Prevent self-targeting with ranged weapons?

[hawthornbunny]

Maybe there are good reasons to self-target that I'm unaware of, but the only one I can think of is to hit oneself with a dispersal weapon in order to self-blink, which feels a bit cheesy to me anyway. Otherwise, I find it interrupts the flow when I'm whittling down enemies with the very convenient ff combination, only for an enemy to suddenly go out of sight and make me accidentally target myself instead, at which point I have to tell the game to cancel it. I feel like removing self-targeting on weapons where it clearly makes no sense to target oneself would make ranged battling a bit smoother.

[svendre]

Or switch the key needed to self target so you never do it by accident. The only other case I can think of where it might benefit a player off the top of my head might be demonspawn mutations, powered by pain...

I generally hate the idea of limiting players with artificial constraints to protect them from themselves, but in this case it doesn't seem like there are many applications, and certainly you don't want it to interfere with the interface.

I'm sure there is an option to disable self-targeting in the options file though, why not just use that? It would accomplish the same thing as your request to remove the ability.

edit: checked the options and only found this:

allow_self_target = (yes | no | prompt)
Allow targeting yourself with risky magic (e.g., the spell Bolt of Fire
or a wand of paralysis.)
When set to 'yes', you are a valid target. When set to 'no', you cannot
target yourself with such spells. When set to 'prompt' (the default),
you will be required to confirm self-targeting. This option has no
effect on area-effect spells, such as Mephitic Cloud, where you are
always a valid target.

The way that's written it sure doesn't make it sound like it'll stop ranged weapons, but I haven't tested it.

[Siegurt]

So this comes from when you hit 'f' the first time, the game wants to know what you're shooting at, where should the cursor go if there are no monsters in sight? If you hit the second 'f' while the targeting cursor is on you, a prompt like "Hey, this is a pretty dumb thing to do, you probably don't want to do that" makes sense as the default.

So the question is what *should* happen if there's nothing on screen to shoot and you hit the 'f' key, putting the cursor on any square *other than* the player means accidentally shooting your ammo at random unoccupied squares and then having to waste more time picking it up, not being able to fire at all when there are no monsters on screen means you can't attack blindly when stuff is invisible.

Also, if you're just hitting 'ff' blindly, you might as well just be using tab (with the ranged options on) that has the same effect, but is one less keypress and just doesn't work if there are no monsters on screen to aim at..

[VeryAngryFelid]

I'm sure there is an option to disable self-targeting in the options file though, why not just use that?

The option should have meaningful default i.e. "no" instead of "prompt". We should stop trying to keep defaults from ancient versions when people used wands on self to identify them.
Defaults for some other options are unfriendly for new players too:
easy_eat_chunks = false
explore_auto_rest = false
confirm_butcher = auto

[TheMeInTeam]

So this comes from when you hit 'f' the first time, the game wants to know what you're shooting at, where should the cursor go if there are no monsters in sight? If you hit the second 'f' while the targeting cursor is on you, a prompt like "Hey, this is a pretty dumb thing to do, you probably don't want to do that" makes sense as the default.

So the question is what *should* happen if there's nothing on screen to shoot and you hit the 'f' key, putting the cursor on any square *other than* the player means accidentally shooting your ammo at random unoccupied squares and then having to waste more time picking it up, not being able to fire at all when there are no monsters on screen means you can't attack blindly when stuff is invisible.

Also, if you're just hitting 'ff' blindly, you might as well just be using tab (with the ranged options on) that has the same effect, but is one less keypress and just doesn't work if there are no monsters on screen to aim at..

Once you set a target with f then "ff" or "f." macro will continue throwing at that target, as long as it remains on screen as a valid target. Tab will continue to default to closest, which is really annoying against enemies like blink frogs or merfolk avatars since you will "tab throw" at drowning souls and other nonsense rather than what you were attacking.

Also, spells can be set to a macro like zaf or zdf, allowing you to do tab-like castings with multiple spells while still having access to the usual inputs via tabbing.

The odd thing is that the player is a valid target for these spells/thrown objects. The player is not a valid target for tabbing himself in melee (which has similar "benefits" as throwing a javelin into yourself, with no mulch risk!), and if you try to cast mephitic cloud with nothing susceptible to it in range you get a message to that effect without a Y/N prompt. Note that the game *does* have some dynamic ability to assess this - by default it will not prompt you against putting mephitic cloud on yourself if you have rPois, but it WILL ask you to confirm if you lack it.

It would likely make the most sense to default launchers/throwing/pure damaging spells to this interaction also, rather than a Y/N prompt to self target.

[petercordia]

I think launchers have this interaction, already. And it's annoying, as the OP pointed out. When you're pressing ff repeatedly, and you suddenly have to press N, it costs a second or two. It would be much nice if the game simply said "Nope, can't do that", like it does for walking into deep water.

This should not be accessed though the same option as spells auto-target, because the player needs the option to throw Mephitic Cloud (or Fireball) in his own face. For Mephitic Cloud I also find it doesn't break the flow nearly as much, because I'll be expecting it.

I completely agree ff and f. can be preferable to TAB.

VeryAngryFelid: how many (new) players play versions where you need to choose which meat to eat ?
I agree about explore_auto_rest = false

[VeryAngryFelid]

VeryAngryFelid: how many (new) players play versions where you need to choose which meat to eat ?

Good question, I took it from http://crawl.akrasiac.org/docs/options_guide.txt which is for current version. My point is devs should not be afraid to change defaults or even remove deprecated options.

[hawthornbunny]

My point is devs should not be afraid to change defaults or even remove deprecated options.

They aren't, generally, which is why I don't feel too bad suggesting this. It's actually something I feel like I should have suggested a long time ago; after years of playing Crawl I finally realized that it's an unnecessary interface blip that could be smoothed away. I just wanted to get people's thoughts on it in case I missed some obvious use case.