The Tavern

I'm fairly new to stone soup, but have been gaming for 40 years, and am wondering how two or three things fit in with the stone soup philosophy:
- is there a compelling reason why fire and cold resistance is apparently stackable but not poison or electricity? This seems quite unique to stone soup
- similarly, apparently there used to be a player spell from the charm school which enable the curing of poison, but was removed. Why was that deemed necessary?
I'd like to understand these decisions better before making further contributions, thank you in advance.

Developers can give you better reasons then me (or some other random posters here), but here I my answers anyway:

1. I do not think there is any reason behind some resistances being 3 levels and others only 1. Poison resistance is not very important even with 1 level, so 3 would be even more strange. Otherwise having only 1 level of every resistance had been proposed, and seems to be better from a game design standpoint, as otherwise you are encouraged to carry more rarely useful items to swap. (Although some people argues that removing resistances all together would be more sensible from a game design perspective.)

I think the 3 levels are mostly heritage. Resistances are not very important or a big part of crawl in any case, I guess nobody cares enough to rebalance them to something better.

2. I guess cure poison had been removed because it was mostly useless, and since poison status is not a big threat anyway there is no need to have even more ways to get rid of it and make it even more trivial.

Not really. Plenty of other games have different elements and their resistances behave differently.

I'm glad Crawl isn't one of those JRPGs where the spells are all named like Fire 1, Cold 1, Poison 1, Dark 1, Fire 2, Cold 3, etc, and the only difference between them is which enemies have which resistances.

Here's the commit in question:

FWIW, it's not, even in roguelikes; in Angband the elemental resistances stack, taking 1/3 damage if you have the resistance on equipment or from a temporary effect like a spell or consumable, and 1/9 if you have both equipment and temporary resistance, but the other resistances (which typically do more in the way of status effects and less outright damage) do not - additionally, one can become immune to some elemental attacks altogether.