Potion of aging and scroll of screams

[Steel Neuron]

One of my favorite changes in all of Crawl since I started playing back in the Death Knight days is a particularly minor one; potions of ambrosia. The reason why I think it was a genius design choice is because it took a boring consumable that functioned strictly as an early game ID trap into a tactical gamble. Ambrosia, Lignification, scroll of immolation and other good/bad consumables are extremely fun to use and tend to be where different playing styles really come to light.

The problem with purely bad consumables is twofold: They become essentially meaningless once known, and the damage they've done is generally negligible, so they just amount to an early speed bump. Purely good, unconditional consumables aren't that much better in my opinion. I would love to see the trend of confusion->ambrosia continue, and watch more consumables develop interesting uses.

So let me put two particular ones under scrutiny... Potion of Degeneration and Scroll of Noise. The former has no practical use whatsoever, and the latter is so niche that it may as well be considered useless. I propose merging them with two good but relatively straight forward consumables:

Potion of Aging: (replaces Degeneration and Experience). Causes your character to age and wither away, temporarily decreasing their stats as they slowly become accustomed to their new body (a more powerful version of degeneration). However, their understanding of the world increases as they age (+experience). I think this would be more interesting than the current potion of experience, since you're trading short term effectiveness for a long term investment.

Scroll of Screams: (replaces Noise and Fear). Lets out a horrifying scream, causing fear on monsters nearby and creating noise at your current location. A tradeoff again, immediate survival in exchange for a more difficult escape.

[Speleothing]

I like your idea for Screams, but +Exp is a very rare effect that's mostly reserved as a reward for the most dangerous portals. Adding a downside to it seems counter-intuitive.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Yes, some players don't quaff potions of benemut, we don't want the same happen to potions of exp. Or do we?

[Steel Neuron]

Yes, some players don't quaff potions of benemut, we don't want the same happen to potions of exp. Or do we?

I say making it an actual choice is good. Even with this downside, +Exp is still a fantastic reward. Just not an auto-quaff on every circumstance.

[Shard1697]

even if you lower me to 1 of every stat, if I am fairly early on I will quaff XP every time

[PowerOfKaishin]

Well no one said aging would be as rare as exp. Degeneration penalties should be increased (never to 0 or below) if this happens tho.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I say making it an actual choice is good. Even with this downside, +Exp is still a fantastic reward. Just not an auto-quaff on every circumstance.

I don't like that quaffing is still a no brainer for powerful combos but can kill weak combos. There is an alternative: it can be ok to be a no-brainer to quaff it if there is actual choice when to do it. In another game there is a similar item which permanently increases character power but it also has an extra effect of healing 33% HP and due to that effect it is a bad idea to use that item immediately.

So let's add something similar to potion of EXP: it also serves as potion of ambrosia, giving HP/MP and confusing player, it's pretty simple to explain from flavor point of view IMHO: you are confused by new knowledge which makes you stronger.

[Steel Neuron]

I don't like that quaffing is still a no brainer for powerful combos but can kill weak combos. There is an alternative: it can be ok to be a no-brainer to quaff it if there is actual choice when to do it. In another game there is a similar item which permanently increases character power but it also has an extra effect of healing 33% HP and due to that effect it is a bad idea to use that item immediately.

That's an interesting idea. I hadn't thought of having to hold back on a consumable because it has two good effects, long term and short term.

In any case, this doesn't solve the Degeneration potion which is really what I'd prioritise with this proposal, so given that +Exp isn't that problematic, how about leaving it untouched and changing Degen to this:

Potion of Aging: Severe stat loss, but +2 to all aptitudes for a given amount of skillpoints (like a half-manual on everything).

[Sprucery]

Potion of Aging: Severe stat loss, but +2 to all aptitudes for a given amount of skillpoints (like a half-manual on everything).

Call it a potion of youth instead: the young have lower stats but learn faster :)

[asdu]

I say making it an actual choice is good. Even with this downside, +Exp is still a fantastic reward. Just not an auto-quaff on every circumstance.

I don't like that quaffing is still a no brainer for powerful combos but can kill weak combos. There is an alternative: it can be ok to be a no-brainer to quaff it if there is actual choice when to do it. In another game there is a similar item which permanently increases character power but it also has an extra effect of healing 33% HP and due to that effect it is a bad idea to use that item immediately.

So let's add something similar to potion of EXP: it also serves as potion of ambrosia, giving HP/MP and confusing player, it's pretty simple to explain from flavor point of view IMHO: you are confused by new knowledge which makes you stronger.

The supposed tradeoff of Brogue's potions of health or whatever they're called is mostly irrelevant. It's a no-brainer to keep them until they're useful for healing, since you still get the permanent effect, while at the same time the max hp increase isn't very useful until you're actually in danger (afaik, OHKOs are not really a thing in Brogue).
Your proposed potions of ambrosia-experience are slightly better because OHKOs aren't entirely out of question in DCSS, so the extra max hp is something you really want at all times, plus xp in Crawl also means skills, spell slots, etc, but on the other hand ambrosia regeneration isn't that great except in the very early game. So the window for the tradeoff to be relevant is very small, and it coincides with the part of the game where you're least likely to even have the rare consumable that enables that choice.

In more general terms, I tend to be unimpressed by these attempts to force "interesting" decisions. Partly because of the difficulty of balancing the pros and cons in a way that's relevant to a large range of possible situations, partly because the downsides are often simply annoying, they tend to feel unnatural and forced more often than not.
On one end of the spectrum, there's false dilemmas that only end up obscuring the real value of things, an example of which in DCSS could be almost everything related to food costs. At the opposite end of the spectrum you risk ending up with an ADOM-like proliferation of useless crap that you're still incentivized to carry around because of some ultra-marginal but highly optimal (when stars align) use; scrolls of noise were somewhat like this.
Most of the time, I feel, interesting decision-making arises from the opportunity cost of using x rather than y combined with the limited availability of resources (where applicable).

[VeryAngryFelid]

I wasn't talking about Brogue, I was talking about item from game Demon. It gives 5 Str or 5 Dex or 5 Int permanently (there are 3 different items) AND heals 33% HP.

[Steel Neuron]

In more general terms, I tend to be unimpressed by these attempts to force "interesting" decisions. Partly because of the difficulty of balancing the pros and cons in a way that's relevant to a large range of possible situations, partly because the downsides are often simply annoying, they tend to feel unnatural and forced more often than not.
On one end of the spectrum, there's false dilemmas that only end up obscuring the real value of things, an example of which in DCSS could be almost everything related to food costs. At the opposite end of the spectrum you risk ending up with an ADOM-like proliferation of useless crap that you're still incentivized to carry around because of some ultra-marginal but highly optimal (when stars align) use; scrolls of noise were somewhat like this.
Most of the time, I feel, interesting decision-making arises from the opportunity cost of using x rather than y combined with the limited availability of resources (where applicable).

Well put, and I agree.

However, even those false dilemmas are a notch above absolute uselessness, design wise. What I propose is a way to salvage the mechanics behind scroll of noise and potion of degeneration, but ultimately even removing them would be better than the status quo.

On a side note: I haven't seen much discussion on the Scroll of Screams part of the proposal. Any arguments for/against it? They don't have to come in a pack.

[Speleothing]

Scroll of screams is a fine idea, nothing essentially wrong about it. The real question is whether we need to make escaping from a fight that's gone against you any harder than it already is.

I say we don't, but there are a lot of people who are into punishing the player for not being optimal