wesleyshaver wrote:2. Throwing potions or dipping weapons into them: again what's the reason for this being bad? A single-use dip or throw per harmful potion vs. a monster would be fun and preserved for tough fights. What's wrong with this?
I can come up with several reasons why crawl doesn't do things this way.
Uniqueness/Independence: Crawl does not have to do things just because Nethack (or any other game) did. Our flavor and/or game design is not dictated by outside forces. (Heck, sometimes there's a contrarian impulse to do things differently just
because it's been done that way before!)
Flavor: It just wouldn't work in universe. Potion bottles in Crawl are pretty tough, and only really break when exposed to extreme heat or cold (as opposed to bottles in Nethack, in which they are so flimsy
mitosis can occur across a glass barrier). A thrown potion wouldn't break, and even if it
did, the chemicals inside wouldn't do anything wetting the outside of a monster. It's been established that the various drugs / chemicals crawlers see need to be metabolized in some way to have an effect, either via ingestion (quaffing), the lungs (clouds) or the bloodstream (needles). Crawl doesn't have contact poison / contact drugs (assuming poisoned sling bullets draw blood). Presumably these chemicals have too fluid a consistency to coat weapons- they just run off.
Balance/Gameplay/Philosophy: letting you use negative items in a positive way misses the point- it just turns bad items into good items. The current system, in which there are a limited number of ways to use normally negative items positively
at a cost is much better- it fosters interesting choices. Want to throw potions? Fine, but you need to waste spell slots on fulsome and evaporate, and some skill lvls in throwing, transmutations, and fire. Or alternatively, invest in cloud spells, or start collecting needles and training throwing to get a similar effect. Want to poison your weapon? Well you can't get one for just a potion of poison- why should you get something good in return for something useless? Instead you need to memorize poison weapon, and burn a scroll of vorpalization. Forcing you to make choices with real and immediate consequences is more interesting and better for the game than just making the ID game traps useful for spoiled players.
Eh, I'm probably not doing the philosophical justification the justice it deserves, but I think you get the point I'm trying to make.