Inventory Management Revisited


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Blades Runner

Posts: 616

Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19

Post Sunday, 11th June 2017, 00:14

Inventory Management Revisited

Some time has passed since I last wrote about a topic which I feel affects the enjoyment of playing crawl to a very large extent: inventory management. Recently I've come up with an alternate solution to improve the situation.

The problem:
Inventory management is a hassle. I won't go into all the gory details why, because many reasons have been stated why by myself and others. One of the largest issues with changing it surrounds power creep issues of allowing everyone access to all items at all times (or nearly so), leading to various complicated solutions such as the magic bag which takes time to access. Item weight used to play a large role in mitigating power creep by acting as a limiting factor, but it was itself a tedious mechanism, from all sides.

New solution:
Limit the number of items a character can carry by category type. For example, X pieces of armor. X being a number which would need to be worked out. I'm not attempting to propose all exact quantities now, but I'd be willing to work on them if the general idea was well received. From a flavor standpoint, it seems intuitive, if not sensible that a character shouldn't be allowed to carry 28 sets of plate mail. On the other hand, in the scrolls category, a character could (and in my opinion) be able to carry an unlimited number of scrolls. Scrolls represent a large number of items with mostly strategic, versus tactical uses (i.e. enchant weapon, enchant armour, amnesia.) I would argue that potion types should also be unlimited. Also, like scrolls there are some strategic items (i.e. mutation, experience.)

Pros:
Relatively simple to understand, and perhaps to implement. It seems intuitive from a flavor standpoint.

Cons:
Certain races and combinations do not use certain items, which is mostly considered a disadvantage, but it also has the side effect of creating more space for other items. Mummies are a good example of this. Because they cannot drink potions, they generally are able to carry more items for evocations. I don't have a solution to offset this change of balance offhand, but I'm not sure if the extra inventory space was actually intended to be an incidental advantage or simply became one for lack of a system to prevent it. If the latter, then this con would become a pro, thus achieving that racial limitations are not also advantages.

Special considerations:
A few tweaks to the system which may be needed come to mind. Octopodes, for instance, could be bound by the limit of # of rings they could carry by adding total number of rings+armour they could carry together as total rings.
Regarding ranged ammo, I think that branded ammo should not count as an additional type. It does not make sense to me, that if I could carry 1,000 javelins, that I might not be able to carry 1 javelin, but then not be able to pick up a second javelin with poison on it. The same applies to tomahawks. Depending on the total number of ammunition types which a character could carry, I do see that this change could amount to some power creep, but perhaps not if the character can only carry 1 or 2 ammunition types in total, thus offsetting some advantage. It was a lovely day when launcher branded ammo went away, too bad that there isn't an equivalent solution for throwing, because that was a more elegant solution.
Evocable items are just a mess. I typically only carry a wand of digging and do not train evocations anymore for the simple reason that for me, there often isn't enough room in inventory to make training the skill worthwhile. If this category was limited to X number of items, independent of the rest of inventory, it could always have value (although true that then this might limit characters who were skilled to take advantage of a heavily populated evocations inventory.)

If there is any interest in this proposal, I'd be willing to give the details some more thought.

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 4432

Joined: Friday, 8th May 2015, 17:51

Post Sunday, 11th June 2017, 05:33

Re: Inventory Management Revisited

I don't see what this proposal improves. Scrolls and potion are still unlimited, nobody has more than 3 body armours in inventory and if you limit this to just 1 body armour, then people will start stashing again.
Underestimated: cleaving, Deep Elf, Formicid, Vehumet, EV
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Blades Runner

Posts: 616

Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19

Post Sunday, 11th June 2017, 09:13

Re: Inventory Management Revisited

Sorry, to clarify: an unlimited number of types of scrolls, not quantity. This proposal attempts to make inventory management easier somewhere between no weight limits and a fixed inventory size (of anything), and the old system that had weight limits somewhat controlling the inventory but was tedious, and a system which allows people to never need to figure out what to drop to make space among certain types of items (for example stashing amnesia scrolls to make an extra space for something else)

Vaults Vanquisher

Posts: 443

Joined: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 15:23

Post Sunday, 11th June 2017, 16:08

Re: Inventory Management Revisited

I don't understand what this thread is supposed to be about. More complicated limits on how inventory size works will only make management correspondingly more complex and therefore bad. The way to deal with inventory management problems by degrees is to reduce the number of item types and hence the number of types of items players will plausibly carry.

People argue that they will then carry more weapon and armor swaps to compensate for gains in open slots. This is true to a point, but there are limits to this since you're still talking about a tiny fraction of such items that make reasonable swaps.
*Lana Del Rey voice* , video games...

Blades Runner

Posts: 548

Joined: Monday, 23rd March 2015, 05:29

Post Monday, 12th June 2017, 11:54

Re: Inventory Management Revisited

watertreatmentRL wrote:I don't understand what this thread is supposed to be about. More complicated limits on how inventory size works will only make management correspondingly more complex and therefore bad.


It could actually simplify some decisions, in that you no longer would need to weigh the value of each scroll or potion against every other possible type of item you could carry, but only against other scrolls or potions...

Vaults Vanquisher

Posts: 443

Joined: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 15:23

Post Monday, 12th June 2017, 13:46

Re: Inventory Management Revisited

Yeah, but then you get a problem of this partitioned inventory limit either doing nothing (like the current limit, outside of producing annoyance) or causing stashing behavior. For example, with scrolls there are lots of types that don't provide any tactical value, so you'd stash them all. In dcss people pretty much already do that. In hellcrawl, it is not necessary because removed items like ?id, ?rc, and food plus improvements to item behavior (e.g. stacking wands) mean you can carry everything that's useful. In other words, there is a better future possible for dcss if we have the courage to embrace it.

It's also worth remembering that there is a small number of problem item types that cause most of the problems with inventory management in dcss, namely high frequency undesirable items that default to autopickup, mostly wands, and those self-destructing, pick up hundreds per game items we all know to love, chunks. The OP seems to suggest that the number of items players can pick up is out of control, but I don't really see this. Trying to regain the complexity of item encumbrance is a step in the wrong direction.
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