Identifying Scrolls

[snow]

Some scrolls aren't identified when read. I think this is rather annoying because it leads to silly things like reading scrolls with a rat around in case it's fear (and if it's not, you know that it's remove curse). There are other examples but really if the scroll isn't one type you know for certain it's another so they might as well just be identified when read. The biggest offenders here enchant armour and recharging... I know for SURE that scroll is enchant armour and it bugs me to no end that the game still has it unidentified.

So... yeah. I read a scroll next to a rat. Nothing happens, I have a HUGE stack of unidentified scrolls that I haven't touched yet, and holy word is rare as fuck... I know for sure then that the scroll I read is curse jewelry since I'm not wearing a ring or anything. If the player can determine for sure 100% of the time what a scroll is after reading it or setting up some silly situation like reading scrolls next to a rat to be 100% sure what it is... why do they then have to manually mark the item in game? Why isn't it automatically marked like every other item?

I'd like to see all scrolls automatically identified when read. The big scroll that you want to identify ASAP is teleportation... so usually you're reading scrolls as soon as you get 2 of them to identify what's what. And even at that point it's trivial to know exactly what's what as soon as you read them by just reading them next to a rat.

[dpeg]

dtsund's fork (Crawl Light) will remove the identification minigame. As it happens, some of us like it. And no, it is not perfect. (Then again, there was a time when scrolls of immolation would burn scrolls in inventory... go figure.) The appeal is that it makes the early game a little more interesting -- a phase of the game which is otherwise not heavy on choices, for lack of equipment and space.

[snow]

I really do like the identification mini game... don't get me wrong. I would love if it wasn't safe to just randomly read scrolls... and if polymorph wands mutated you when you tested them on yourself. I just feel that once you read a scroll, since you know what it is anyway after reading it, it might as well just be identified in your inventory.

[Tiber]

What I would like to see from the ID mini-game is it ID-ing based on what you already know. It makes sense that you're not sure if that potion a monster healed itself was heal wounds or healing, but if you have one of them identified and the monster uses the other, it should identify. If you have identified all but one of an item type, the last one should identify.

[daggaz]

Your example with holy word is a bad one. Its may be ultra-rare, but the chance is not zero. So you dont actually know for certain about the un-ID'd scroll, you are just very, very sure. Logic-wise, which is coding after all, these are worlds apart. The example with ID vs Enchant Armor vs Recharge is more sound, and yet.. why would your fresh character recognize the third type without having used it successfully? Coding in meta-knowledge just sucks the theme right out of the game. Not to mention, some of us like playing scroll-sudoku. Overall, theres not real difference, tho, unless you honestly cannot remember that the scroll you failed to use on your buckler (and it tells you this ingame) must be a recharge scroll.

[ryak]

Or introduce more scrolls you wouldn't want to read-id. Torment, holy word as undead, noise* and immolation* are about the only examples i can think of that exist right now, although potentially wasting an enchant scroll is a modest penalty, too. Sometimes good-sometimes bad effects would seem to be more interesting than strictly bad ones.

strictly bad:
scroll of foolishness- divination miscast
scroll of disenchant (weapon? armour?)

sometimes good/sometimes bad:
scroll of summon demons - could be interesting if they were sometimes friendly sometimes hostile similar to makhleb's demons.
scroll of xom

* these two aren't even actually that bad.