Post Sunday, 26th December 2021, 01:02

Stat adjustment potions

3 potions: Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. Each increases its associated stat by 2 and decreases the other 2 stats by 1 each. Thus, they don't make a player more powerful, but provide a mechanism to alter a character's power distribution.

Why?

Crawl is meant to be a game where players adapt to what they find in the dungeon. But, the effectiveness of most strategies is significantly influenced by stats, which currently can't be adapted to suit new strategies. This significantly reduces the practicality for adapting one's strategy by restricting the effective options, except in cases where the new strategy happens to align with a player's stat distribution.

The only long-term consideration for background choice is that background's stat contribution. Equipment and spells can be found. Skills can be trained. Religions can be abandoned and joined. But, stats are forever. Therefore, they overwhelmingly outweigh the other considerations, provided the player is skilled enough to be able to survive the early game with their particular species/background combination. This limits replay value, as certain backgrounds are far more attractive than others, particularly those that feature a "dump" stat. Stat considerations also dictate species choice to a certain degree, though not to such an overwhelming extent given that many species feature unique perks and drawbacks.

So, having the ability to adjust stat distribution opens up strategic choice both at character creation and throughout the game. There are many mechanisms by which such ability could be provided, but this potion method seems to align well with crawl's design goals. It's simple, both to understand and in terms of UI. It's randomized, in that you can expect to be able to use potions to adjust your stats as desired, but you can't count on when you'll be able to do so. This creates meaningful choices, e.g. do you use a potion early to compliment a stat-boosting ring you just found, or do you save it for later to see what stat boosts (and penalties!) will be on the artifacts you find?

The downside, of course, is that adding 3 new consumable items would exacerbate the issue of inventory clutter, but that problem won't be solved by not having stat potions in the game. Moreover, the impact of these potions would be rather minimal, as their effect is purely strategic, so they can be confidently left to sit on the floor.

For this message the author Nekoatl has received thanks: 2
Majang, petercordia