Remove butchering and simplify corpse drops

[Rast]

Currently crawl has the "interesting" mechanic that the player can choose to either chop a corpse into edible chunks, or save the corpse to use with various necromancy spells/abilities.

The problem with this is that most characters don't use necromancy at all, and most characters need relatively few chunks compared to the amount available. So, aside from troll/ghoul necromancers, there's almost never a tension between eating a corpse or using it. In fact, most corpses are neither butchered nor reanimated. They're just ignored.

I suggest that when a monster that could leave a corpse dies, the game chooses at random only one of the following to drop:
40%: A corpse.
30%: Hide/scales if possible. Otherwise nothing. Yes this is a slight decrease from the current 33% chance.
20%: Absolutely nothing.
10%: Chunks, using the current formula for quantity
0%: Skeleton.

And then remove the butcher command, but give trolls and ghouls the ability to eat corpses directly from the floor.

And then special case something for vampires.

For Gozag it would still be 100% chance of gold, only.

(Inspired by https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=11259 )

[PlatinumSpider]

0%: Skeleton.

What is the point of this?

[OOTN]

So are you suggesting they remove necromancy too?

[Fingolfin]

50% nothing and only 10% chunks seems completely unreasonable for trolls or blaster casters. Also this means that a Beogh follower has 60% chances of not being given the opportunity to revive his fallen warlord, which could very well mean never in a given game.

[Siegurt]

Also: Why are the chances exclusive? If the objective is just to remove the 'c' command, why not simply have chunks/hides/corpses have their own odds of dropping, and if more than one drops, so be it?

[duvessa]

Because crawl can't display more than one item on the same square.

[Siegurt]

Because crawl can't display more than one item on the same square.

That is a pretty dumb reason "the interface isnt robust enough" is a bad reason to create gameplay rules, interface should flow from gameplay, not define it. If you follow that logic, then creatures shouldn't drop items either.

"You should be able to easily see all items" is a good idea generally, unrestricted to corpses/chunks/hides/skeletons.

If you solve the interface problem of "items being in stacks" in any way (by spreading them out, so items aren't in stacks any more, or by eating part of the screen real estate with a list or whatever the solution is) that solution is just as applicable to hides/corpses/chunks/skeletons as it is to anything else.

There is an interface problem, but this has nothing to do with a solution to it.

[Rast]

50% nothing and only 10% chunks seems completely unreasonable for trolls or blaster casters. Also this means that a Beogh follower has 60% chances of not being given the opportunity to revive his fallen warlord, which could very well mean never in a given game.

FYI the corpse chance is currently only 50%. Dropping it to 40% is not a huge nerf to Beogh.

Trolls I gave the special ability to eat corpses. So 40% chance of an edible corpse plus 10% chance of chunks is the same as the current 50% chance of a corpse that you then have to butcher.

Blaster casters... do they really end up butchering more than 1/5th of corpses? If so, perhaps they should train Spellcasting harder.

However, here is an alternative, super generous version of my original proposal:
50%: A corpse.
30%: Hide/scales if possible. Otherwise nothing.
20%: Chunks, using the current formula for quantity

The point is still that (1) you never have to butcher and (2) only one thing drops from any particular dead monster, not counting inventory.

The point of "0% skeleton" was that currently 1/3rd of butchering produces skeletons. I don't find that interesting enough to be worth preserving.

[watertreatmentRL]

Because crawl can't display more than one item on the same square.

That is a pretty dumb reason "the interface isnt robust enough" is a bad reason to create gameplay rules, interface should flow from gameplay, not define it. If you follow that logic, then creatures shouldn't drop items either.

"You should be able to easily see all items" is a good idea generally, unrestricted to corpses/chunks/hides/skeletons.

If you solve the interface problem of "items being in stacks" in any way (by spreading them out, so items aren't in stacks any more, or by eating part of the screen real estate with a list or whatever the solution is) that solution is just as applicable to hides/corpses/chunks/skeletons as it is to anything else.

There is an interface problem, but this has nothing to do with a solution to it.

That is completely backwards. Limitations of the interface are exactly the sort of thing to design rules around.

[Siegurt]

Because crawl can't display more than one item on the same square.

That is a pretty dumb reason "the interface isnt robust enough" is a bad reason to create gameplay rules, interface should flow from gameplay, not define it. If you follow that logic, then creatures shouldn't drop items either.

"You should be able to easily see all items" is a good idea generally, unrestricted to corpses/chunks/hides/skeletons.

If you solve the interface problem of "items being in stacks" in any way (by spreading them out, so items aren't in stacks any more, or by eating part of the screen real estate with a list or whatever the solution is) that solution is just as applicable to hides/corpses/chunks/skeletons as it is to anything else.

There is an interface problem, but this has nothing to do with a solution to it.

That is completely backwards. Limitations of the interface are exactly the sort of thing to design rules around.

If some gameplay rules are bad, they are bad gameplay no matter what the interface looks like, and vise versa, the only time a game's interface limitations should force game rules to be created around it is when they don't fall into the domain of the game designer's choice (for example, if we add the constraint "must be played on a 2d screen" then obviously game rules that require a 3d interface aren't going to work) ; In other words, game rules need to cede to interface limitations when the interface limitations are inherent to the type of interface provided.

However it's not common to address inherent interface limtations as "part of the game". As a game writer, you don't design your display hardware, or whether a mobile device has a keyboard or not. When I talk about "the game's interface" I'm specifically talking about *the part of your game you write to interface with the game player*

The problem of "crawl can't easily display more than one item in a square" isn't an inherent limitation of the interface(s) used for crawl, it's part of the programming choices that have been made when implementing the interface for stacks of items. If it's true that it's bad game play to not be able to see more than one item per square, and it's further true that it's good game play to *have* more than one item per square, then it's logically optimal to rewrite the interface for stacks of items to support being able to easily see more than one item per square.

If it was in fact true that the best possible game was one where you could have stacks of items in a single square, and that you could easily see them all, but the interface *as it was presently written* didn't support easily seeing all the contents of a stack, it would be pretty odd indeed to declare that one should change the game rules to make a "worse" game, so you didn't have to change the implementation of the interface.

[watertreatmentRL]

The fact is that the worst supported version of the interface cannot show more than one item at a time and there is no realistic path to improving that. There are reasonable ways to show, say, two items per cell in a terminal interface, but that is never going to happen in crawl. Whatever you do, there will be physical and psychological limits on how much shit you can represent in a cell of any interface for crawl. Therefore the best thing you can do is keep the number of items within those limits. But in crawl we don't do the best thing, we make huge piles of items and item-like things, e.g. corpses, skeletons, all over the place.

You propose that monsters might drop a corpse and a chunk, or a corpse and a skeleton, or a skeleton and a chunk (or something, I'm not sure what the point of non-mutually exclusive choice is in relation to the OP). The right number of corpses, chunks, and skeletons to drop is zero. This is the number that keeps the total number of items closest to what the interface can conveniently represent in common use cases, e.g. you kill an orc.

In any case, I don't think there's a lot of point in talking about this stuff. It sounds like food removal will happen eventually and people aren't real keen to make changes intermediate to that. Generating corpses but not letting people butcher them is picking a fight over nothing at this point.