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Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 22nd December 2010, 00:44
by danr
Currently, if you drink a potion of agility, you see your dex increase and also your EV score. A potion of brilliance boosts your int, and you also see differences in spell success rates etc.

However:
- with a potion of might, you don't see anywhere that this gives a bonus to melee damage separate from the Str bonus.
- You don't see your GDR anywhere ever, even though this is the measure that ultimately matters, just as it is your EV score that matters for dodging.
- You do't get any indication of your actual speed or accuracy with a weapon (or true damage potential)

This is not about being spoily, it is just about being consistent. I sometimes get the sense that the melee game is more of an afterthought, and that the real attention goes to the magic game (where infomation about spell success rates, hunger cost, range and power is totally transparent)

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 22nd December 2010, 14:40
by Danei
danr wrote:
- with a potion of might, you don't see anywhere that this gives a bonus to melee damage separate from the Str bonus.


I agree, this should be changed or clarified.

danr wrote:- You don't see your GDR anywhere ever, even though this is the measure that ultimately matters, just as it is your EV score that matters for dodging.


I'm not sure GDR is what "ultimately" matters. AC matters too. GDR just puts an upper bound on the damage you can take. But I agree, there's no reason not to indicate it in parentheses, just like in Wizard Mode.

danr wrote:- You do't get any indication of your actual speed or accuracy with a weapon (or true damage potential)


Like Minmay said, you can see your speed, but I agree that some other indications would be nice. Note, however, that you can't tell how much damage, numerically, you're going to do with spells; just how powerful your spell is compared to how powerful it can potentially be.

A similar power indicator for weapons might be difficult because the main advantage of higher weapon skill is attack delay decrease, but even after the minimum delay, higher skill does increase accuracy and damage.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 22nd December 2010, 16:33
by danr
Danei wrote:
danr wrote:- You do't get any indication of your actual speed or accuracy with a weapon (or true damage potential)


Like Minmay said, you can see your speed, but I agree that some other indications would be nice. Note, however, that you can't tell how much damage, numerically, you're going to do with spells; just how powerful your spell is compared to how powerful it can potentially be.

A similar power indicator for weapons might be difficult because the main advantage of higher weapon skill is attack delay decrease, but even after the minimum delay, higher skill does increase accuracy and damage.


See, and I have NO clue how much it increases accuracy and damage. With Axes 27, does base damage for my battleaxe increase to 20, to 35, 50? I know I can kill things in a hurry but I don't know how much AC or HP monsters have.

I don't know if hand axes are pointless in the endgame. I don't know if it's crazy to start training another weapon type late in the game. I don't know if it's worth using a cool ego weapon for which I don't have aptitudes, because I can't compare the relative effects of brand damage and skill bonuses.

There are so many variables in weapon effectiveness, I just would like it to be made a bit clearer in any way the devs are willing to make it clearer.

Again, why are the costs and relative power of spells so clearly displayed, and updated according to character skills & equipment, while all we get about weapons is their base damage and accuracy?

E.g. if you are a spellcaster and you put on some armour, you immediately see changes in the success rates for all your spells. If on the other hand you are using a broadaxe and you put on a shield, there is no updated information for the player, there's just the general description that "this weapon is more effective if used with two hands".

The character would know very well how comfortable and effective they are with different weapons, I don't see why this is not relayed to the player.

In fact, recently, the player even gets told how easily a monster resists an enchantment attempt. I really appreciate this, it helps me know if I'm just having bad luck or if I should give up trying to enchant a monster, but how on earth does the character actually know how easy it was for that slime mold to resist a spell? And again, how could they know that, but not know how relatively effective they are with their broadaxe (skill 15) compared to their dire flail of crushing (skill 6)?

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 22nd December 2010, 16:55
by Danei
See, and I have NO clue how much it increases accuracy and damage.


Neither do I. It's small enough that a lot of people turn off their weapon skill once they hit minimum delay, though.

You also don't know how much each notch on the power bar increases the damage of your spells.

I don't know if hand axes are pointless in the endgame. I don't know if it's crazy to start training another weapon type late in the game. I don't know if it's worth using a cool ego weapon for which I don't have aptitudes


In order: Yes they are, Yes it usually is crazy, and sometimes, depending on the weapon and circumstances (A dagger of venom is useful against insects even without short blades skill, e.g.)

