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Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Wednesday, 13th May 2020, 06:28
by svendre
Anything that reduces inventory clutter and draw to loop picking up items and stashing them (well almost) is a good thing in my opinion. To those ends I want to highlight the items that seem like they have almost no, or very little tactical use, and therefore are always better collected and stored. I'm not ready to jump on the get rid of stairs and make items disappear off the floor bandwagon, but I would like to continue seeing changes that further reduce the amount of those kinds of items that you need, but just not in inventory.

Where should these items with strategic value go? I think given the current situation, the easiest thing to "goldify them" would be for each of these items to unlock an ability from the ability menu, with a cost of burning up a counter that was incremented when the item was found.

The items:

Scroll of Amnesia - Why does this have to take up a slot, or have to be littered all over the dungeon when you need it? You can't very well memorize a new spell in the middle of combat, so I see very little tactical possibilities.

Scroll of Enchant Weapon - No, not everyone uses these immediately! It would seem a strange item to use during combat.

Scroll of Enchant Armour - Pretty much the same as enchant weapon.

Scroll of branding (weapons) - Who is going to not value collecting these? Who is going to use this in combat? Some crazy person perhaps.

Scroll of Remove Curse - You need them, you just don't really need them in combat for the most part. If you have them, and you've got a cursed item that you think might get you killed in a fight, you would use it before entering combat in most cases.

Potion of mutation - Not all that tactical... but valuable, so another item you are nudged to stash. The only real time I feel like it's a bigger consideration is if you're going into Pandemonium you may want to sort-of-tactically grab your mut potions since you can't get them almost any time you want until you get out of Pan, and there's a fair amount of stuff that mutates you there (same for abyss), but again, not all that tactical - it nearly always makes sense to grab them for Pan and Abyss.

Potion of Experience - ... saving them to remove drain effects, or waiting for a training book?? I guess... at least the player has a way to cash them in and keep them out of inventory at all times.

Training manuals - These sure do get annoying. They're quite valuable in general. If you have more than one, there's never much advantage in having two in inventory at once (limiting your options for other items), so this leads to dropping one being optimal until the first one is used up. They don't get used up so quickly that there's much in the way of any tactics with having more than one in inventory. I think they should just be read and applied until they wear off without staying in inventory.

I feel like there is other stuff I haven't mentioned, but I'm done for now. Reducing tedium is one of the core design goals right? Well, collecting this stuff is tedious. Abandoning these things is messy at best. Removing it all is too much change. Please don't turn this into we should remove all these things. The game needs a few limited resource type things for depth of game play--just deal with the tedious part. If they goldify in some way instead of being tempting/advantageous to stash, the problem of tediousness can be solved without breaking something else.

P.S. Spellbooks going into the spell library was one of the most bad-ass game changers I can remember in quite some time. Many thanks all who worked on that!

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Wednesday, 13th May 2020, 18:58
by duvessa
Goldifying manuals requires a commensurate change to either gnolls or acquirement. Because gnolls cannot turn off skills, and skills influence acquirement results, possessing a manual for an unwanted skill as a gnoll can be detrimental. So you end up with gnolls wanting to carefully avoid picking up some manuals, which is pretty bad gameplay. Probably the best fix, other than removing manuals, is to just make manuals not work for gnolls.

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Wednesday, 13th May 2020, 23:18
by petercordia
You could also make acquirement not look at skills for gnolls. Skills influencing acquirement doesn't make any sense for gnolls. (accept in the early game I guess, but I've never had an acquirement that early.)

Goldifying scrolls feels a bit iffy to me, unless all scrolls are goldified. Goldifying some scrolls would just be inelegant.

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Thursday, 14th May 2020, 01:09
by Hellmonk
Second the motion for goldifying manuals and prohibiting gnolls from using them.

Goldifying all scrolls would mean giving up the pretense that crawl inventory is meant to be limited. Seems fine as long as you still run everything through the r menu, but I suspect there won't be willingness to take that step. The op is specifically concerned with goldifying strategic items, which is why the scrolls that you almost never read in combat are listed and the ones that you read in combat are not. These items share a category for legacy reasons and would not all be the same item base type if they were added today. Another approach to your 'inelegance' concern would be to rename all the strategic consumables and move them to a different item type before goldifying them, though this does increase the amount of work required.

