The Tavern

Gain hp on exploration, similar to the previous proposal where they gained heal wounds potions on exploring, but this time just give to them directly as health. Remove max hp cap - they simply gain health indefinitely. It would be possible to have thousands of hit points. Disable all healing - god effects, vampiric weapons/draining, regeneration. Simply X tiles = +1 hp, with possible scaling if testing determines it needs to give more in the early or late game. Optionally we can even remove heal wounds/curing potions (other than the status effects - this is the same as vine stalker's no device heal mutation).

Allow transmutations, but block any +hp scaling from forms. Likewise, the amulet of vitality does not grant +15 hp (it wouldn't matter much, and you'd have an odd corner case where you could remove the amulet and die).

Benefits:
Health management is more or less automatic - you don't have to worry about wasting healing or running around with half health.
God choice is truly free and you can use any god.
Vampiric weapons no longer result in more or less free wins.
There's no incentive to ever "park" a monster you can heal off of later.

Problems:
Removes tactical threats - the game becomes much more strategic. This is already the case with DD's, but there's at least currently some idea that taking 200+ damage in a fight can outright kill you, whereas under this proposal, you could have 2000 hp, and then take an utterly horrible engagement, lose 1600 hp but still "win", which may or may not cripple your character to the point of being unwinnable later on. Again this is already a problem with the current DD, but this proposal will make it somewhat more pronounced.
When a fight is going horribly wrong, the DD will no longer have to give up a turn to quaff heal wounds - they essentially "pre-quaffed" it before the fight.

As an aside I think it would be cool to be able to brag/track your progress by saying things like "I was able to finish lair with 500 health remaining" or "I only had 300 health when I starts vaults, so it was an uphill battle". Players could compete to win with the highest remaining health!

You would also probably need to rework torment too, because I would not like to get tormented for 500 hp

I presume there will be special cases to prevent getting millions of health by abyss or pan scumming?

The idea came up before, and completely removing all tactical implications of health wasn't really well received (I'm still not personally in favor of the idea.)

Yeah, I certainly understand if the removal of tactical pressure is considered too important, but I think I'd be willing to give it up.

Torment could be based off of the max hp for a DD currently at your level and fighting skill. Say you would have had a max of 220, but you actually have 1300, torment starts at half of 220, then minus your rN+, statue form, etc. I think this would make it a bit too dangerous, since all torments would hit you as if you had full life, so perhaps scale it down somewhat (say take 60% of your 220 "max" health, and base the torment off that).

Edit: changed torment mechanic suggestion.

Seems to be almost strictly inferior to the brewing heal wounds/ambrosia idea.

The only advantage is more convenience: you don't have to quaff healing/ambrosia potions. But I don't think the minor increase in convenience is important. The change in tactical value of HP, in my opinion, is a loss, not a gain. The torment change is kludgy. I don't like it.

Personally, I wouldn't.

As an alternative proposal you could stick with the original theme and say: no healing from any source.

The only way to get additional HP is to get max HP from levelling or training fighting skill. Any lost current HP can never be refilled. Never.

And then, to make winning actually possible, although maybe not probable, cap all damage at 1. Whenever DD takes damage, that damage is reduced to 1. That includes hellfire, torment, etc.

I don't think capping all damage at 1 would be enough to make winning with the ~250 hp pool feasible. I'm sure it could be done as a challenge condition, but it wouldn't be practical for average players.

What if the health went to a "health bank" that you heal from over time, and when it's depleted it's depleted. That would address the tactical health issue.

DD cannot be solved IMHO. You either:
1) give HP for killing easy monsters which makes avoiding monsters reasonable at full HP (saving them for later when you are wounded)
2) don't give HP for killing easy monsters which again makes avoiding monsters reasonable (running away from plain orcs in Orc 2 is not fun)

In both cases autoexplore is broken, autotravel is broken and player makes a tough choice between fun game and game to win for every monster who comes into view

Edit. If DD does not have max HP, it still does not work as you can scum plain orcs in Orc 2, for example. Removing monster generation with time might work, but it will require many changes in other areas.

Damage capping to 1 would be interesting for making armour useless. In this disadvantage, DD would have a huge advantage as a caster.


The easy way is to have all generated monsters after the ones starting in the level be durably summoned.

I still think armour would be important, because it can convert a lot of instances of 1 damage into 0 damage.

The biggest problem with any finite-health pool proposal is that it is hard to get right. If it's calibrated towards difficult, then avoiding damage as much as possible becomes imperative. That probably means avoiding melee combat. If it's too easy then it turns into the best species.

It has been suggested many times and still is not in the game so I assumed devs don't like it and thus more complicated changes would be needed.

Probably it might be fun to completely remove healing for DD except always restore HP to 100% after entering a new floor but I am not sure it would be crawl and it reminds Sp speedruns in some way. Of course it still breaks autoexplore and autotravel.

That sounds quite fun. Running out of health? Head down those stairs!

What's wrong with the current design? I feel like the invokable ability is the best solution you're going to find to this issue, and I certainly liked it a lot more than I did the old wand of healing gag.

The current version doesn't look significantly different from the wand version to me.

The problem I have with it is three-fold:
1) The 'impurity' of the design. You can't heal, except you can. This can be fixed by literally banning healing, but of course some mechanism needs to ba added to allow DD actually to win.

2) It is very restrictive on play-style. One is forced to look for one of the remaining renewable ways of healing. Usually that means Makhleb, but I suppose Necromancy, TSO or Trog could work too. Everything else is frought with tedium.

3) The general tedium of having to always look for ways to avoid damage. Even trivial enemies like jackals can take HP's that aren't easily replaced. This leads, again, to a restriction of options. Doing damage at range, or using summons become the norm.