Again, why are the costs and relative power of spells so clearly displayed, and updated according to character skills & equipment, while all we get about weapons is their base damage and accuracy?

E.g. if you are a spellcaster and you put on some armour, you immediately see changes in the success rates for all your spells. If on the other hand you are using a broadaxe and you put on a shield, there is no updated information for the player, there's just the general description that "this weapon is more effective if used with two hands".


You know about the success rates, but you don't really know about the relative power of spells. You don't know, for example, how much more damage bolt of fire does than throw flame.

I do agree that some indication of ability to use weapons and armor would be nice, though.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 22nd December 2010, 18:01
by danr
I'm not wanting to know damage amounts, or anything more than similar information as is given for spells. The main principle is that there should be some cumulative indicator of speed, accuracy and damage that reflects the player's skill, stats and equipment.

Base damage is essentially the same thing for each weapon, so a damage indicator showing a bar of "####....." would be workable. So if my dagger is "#####......" with accuracy of "excellent" or whatever, and my battleaxe shows damage of "####........" and accuracy "poor", I can make an informed decision.

If spell information was done like weapon effectiveness, the game would tell you the base hunger cost of the spell, its base success rate, and its MP cost. It would also show you though the base damage, eg. 1d8 or 3d27, as we see base damage for weapon types.

So - I'd be okay even with hiding the base weapon damage, just as base spell damage is hidden. Instead, just give players qualitative descriptions of THEIR characters relative damage, accuracy and speed with a weapon. Leave brand damage out of the equation and just provide that extra information separately.

I'm envisioning a "Wield weapon" screen similar to the spellcasting screen, something like:

  Code:
Wield which weapon?                                         Accuracy    Speed      Damage
(a) -1, +6 Dagger of the Wind {rElec, Blink} (venom)        Excellent   #######... ####......
(Q) +1,+2 Broad Axe                                         Fair        ###....... #######...


If the character equipped a shield, the damage rating of the broad axe would decrease. If they equipped some heavy armour, their accuracy would decrease for both weapons.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 13:05
by dpeg
That last screen proposal by danr might actually lead to something.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 14:25
by Kate
Considering that weapon speed is already shown in @, it'd be very nice to have an indicator like that which would show you 1) weapon speeds relative to each other, and 2) how close your weapons are to reaching the speed cap.

So to take that example, you'd have something more like:
  Code:
Wield which weapon?                                         Accuracy    Speed
(a) quick blade                                             Excellent   #########.
(b) demon whip                                              Very good   #####...
(c) katana                                                  Very good   #####..
(d) battleaxe                                               Fair        ###...

That's my quick and sloppy attempt to indicate that quick blade gets min delay 3, demon whip 5, katana 6, battleaxe 7. Obviously an actually sensible scale would be needed, preferably with no logarithms or stepdowns involved.

Perhaps there could even be some indication on the scale of the point where the weapon reaches delay 10, as that's a fairly important turning point (using colours? a different symbol?).

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 16:01
by Danei
If you wanted to get fancy, you could even use another symbol in the accuracy bar besides # or . to indicate how much accuracy is being reduced by your armour/shield.

###%..

For example, with the % Indicating that your armour is disabling 1 "notch" of accuracy.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 17:48
by danr
Hey, it's nice to get some traction on an idea!

I just used the verbal descriptions for accuracy to be consistent with spell success rate, a bar would be better, I agree. The ###% idea is cool too.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 20:24
by Kate
You could probably do without a bar for accuracy entirely if the current adjectives for combat got tweaked a little. Right now, you do get feedback ("You closely miss Sigmund!", etc.) but it's pretty meaningless because it's just based off the RNG - you can completely miss something one round and barely miss it the next. If those adjectives were based off the average to-hit roll vs the opponent's EV (so you'd mostly get the same adjective against each enemy) then they'd probably be enough meaningful feedback. Doing exactly the same thing for the current MR messages would also be good, on a related note.

