Tartarus Sorceror
Posts: 1698
Joined: Saturday, 18th June 2016, 13:57
Id: Think of the Gnolls!
The reasoning is the following: it is already burdensome, when you are in the late game and you have to manually identify all blue armour or weapons of the category that could interest you. Probably, by Vaults and Elf and Depths, you are already at this point.The chances that the items you are identifying will be useful get very, very low. This means that the player isn't making a tactical or strategic decision. The player only has to choose: do I want to play optimally, probably wasting my time and effort, slowing the game, doing inventory juggling to identify this stuff, or do I want to just go on and have my fun?
But now we have gnolls. Gnolls can use anything they find. Gnolls are interested into identifying anything they find. Gnolls have to stop and identify everything, unless they choose to just go on and ignore chances to power up.
To improve playability, armour and weapons should already be fully identified when seen on the floor, or in enemy hands. This would also solve a few problems, like displaying resistances you aren't supposed to know about (see e.g. leather armour of poison resistance).
Artifacts have a few interesting properties like *drain and *contamination, so they could be a special case and still need identification (so people can still end up in the robe of misfortune).
As for jewels, I have often said that 2-step identification should go. If you identify a +2 ring of strength, you should be able to tell the numerical value of all other rings of strength without having to individually id every single one of them. The current situation serves no purpose, and even curses are normally meaningless by the time you are finding the second ring or amulet of the same kind.
The interesting parts of the ID game are potions and scrolls, and, sometimes, wands (having to choose between having more charges and knowing what a single potion does). These can stay.
BTW, gnolls probably are one more reason why spell books should disappear as inventory items, since gnolls can potentially use all spells they find in a game, and I don't think it makes sense to force them to make trips to the books. Other species too, but gnolls make the problem more apparent.
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- continuumg, nago, svendre, Terrapin, VeryAngryFelid, yesno