, leading to more hilarious deaths

Edit: This excludes food of course. Food should really be removed from the game or goldified.

That would be an interesting game but it would not be Crawl.

i know what youre talking about, remember that time that i was playing monopoly with my friends, and they insisted on using their house rules, and that made my monopoly board spontaneously turn into a roller coaster? i mean dont get me wrong, it was awesome, but we dont want that happening to crawl

you only need a very small number of blink/tele/haste/fog/fear/etc to get out of virtually any situation, and you propose keeping the player in constant supply of consumables anyway, so what does the proposal even accomplish and why do you want to sustain consumables in the first place

Im not proposing keeping the player in constant supply. In fact its the opposite, enforced non constant supply. Any time u use an item your # of that item would reduce to zero, and it would be a long time in game before another one of that item drops, leaving you in a vulnerable spot.

Contrast this to crawl as it is now where a good player will never run out of anything and always have all escape options available (past a certain point in the game)

I think thats a significant difference.

I tried this argument on devs before for changes i thought was non crawl like. They seem immune to it so im not really worried about it.

Real friends don't rope you into playing Monopoly in the first place.

Anyway, how does this proposal handle stashing weaker packs of monsters for later to restock consumables when needed with minimal risk (such as just leaving Orc or Elf until you need a refill and it is too dangerous to progress)?

Hmm good point. maybe make it so items don't drop if too many turns passed since entering the level?

Then players want to track that information. And you could just not enter orc at all until you need to.

If players leave easy areas for later and enter more dangerous areas instead, it means they are playing an easy (for them) combo so I don't see a problem.
Those who want challenge pick combos they are struggling with and in this case entering Orc or whatever is a good idea since it increases your chance to win.

I don't think it always means they're playing an easy combo, orc's XP rewards are quite small and the loot often isn't great so I could see leaving it as a 'consumable stash' with this model being more worthwhile than doing it as soon as you can.

Mm, what about if only yellow and red names drop consumables? Then no more farming easy mobs or stashing them for later.

I think this will be a great reason to kill dangerous monsters like uniques. Also red names should drop more loot than yellow ones.

While I can get behind the crux of "let's put hard caps on consumables so you can't save up", this specific execution of that idea (consumables as drops from 'hard kills') seems to be needless complication. Why not be explicit and say "consumables are tied to the XP clock, just like god wrath or elemental evokers"?

So something like this: "after using a given tactical consumable, you can't use it again until X xp later. Nothing about consumable quantities change."

Some leading questions:

If the designer wants maximal control over the supply of something available to a player, should he be tying his hands by making that something an item, subject to the rules and mechanics of item usage and generation?

Have simpler approaches to the problem of the number of consumables available to the player, for example reducing the number that generate, been explored in a serious way?

How many copies of a given consumable are needed to achieve saturation, where the value of adding another is insignificant in terms of its effect on the outcome of the game? How often is the number one? Or zero?

I would suggest that consumables are just one aspect of a broader problem of resource saturation and not the most important one.

I am not sure, what's the current consensus on consumables among devs?
Is hoarding consumables by powerful combo good? I guess not, player should not have dozens of scrolls of blinking etc. as it makes late game too easy even for powerful combo.
But if I am playing a weak combo and I did something smart and saved a consumable which 99% players would use in the same situation? Should I be rewarded for that? I hope the answer is yes. By having an extra consumable? I guess not, we cannot differentiate it from situation when the consumable was not needed so we have to invent something else. How about punishing using a consumable? For example, Ru is great, you get drained and exhausted, so if you use its ability, you have to pay for it, and if you don't use it, you get nothing to hoard. I think a similar approach might be useful for consumables too.

What's the difference between 6 scrolls of blinking and 7 scrolls of blinking? In my experience, there is no difference.

There is, however, a very large difference between 2 blink scrolls and 3. Which is an amount i find myself with frequently when i get to zot in a 3 rune game (that is to say without using any). I *have* gotten to zot and only found 1 blinking scroll in the entire 3 rune game. It is rare, but it happens. I have also gotten there with the 6-7 or more.

The rather wide variance in the types and amounts of resources available create different experiences, and thereby increase the amount of enjoyment i can derive from playing crawl.

If *every* game was, as seems to be implied here, chock full of more consumables than i would ever use or need, then it would be less variable, and less enjoyable, not more.

This seems to me to be a problem that applies to games that run more than 3 runes, or where you fully explore a lot of optional content, maybe the solution here is to just not generate consumables in "extended" areas.

Having a stock set of known available consumables available at regular intervals might be more balanced, but a bunch of samely-balanced games in a row is *really really* boring. i don't want to make crawl less fun to play repeatedly in order to make it more balanced.

Specifically for scrolls of blinking, they should be generated only on top of runes and immune to apportation. So you will have exactly 3 scrolls of blinking in 3 rune game unless you apport some runes in which case you will have less scrolls.

This suggestion: 1. Has the opposite of the intended effect, blinking scrolls can't be used at all by inexperienced players, and veterans still accumulate a stack. And 2. Makes the game more boring, every step you take towards a predictable system that doesn't ever change worsens the games ability to retain interest.