If anything that'd be better than an accuracy bar, since it would factor in enemy EV instead of just being some abstract accuracy value in a vacuum. Then you'd only need to display speed, which is probably one of the more important things to get across to the player anyway.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 20:37
by galehar
Thanks danr, this is a great idea and it really fits crawl's design philosophy.
I like adjectives for accuracy.
I really like different bar length for speed as suggested by MarvinPA.
The real problem is going to be damage, because the formula is very complex. The bars should be of variable length, like for speed and brands should be taken into account too. We'll just have to assume no resist/vulnerability and simplify the damage potential of venom and draining brands. And we'll also have to accept that simplified and inaccurate are better than nothing and good enough for our needs.

Now, the bad news is that this doesn't really fit on our planning for 0.8 nor on any of the devs todo list (well I think so). Anyway, you should polish it and put it on the wiki. We can even make an "interface implementable" on mantis, but I doubt that any patcher is crazy enough to venture into fight.cc (few devs are) ;)

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 22:16
by danr
Great, thanks!

Yeah, how to reflect brand damage is complicated. Esp. for a brand like distortion, how do you reflect e.g. banishment?

I think you would simply have to account for any effect that does damage, and then leave it to the player to understand that the weapon has effects in addition to HP damage. This is okay, because with artifact weapons, there are usually other extra considerations anyway (e.g. this weapon provides rPois, the other +Blink).

For venom: perhaps just adding the equivalent of two rounds poison damage? After this point the damage is not "immediate" and so is not counted.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Friday, 24th December 2010, 15:01
by Kate
I don't see that factoring in brand damage is really necessary, it sounds a bit over-complicated and confusing (especially for the more complex brands). Considering that weapon skill and str/dex barely affect damage anyway, just showing the base damage is plenty, surely. Although the other thing I can think of that's really unclear is how weapon enchantment and slaying interact with base damage, so perhaps factoring those in would be good (so a player would be able to see straight away that a +0,+10 hand axe actually does far less damage than a +0,+0 battleaxe).

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Friday, 24th December 2010, 16:22
by danr
I'm kind of inclined to agree - factoring in the brands would be pretty complicated. If there is a need for better information on brand effects, that could be improved just through the general description of the brand.

However, the description could and should include the effects of:
- weapon enchantment
- rings of slaying or other Acc/Dam bonuses
- weapon skill
- fighting skill (I assume this affects weapon effectiveness somehow?)
- armor worn / shield / how many hands
- temporary potion effects or berserk, if active.
- Other effects such as Tukima's sure blade

Arguably, vorpal brand could be included, because that is really simple and a straight damage bonus, but that one is also the easiest for players to understand anyway.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Friday, 24th December 2010, 22:49
by MrMisterMonkey
don't special case inclusion of brands

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Monday, 27th December 2010, 21:33
by danr
galehar wrote:Thanks danr, this is a great idea and it really fits crawl's design philosophy.
...
Now, the bad news is that this doesn't really fit on our planning for 0.8 nor on any of the devs todo list (well I think so). Anyway, you should polish it and put it on the wiki.


Okay, I created a page at dcss:brainstorm:weapons, hope I used the right "namespace". Also, the code formatting there doesn't seem to work like here so the sample view looks like @$$.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Monday, 27th December 2010, 22:38
by dpeg
Thanks for the wiki page. I took care of the formatting.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 28th December 2010, 07:11
by radzia
Armor could be showed in a range


with a robe and some other stuff
1-10AC
with a dragon swamp armor
7-17AC

i got quick game mechanic question also, how GDA works? lets stick to dragon swamp armor example - did i get random damage reduction number from 7 to 17 or i get random number from 1 to 17, and if this number is below 7 (let say 3), damage reduction result is 7

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 28th December 2010, 14:17
by starless
How about Unarmed Combat and Ranged Attack, will they be displayed as well?

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 28th December 2010, 18:37
by asdu
MarvintheParanoidAndroid wrote:a +0,+10 hand axe actually does far less damage than a +0,+0 battleaxe


Wait, what?
My understanding is that a +0,+10 hand axe's base damage is 1d7 + 1d10 while a +0,+0 battleaxe's is 1d17, and when you also take into account speed, accuracy, handedness and weight, the hand axe is definitely preferable.
Still, I guess you know better than me, so please shed some light on that most bewildering statement :)

Back on topic, the idea of displaying speed and accuracy, however implemented, is definitely an improvement over the current state, but to be honest it would be only useful for the complete newbies, since weapon speed is actually very easy to calculate (unless there's some twist to it that's not mentioned on the wiki :roll:), and accuracy is fairly meaningless unless it's relative to a specific enemy.
The really hard one to figure out is damage.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 28th December 2010, 19:04
by Kate
I was going to delve into fight.cc to figure it all out but then I remembered that it's a horrible mess and I don't understand most of it so I just resorted to the LearnDB which might not be as accurate:
"weapon damage[1/3]: Approximately: 1d(base*strength_bonus + slaying)*skill_bonus + 1d(to_dam)".