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Thursday, 14th May 2020, 01:20
by Shtopit
Yup, these items don't need to be scrolls. They can become any new class, for example, magic gemstones, or coloured glass shards, or magic marbles.

I agree with the OP, there's no reason to impose limits on these items. I would add identify to the list.

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Thursday, 14th May 2020, 21:12
by vt
You could also make acquirement not look at skills for gnolls. Skills influencing acquirement doesn't make any sense for gnolls.


It still makes some sense, since all else equal you can get more use out of something you have higher skill with, even if you did not choose to have that higher skill.

More importantly (to my mind) this would be a hidden change in an already very spoilery system. It adds to the intimidating edifice of obscure special cases in crawl mechanics. And it does a dubious job of changing player behavior wrt to manuals when playing gnolls, because many players will not know there's a difference in acquirement at all (although arguably the ones who were likely to bother with such details are more likely to be spoiled).

Whatever else you can say about the "make manuals useless" alternative, at least it can be communicated clearly to the player with existing tools (mark it as useless, add a line to the item description when playing a gnoll saying "This item will have no effect because you are a gnoll.")

FWIW I suspect making manuals useless for gnolls for such an edge-casey reason will feel pretty bad for a lot of players. I'd consider making manuals droppable or deactivatable from wherever they're moved to instead.

If you have more than one [manual], there's never much advantage in having two in inventory at once (limiting your options for other items), so this leads to dropping one being optimal until the first one is used up.


If manuals do not get goldified, it would be great to at least make them stackable.

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Friday, 15th May 2020, 07:48
by Majang
duvessa wrote:Goldifying manuals requires a commensurate change to either gnolls or acquirement. Because gnolls cannot turn off skills, and skills influence acquirement results, possessing a manual for an unwanted skill as a gnoll can be detrimental. So you end up with gnolls wanting to carefully avoid picking up some manuals, which is pretty bad gameplay. Probably the best fix, other than removing manuals, is to just make manuals not work for gnolls.


As things currently stand, manuals are bad for gnolls because they block a much-needed inventory slot for a very long time. But, acquirement considerations aside, goldified manuals are very good for gnolls who plan an extended game. Skills supported by manuals max out significantly before other skills, which means that the total experience is spread out between fewer skills, with the same insane aptitudes. The more manuals a gnoll has under its belt, the sooner it will have all skills in the 20s, which makes them able to do practically everything. Given that even with careful skills management in other characters I often find most of the acquirement offers useless, a gnoll using manuals should always be able to find something in a scroll, as basically nothing should be entirely useless to a gnoll. So I don't really see the problem with acquirements.

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Saturday, 16th May 2020, 01:35
by duvessa
Majang wrote:Skills supported by manuals max out significantly before other skills, which means that the total experience is spread out between fewer skills, with the same insane aptitudes.
Huh. I had assumed that the code to prevent this from happening for gnolls was correct, but now that you've brought it up, I tested it and you're right; this does happen (and is a bug).

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Saturday, 16th May 2020, 02:14
by Midn8
The only thing I really need to see goldified is chunks (and possibly rations). I don't mind shuffling stuff around for space but I hate playing the game of "what did autopickup grab in my chunks slot this time"

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Saturday, 16th May 2020, 07:21
by Majang
duvessa wrote:
Majang wrote:Skills supported by manuals max out significantly before other skills, which means that the total experience is spread out between fewer skills, with the same insane aptitudes.
Huh. I had assumed that the code to prevent this from happening for gnolls was correct, but now that you've brought it up, I tested it and you're right; this does happen (and is a bug).

How is it supposed to be?

Re: Whatever happened to goldify ideas

PostPosted: Tuesday, 19th May 2020, 19:17
by shping
short_name = ADHD
long_name = you can't read anything longer than a scroll bec...BARKBARKBARK