nicolae wrote:zasvid wrote:It would be okay as a design goal for some artistic game that wanted to get across a message about getting your hopes up and the reality crushing them like fragile eggs. That doesn't really work for Crawl, though.
Crawl isn't a game about getting your hopes up and then crushing them like eggs? Are you sure you're playing the same game as everyone else?
Well, the way I see it, once past early game it's not Crawl that does the crushing, you crush your hopes yourself through bad play - and for the early game, I gave up any hope long ago.
Tenaya wrote:So, the message is that one should not expect artifacts to always be useful. Furthermore, using consumables (such as scrolls of identify) on randart weapons, or taking risks to retrieve items from vaults, might not be an obvious choice.
That's easily accomplished by finding a randart with *MUT* or a randart ring of slaying found by a pure spellcaster, no need to have pitiful things like the ones in the OP.
dd wrote:Crawl artifacts can stay as artifacts IMO. Just because something means something in D&D, doesn't mean it has to have the same meaning in Crawl.
The meaning bled over to most (if not all) uses of the word in other roguelikes & video games, board games, RPG games and traditional media with themes similar to DCSS, therefore giving a lot of people most likely to try Crawl a strong preconception about 'artifacts'. In the end, DCSS is fighting that preconceived notion and providing disappointment to some (though probably most) of its players for no good reason, which makes it a (very, very slightly) worse game than it could be.
So, anyway, I didn't write all of this because a randart robe of cold resistance is a particularly thorny issue in my side, but I've noticed that some of the vocal posters here look at DCSS as if its only value were that of an abstract puzzle to be solved - even though Crawl neither isn't just that, nor it strives to be - and inspiration struck me to explain this issue, though to what end, I'm not sure anymore. Still, it's good to think and talk about the things that make games fun, in hope of positively influencing the future of games.