The important point, anyway, is that base damage (and slaying) is affected by weapon/fighting skill and str/dex weighting, but the plus to damage isn't. So assuming the player has enough weapon skill for the battleaxe to be at a reasonable speed, it'd be far better.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 12th January 2011, 18:00
by ryak
MarvintheParanoidAndroid wrote:Considering that weapon speed is already shown in @, it'd be very nice to have an indicator like that which would show you 1) weapon speeds relative to each other, and 2) how close your weapons are to reaching the speed cap.

So to take that example, you'd have something more like:
  Code:
Wield which weapon?                                         Accuracy    Speed
(a) quick blade                                             Excellent   #########.
(b) demon whip                                              Very good   #####...
(c) katana                                                  Very good   #####..
(d) battleaxe                                               Fair        ###...

That's my quick and sloppy attempt to indicate that quick blade gets min delay 3, demon whip 5, katana 6, battleaxe 7. Obviously an actually sensible scale would be needed, preferably with no logarithms or stepdowns involved.

Perhaps there could even be some indication on the scale of the point where the weapon reaches delay 10, as that's a fairly important turning point (using colours? a different symbol?).


This is a good idea! Even if we can't implement it to be 100% perfect in reflecting every factor, if it was close it would be a significant improvement over what there is now.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 12th January 2011, 19:00
by szanth
I like everything that's going on in this thread.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 12th January 2011, 19:00
by danr
What are the factors that influence chance to hit, between different weapons?

We can ignore monster EV differences.

Does weapon skill influence chance to hit?
Armour does.
rings of slaying
enchant I status

Anything else? weapon size relative to body size?

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 12th January 2011, 23:32
by Robsoie
The way it is presented in both this thread and in the brainstorm page, i think it is truly an excellent idea, as it adresses indeed a part of Crawl that is too opaque to the player, leading often in some frustration in term to weapon choices in comparison to skill level/bonus/malus/brand, on the viability in learning new weapon depending on our game location/situation etc...

I understand that it can't be implemented for 0.8, not being on the roadmap, but i hope for future evolution of Crawl it will be considered by the devs, i believe it is a good enhancement for the player.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Thursday, 13th January 2011, 18:39
by evktalo
It's an interface thing so it wouldn't require balancing etc, which takes time. If we got an outside patch, I'm pretty sure it could go in before 0.8 (hint hint). And one of the devs might decide to implement it as well, who knows. The "official wishlist" (i.e. release plan) is just a bit full (and probably a lot of the things on it won't go in) and we want to release sooner than later.

--Eino

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Thursday, 13th January 2011, 21:35
by danr
I would love to have a crack at it, but my only programming experience is in PHP.

I might be able to hack through it though if someone would point me to the right source files... I've long wanted to get into real programming.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Friday, 14th January 2011, 17:16
by danr
Okay, I've created a new section for "Source Code" and split this topic off to there.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Saturday, 29th January 2011, 01:56
by szanth
Yeah, when I first played I thought 'draining' transferred health like the vampiric brand, but after I found the vampiric brand I was confused as to what either did.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Saturday, 29th January 2011, 18:18
by Morosgovanyi
I think this is a great game (maybe the best roguelike ever), but something really important that it really lacks is transparency.

There are many hidden things to players who don't code-dive, and every single one of them should be fixed IMO.

Exact "to hit" and "speed" rates are never shown, for example, so one will never know which one of those two armors is best to use, or if it's better to use a small or a large shield.. this is annoying.

Those values should always be there, on the char description and in every item description (armors, shields, potions, etc).

