The Tavern

There's not really a reason for these to take up an inventory slot. As long as the boost is noted on the skill screen like it is now, the manual itself doesn't need to exist as an item. This would slightly improve crawl inventory management with negligible downside.

Unless inventory management itself is a feature rather than a downside.

Manuals need a reform or removal badly anyway. As-is, their intended usecase is to find an "early" manual and let that influence the way your character goes. That almost never happens, they are much too rare early on. They are also too specialized, 90% of manuals stay unused due to not fitting an existing character at all.

Some brainstorming:

- Flat out removal. Give a very slight increase in !exp drop rate in compensation.
- Keep the broadly useful and good manuals at their current rate drop rate. Fighting, spellcasting for example. Remove very specific skills, eg. staves/conjuration.
- Introduce broad skill class based manuals. Eg. "weapon manual" gives its bonus to all weapons, "arcane manual" to all magic schools, "defensive manual" to all defenses. Keep at current rarity.
- Keep current system, but increase specific skill drop rate a lot, especially early. Keep fighting/spellcasting dropchance low. Serves to "steer" a character with an early drop.

- Also put in how many XP-"units" are in it - we get a lot of questions here on the tavern for that. Can be based on the skill-screen [m] based system, no need to put in exact XP, but having a rough measure helps.

One option is making manuals contain two or more randomly chosen skills.

"A manual of Fighting and Hexes". "A manual of Staves, Invocations, and Slings".

FWIW I use about 75% of the manuals I find (However, I do tend to play very unspecialized characters), I don't know where you came up with 90% from, but I really doubt the average number is 90% maybe somewhere between the 25% unused that I get and the 90% that you're claiming is an actual average. I could be persuaded to believe maybe 50% which sounds like a good number of unused manuals on average.

Even if it is as high as 90% unused, why should manuals be special in this regard? You don't use most of the body armours, or weapons you find either.

Sticking to just the original proposal: yeah, I'd agree that goldifying manuals would be nice. I'm not a huge fan of inventory management and with spellbooks being gone/one type of food it's a lot easier to fit most things you want in 52 slots, so this would only continue that trend.

As for some of the other comments: if you want early manuals, I'd say just make manuals show up early. There's already specific rules for item generation on the first 4 floors (like you can't generate torment scrolls until at least D:5, if I'm not mistaken)...you could just make manuals have a high chance to show up early and then drop the rate back down to the current value after that, if you wanted to steer early players towards skills. It'd be more likely to just boost the characters who found 'matching' manuals; although if you really want to get complex about it, you could only generate manuals which are for skills the player's background had 0 skill in at creation.

Then everyone can complain about how unintuitive the whole thing is. Back on topic, yeah, goldify manuals.

Goldify manuals sounds good to me. It would be especially nice for gnolls who wind up dragging them around seemingly forever.

Manuals should give a permanent, retroactive, +2 to the skill apt.

No manuals of Fighting, Armour, Dodging, as those aren't interesting.

This is a good change.

Other things we should goldify:
Food
Ammo (other than throwing)
Scrolls
Potions
Wands

Basically goldify anything that doesn't have unique modifiers

I think that goldification is good for things that are passives and don't really represent a choice. So, for example, I am OK for goldification of food (you have to eat, there's no choice there) and of ammo (you choose your launcher, not your ammo). Ammo in particular could be shown like this:



But things that are active, and represent a choice, like scrolls, potions and wands, should imo not be goldified. They would become overwhelming. Instead, I am for limiting the overall number of consumable types available to the player. One way is merging together different effects, as it was done with !mutation and I hope will one day be done with might and agility. The other way is introducing more species with restricted access to certain item categories (like mummies and formicids).

Other things that are practically a given to be only used strategically:

Scroll of enchant armour
Scroll of enchant weapon
Scroll of brand weapon
Scroll of remove curse
Scroll of identify (maybe sometimes used tactically)
Potion of experience
Potion of mutation

@svendre: I agree. It's however hard for me to think of something else into which to turn those items. I mean, potions in general are supposed to be unusable for mummies, while mut has that "surprise surprise" effect, when you drink-identify them.

Otherwise, all of these things could be used from the (a)bility menu. Like "you found a pearl of weapon branding", and it's all "magical pearls" that you put in a chain around your neck, and don't take room in the inventory. Unless Troglodytes come into play, in that case, it will be needed to give a reason why the pearls are unusable, and they probably will have to be turned into something else, lore-wise.

Just spitballing.

,

Drinking/reading them for the first time could move the item into a "bag/backpack" for all subsequent uses. This would operate similarly to how picking up a spell book moves spells into your library. The "bag-inventory" could be accessed just like the ability menu or the spell library. It could be explained that you have a bag which carries these kinds of things that aren't typically used during combat, and don't take up any of your slots for more quickly accessible items. It could optionally take several turns to access this bag. You could also even go so far as to let players move some other items they want to stash away into their backpack.

The problem is that inventory choice for potions and scrolls is either a no-brainer or trivially decided by character build. Think about how much time is spent playing inventory tetris versus how rarely you die due to not having a specific item in your inventory.

Some consumables operate entirely at the strategic layer, and thus don't affect life-or-death at the tactical layer and purely represent trading inventory slots for convenience.
Scroll of acquirement (generally used immediately)
Scroll of amnesia
Scroll of brand weapon
Scroll of enchant armour
Scroll of enchant weapon
Scroll of identify (generally carried)
Scroll of remove curse (generally carried)
Potion of experience (generally used immediately)
Potion of mutation (generally carried in the end and postgame)

Some consumables are straight up always bad and should never be carried
Scroll of noise
Scroll of random uselessness
Scroll of vulnerability
Potion of degeneration

Some consumables are straight up good and should always be carried outside of major exceptions (mummy/formicid)
Scroll of blinking
Scroll of magic mapping
Scroll of teleportation
Potion of agility
Potion of brilliance (unless you're strictly melee, in which case disregard)
Potion of cancellation
Potion of curing
Potion of haste
Potion of heal wounds
Potion of invisibility
Potion of magic (unless you're strictly melee, in which case disregard)
Potion of might
Potion of resistance
Scroll of fear (at least for the early and midgame)

So there are really only 10 consumables we have to make decisions about and most of them are pretty clean-cut, e.g. you're not going to carry berserk on a spellcaster or carry torment or immolation if you don't have a specific plan for it (e.g. cheesing TRJ).
Scroll of fog
Scroll of holy word
Scroll of immolation
Scroll of silence
Scroll of summoning
Scroll of torment
Potion of ambrosia
Potion of berserk rage
Potion of flight
Potion of lignification

I wouldn't see goldification as eliminating ID-ing for consumables. Instead you'd press [q]uaff and see a menu like

a - 2 potions of healing
b - 3 potions of curing
c - 1 potion of might
...
A - 2 fizzy blue potions
B - 1 gray potion
...

It would also have the advantage that ID'd potions would always have the same mappings, e.g. q->h for healing.

For me I spend virtually no time playing invetory tetris (over the span of playing for 4 hours I spend less than 10 minutes finagling things into my inventory, probably often less than 5) And virtually every single one of my deaths could've been avoided by having the right item in my inventory.

Eliminating ID for consumables is a good idea anyway. Crawl's ID game is pretty bad.

Do you mean that the two facts are related?

No, just responding to the thing that I responded to, I don't think the two are related (Although perhaps quotee I was responding to did, I can't vouch for or against that)