The Tavern

In pursuit of the goal of reducing grind, I propose to add 2 benefits to collecting runes. Idea being to shift the biggest incentives for farming infinite areas to something inherently non-grindable. The two things that players are most inclined to grind for are skill experience and unrandarts.

For each rune collected, boost the player's skill experience. This could either be a one-time boost similar to a potion of experience, or an increase to the contribution rate of experience points gained to skill experience awarded from then on, or both.

Second, for every 5 runes collected, give the player an unrandart of their choice. 3 should be enough that players can get whichever unrandarts they have their heart set on enough to motivate them to spend millions of turns grinding. 3 also ensures that all species except felids will still choose the bulk of their equipment from whatever's randomly generated. And IMO if a player manages to keep a felid alive long enough to collect all 15 runes, they've earned it.

Bonus: players would feel more rewarded for tackling crawl's special challenge areas.

If you are going to add rune perks, you should make them cool, not generic.
Slime rune: activate for a random mutation. recharge with xp.
Spider rune: activate to surround yourself with webs. Poisons you.

The purpose of the proposal is not to add features to runes for the sake of runes having features. It's to improve the gameplay experience by reducing the incentive to grind. Runes just happen to be the best gating mechanism I could think of. Right now, if a player wants to use a specific unrandart, they have 3 options, not of them good:

1) Grind, potentially endlessly, through infinite content areas until they either find the item in question, or a ?acquire that offers it, or enough gold to fund enough Gozag shops until one offers it. The problem with this is obvious.

2) Collect game seeds until they find one with the unrandart in question, then replay using that seed whenever they want to use that unrandart. The problem with this is that replaying the game multiple times using the same seed gets incredibly boring, as you quickly learn where everything of interest is and can easily navigate around unseen uniques and out-of-depth monsters to collect the best treasure.

3) Use WizMode and simply create the items in question. There are 2 problems with this. First, it gives players access to the unrandarts far too early, trivializing most of the non-extended game. Second, it gives access to too many unrandarts, as well as a host of other power boosts, potentially trivializing the entire game. (Although I am really looking forward to seeing what's possible with the refactoring of species features into mutations instead of hard-coded special cases... ya know, for science.)

I don't know that I was aware until I saw this thread that grinding Abyss/Pan for a specific unrandart was a thing anyone did. One way to prevent it, though, would be to disable unrandart generation in Abyss/Pan. (I don't think one is intended to be able to get one's preferred unrandart in every game.)

Unrandarts don't generate in Abyss, but if you wanted to stop players from grinding for them, you'd have to make the same true for Pan and Zig, make all 3 areas not drop ?acquire or prevent unrandarts from being obtained through ?acquire, and rework or remove Gozag. But seriously, without grinding or WizMode, how are you supposed to collect the Octopus King set?

But yeah, some of us are interested in building specific character concepts, and from that viewpoint, winning before completing the character concept is functionally equivalent to quitting the game.

Now really, what would be the use of acquiring my desired unrandart with the 15th rune? Just to hold it in my hands/claws and shout hoorray? What benefit would I have from it, now that I completed everything the game can throw at me without that unrandart?

Collecting 15 runes isn't the same as completing everything the game can throw at you. For one thing, the rune guardians are not the most dangerous encounters that can appear in Pan or the Abyss. For another, neither ziggs nor the orb run must be completed in order to collect 15 runes.

Also, per my proposal, if you only had one desired unrandart, it would be available upon collecting the 5th rune, not the 15th.

I've always thought runes should grant a branch-specific thing in the name of making navigating out of the branch less annoying, Abyssal already gives "improved chances of generating an exit" we could add things like "Snake rune gives immunity to snake constriction" "Swamp rune gives the ability to not be slowed by swamp water" etc. (We could also just make it so that picking up a rune gives you the option to be teleported to the branch entrance)

Huh this would certainly make apporting the rune and running for it a better option.

A problem with letting players pick unrandarts is spoilers: instead of discovering some amazing interesting item occasionally over a lot of games, new players get[1] a list of all unrandarts the first time they manage to obtain a rune.
Also it diminishes an interesting choice: if your current weapon sucks and you randomly find an untrained artefact of +amazing, switching skills becomes a lot less attractive if you know for sure you can get an unrand for your chosen weapon skill later on.

[1] Because if you don't show them the list, optimal play becomes "look up a list of unrands online"