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 8th February 2011, 14:28
by ais523
One thing that should be more transparent is how damaging/dangerous enemy monsters are. This information isn't shown in-game on xv (and IIRC, not via ?/ either); and is very important for knowing how to deal with an unknown monster safely. This is one of the things in Crawl that most promotes spoilers; otherwise, you end up having to die repeatedly to each monster in order to have an idea as to how dangerous it is, and there are a lot of monsters in Crawl. (Not to mention playing through the early-game again and again to reach them...) Sprint helps a lot with this, letting the player gauge the difficulty of monsters against late-game characters and making the grind to actually reach them faster, but not all monsters are there. (The damage formula doesn't help either; especially for EV characters, attacking a monster and being attacked back rarely gives much information about how dangerous it is except in obvious cases like ogres, as it's most likely to be relatively small most of the time and very high occasionally no matter what the stats of the opponent.)

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 8th February 2011, 23:05
by wesleyshaver
I agree with ais523 that this:

  Code:
         Accuracy    Speed      Damage      Armor      Evasion      Hit Dice
         #####...     ###...     ######.       ###...      ####...      6


or this:

  Code:
         Accuracy    Speed        Damage        Armor          Evasion       Hit Dice
         Clumsy      Quick       Mighty      Thick          Sluggish       Robust



Should appear in the monster description page. It'd be a welcome bit of transparency.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Friday, 11th February 2011, 18:59
by Tiber
I definitely like the sound of this. I would also like to suggest that armor gives you some way to see how much it restricts you. You can see how much it affects spellcasting if you have spells, but as to combat, you can't really tell until you get in a fight and find out it's preventing you from hitting things. And at that point you don't really have time to mess with it.

I'd also say that if this new functionality is tied to the (w)ield command, you might want to make sure new players know about it, as I remember it taking me a while to figure out that command as a tiles player.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Friday, 11th February 2011, 22:12
by dpeg
Comparing armours is fine. There used to be an accuracy feedback at @ ("You have some problems hitting very nimble enemies." or similar), and it will be back once the feedback is meaningful (it was too coarse last time).

Full disclosure on enemies is not fine. We thought very long about what monster properties to give away (one of the proposals was an angband like monster memory). We settled for what you can see now: resistances, speed, and a bit more. Showing health, damage or similar will not come. If we start this, players will feel encouraged to carefully check every opponent. Yes, some players do this check via ##crawl and learndb. But that's a completely different matter than us suggesting these checks are necessary. Also note how much monster health and damage are randomised. I cannot see any of this going in.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 06:34
by Stormlock
That seems like a major double standard in favour of spell casters. Currently they get rather detailed information about everything that is relevant to them: What the monster resists, how much it resists it, how much magic resistance it has, how fast it moves, whether or not it is mindless and can see invis even. All these things are a tremendous help to a spellcaster and nearly useless for a fighter. It's not like hitting a fire giant with a fire brand is any big deal. Knowing that an ogre is far more accurate with that club than the bats that could barely hit you is. Or that an elephant slug is an order of magnitude stronger than an agate snail. Why shouldn't players check every new opponent carefully? Spellcasters certainly do. It doesn't have to be as detailed as bars (Although what magic users get pretty much is, since resists and speed are so granular) but players should certainly be able to know if gnolls are more or less dangerous than orc warriors in melee. They do when they're trying to cast Ensorcelled Hibernation on them, after all.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 13:51
by dolphin
(Sorry to interrupt the current discussion)

Another thing I think should be more transparent is how much your stats are boosted from items and mutations. So instead of | Str: 22 |, it would be | Str: 17 +5 | or even | Str: 17 +4 (in some color picked to designate item-based stat gain) +1 (ditto for mutations) |.

When I'm picking my stat gains, I would like to pick them based on my innate stats, since equips tend to change over the course of the game, and there currently isn't a place I know where all the stat information is gathered together easily. Sure, you could look at your % screen and add everything up so that you are informed for your next level up. But I often forget to write this down, and since I can't check anything while it's asking me which stat I would like to increase, I end up just picking one.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 14:58
by Stormlock
Something I just thought of as well, would be chances for ammo mulching. When you don't know how long they're going to last, it's very distressing for a new player to contemplate using ranged weapons, especially branded or highly enchanted ammo. Or to enchant ammo. A rough estimate of how many shots you're likely to get with a missile before it breaks would be nice, since that can be different by orders of magnitude between different weapons.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 15:14
by szanth
That's not really a thing, I think. Like, it's all just a percentage chance of it happening, rather than there being a hidden number saying that this arrow will die after three more shots.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 17:25
by Stormlock
I know. But the game can easily calculate the average number of shots a missile gets based on that chance and spit out an order of magnitude so the player has a rough idea whether the darts last 1-5 throws, 5-10, 10-20, 20-40, or 40+

