The Tavern

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but clearly not enough becuse clubs still exist.

Clubs seem to be unique in their badness and uselessness.

Any class starting with M&F has at least a mace. I can’t think of any other weapon in the game that I would never use for any reason (even scythes have a couple interesting unrands). Anticipating the argument that it’s a monster weapon, would we lose much if certain hobgoblins etc. just spawned unarmed, or with maces? Whereas we’d gain one less useless item.

monkeytor wrote:I can’t think of any other weapon in the game that I would never use for any reason (even scythes have a couple interesting unrands).

Do you never wield clubs on backgrounds with no starting weapon?

A while ago I suggested "abstracting away" all monster weapons, a proposal that got some attention but ultimately went nowhere. Perhaps hobgoblins would be a good way to test that concept: up their damage to 8 or 9, and disable weapon use for them. That would probably be better than giving them maces, which would let them one-shot quite a few (more) characters.

That would be a big buff to hobgoblins. A hobgoblin with a +0 club deals 1d5+1d4-1d3-1 damage per hit - max 7, min 0, mean 2.5. An unarmed hobgoblin with 8 base damage deals 1d8 damage per hit - max 8, min 1, mean 4.5. And that's before accounting for the higher attack delay and lower accuracy that the club hobgoblin has.

You probably want to leave them at 5 damage or increase it to 6 unless your goal is specifically to buff them.

edit: oops the club hobgoblin has higher accuracy, not lower accuracy, so yeah you probably want to increase it to 6

duvessa wrote:
monkeytor wrote:I can’t think of any other weapon in the game that I would never use for any reason (even scythes have a couple interesting unrands).
Do you never wield clubs on backgrounds with no starting weapon?

I don't think this use-case is very interesting. It will always be the case that picking up the 1st weapon you see and wielding it if you are in danger of running out of mp is a no-brainer. But clubs are unique for being a double no-brainer: afaik you should always switch to the first non-club non-glowing weapon you see.

I may use club instead of dagger.

Feature Request:
Make clubs eligible for Sticks to Snakes conversion. It's more "Stick-y" than an arrow, to be honest. Also make them throwable for extra fun. "I'd prefer a tomahawk, but this big stick is on the ground so I'll go with this."

Pre 0.14 (according to the wiki), clubs (and other sticklike things) used to be eligible Sticks to Snakes targets, they would give you better snakes (mamba and anacondas, IIRC) and it was really strong and kind of bad in that it meant your inventory was full of a bunch of weird sticklike things and that a level 2 spell was basically an insanely strong summon — an anaconda will take down a tremendous amount of the game single-handedly, and even more if it's surrounded by a cloud of supporting snakes.

Also pre-0.14, clubs used to be throwable. Again, you just wound up with an early-game inventory full of crappy missiles.

Non-stacking inventory items don't make for very good spell reagents or missiles, IMO.

njvack wrote:Pre 0.14 (according to the wiki), clubs (and other sticklike things) used to be eligible Sticks to Snakes targets, they would give you better snakes (mamba and anacondas, IIRC) and it was really strong and kind of bad in that it meant your inventory was full of a bunch of weird sticklike things and that a level 2 spell was basically an insanely strong summon — an anaconda will take down a tremendous amount of the game single-handedly, and even more if it's surrounded by a cloud of supporting snakes.

Also pre-0.14, clubs used to be throwable. Again, you just wound up with an early-game inventory full of crappy missiles.

Non-stacking inventory items don't make for very good spell reagents or missiles, IMO.

I vaguely remember that from 0.13 and prior, so my bad for thinking it was a new idea.

Since melee weapons do not stack in inventory I'm totally in agreement that making them 'S2S-eligible' would be an inventory nightmare, and I'm fresh out of ideas for making clubs more interesting and differentiated without screwing the player with a bad inventory management experience.

What's wrong with having bad/useless weapon bases? They don't really enrich the game much, but they don't seem to hurt it at all. If nothing else, having some easily ignorable, obviously bad items around contributes to the feeling of a world beyond the video-game.

Many of the items that gave that sort of non-polished realistic feel have been removed for tedium or noob-trap reasons (see disc of storms, or really, most of the old evokables.)

But clubs aren't tedious. And they aren't a noob trap. They're just... bad.

And that's OK.

There were also a lot of dumb extra armor types like banded mail(fuck you, Samuel Rush Meyrick!), often bad as well.

I agree that having bad items is not fundamentally a bad thing though.
And I also do not agree with the idea that everything needs to be designed around avoiding "no-brainers". A game where you have to be using your brain and making difficult decisions constantly is, to be blunt, exhausting. Having weak weapons you can upgrade from provides a satisfying sense of progression from increasing player power, and that's a good thing.

Don't like to see "having bad items is not fundamentally a bad thing" being the parting take. Having unremarkable items is a fundamentally bad thing, forget about bad ones.

In a game with a lot of early daggers, it seems to me that the case where you'd use a club is an outlier. It's a situation where you're pressed into meleeing with a book background without getting a dagger first. I wouldn't say it would never happen, but I wouldn't say it's worth a class of weapons either.

counterproposal: bring back hammers

njvack wrote:counterproposal: bring back hammers

Countercounterproposal: Bring back ankus

tealizard wrote:Don't like to see "having bad items is not fundamentally a bad thing" being the parting take. Having unremarkable items is a fundamentally bad thing, forget about bad ones.

This seems to be a popular take, but I don't see the rationale. Unremarkable items that do not affect play are essentially equivalent to the various wall-decorations crawl already has. Why is one bad and not the other?

Edit: would you think clubs were fine if they were like skeletons, and were uninteractable?

They clutter the screen, messages, and searching, and add cognitive load.

Indeed. Clubs in particular also create a situation where you should pick the item up, not use it, then drop it later.

re: Decorative clubs, I think that would make sense in a game where there is no expectation that a monster would drop its weapon. I don't think it's good to raise the question of why this thing that looks like an item isn't actually an item. In hellcrawl, Sigmund does not carry a scythe (scythes don't exist as normal weapons, tho I think the unrands are still in there), but his tile still has the scythe and he still has a reaching attack. Arguably this is "game-y," but I think the hellcrawl audience gets that the game takes priority over the simulation.

byrel wrote:What's wrong with having bad/useless weapon bases? They don't really enrich the game much, but they don't seem to hurt it at all. If nothing else, having some easily ignorable, obviously bad items around contributes to the feeling of a world beyond the video-game.
Many of the items that gave that sort of non-polished realistic feel have been removed for tedium or noob-trap reasons (see disc of storms, or really, most of the old evokables.)

But clubs aren't tedious. And they aren't a noob trap. They're just... bad.

I'm all for things that deepen and enrich the gameworld, but at least for me personally having tons of clubs lying around the early dungeon doesn't do that. As duvessa notes, they are just clutter.

I'd argue much more 'enriching' are vaults, especially small ones, and other little details: that one ossuary that's a miniature version of Tomb:3, the little vault in Elf where there's a cluster of trees and if you burn them down you find there's a statue in the middle, that one floor-size vault in the lower dungeons that has a troll bridge with a gatehouse and a bunch of gnoll huts and gardens. I've been playing the game for years and still find new vaults like that, or remember ones I've only seen once.

The Tavern

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