The point of displaying it as shots is it's less deceptive than the % chance to survive a shot. Some people are bad with probabilities, and might think an arrow with 80% chance to survive a shot is just a bit better than one with 65% chance, when it's actually nearly twice as durable.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 08:43
by Zicher
Stormlock wrote:The point of displaying it as shots is it's less deceptive than the % chance to survive a shot. Some people are bad with probabilities, and might think an arrow with 80% chance to survive a shot is just a bit better than one with 65% chance, when it's actually nearly twice as durable.


Wouldn't it then make more sense to display a percentage chance of not surviving a shot?
In your example, the two arrows would break on 20% and 35% chances respectively, so the first one is clearly about twice less likely to break.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 15:00
by Stormlock
That might work well enough, since ammo in never really has more than a 50% chance to mulch, which is where differences become deceptively irrelevant.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 23:54
by dolphin
It isn't clear that magic staves are not enchantable, especially when every other weapon in the game is. A simple, cheesy, "Due to its magical nature, this item is immune to enchantment," in the description would probably do it.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Friday, 18th February 2011, 01:49
by Cybermg
Speaking of ammo enchantment, I've always thought that it's pretty opaque that you need to wield ammo to do it, when it's not available as a default option under the (w) menu.

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Monday, 21st February 2011, 21:14
by dolphin
In the spirit of making a summarizing list, as Danr did for Tavern Ideas:
  • Speaking of ammo enchantment, I've always thought that it's pretty opaque that you need to wield ammo to do it, when it's not available as a default option under the (w) menu. (Cybermg)
  • It isn't clear that magic staves are not enchantable, especially when every other weapon in the game is. A simple, cheesy, "Due to its magical nature, this item is immune to enchantment," in the description would probably do it. (dolphin)
  • But the game can easily calculate the average number of shots a missile gets based on that chance and spit out an order of magnitude so the player has a rough idea whether the darts last 1-5 throws, 5-10, 10-20, 20-40, or 40+. (Stormlock)
  • Another thing I think should be more transparent is how much your stats are boosted from items and mutations. So instead of | Str: 22 |, it would be | Str: 17 +5 | or even | Str: 17 +4 (in some color picked to designate item-based stat gain) +1 (ditto for mutations) |. (dolphin)
  • I would also like to suggest that armor gives you some way to see how much it restricts you. You can see how much it affects spellcasting if you have spells, but as to combat, you can't really tell until you get in a fight and find out it's preventing you from hitting things. And at that point you don't really have time to mess with it.(Tiber)
  • Okay, something I think should be stated clearly in the game: draining a monster reduces its XP value. This is not very intuitive, but it is significant. (minmay)
  • with a potion of might, you don't see anywhere that this gives a bonus to melee damage separate from the Str bonus.
    *It should also be noted that agility gives stealth and brilliance gives wizardry, all without remark.
  • You don't see your GDR anywhere ever, even though this is the measure that ultimately matters, just as it is your EV score that matters for dodging.
  • You do't get any indication of your actual speed or accuracy with a weapon (or true damage potential) [see weapons] (all Danr)
  • Code:
    Accuracy Speed Damage Armor Evasion Hit Dice
    #####... ###... ######. ###... ####... 6
    or this:
    Code:
    Accuracy Speed Damage Armor Evasion Hit Dice
    Clumsy Quick Mighty Thick Sluggish Robust (ais523, wesleyshaver)


    (unfortunately, dpeg was not okay at the time with revealing monster stats, but do note Monster Descriptions)

Re: Things that should be more transparent

PostPosted: Monday, 28th February 2011, 20:52
by dolphin
Once the weapons stats go in as above, can we get something similar for armour and shields? I know Tiber has already asked for some transparency above, but one thing specifically I think would be helpful would be the necessary Str to use the armour without penalty, even if in a relative stat ("Your piddly strength hinders your movement in this heavy armour"). I saw somewhere or other that Str 27 was required to use GDA without extra penalty, and while it is intuitive that you need to be strong, I don't see how to intuit how strong. If I had 20-25 Str, I would feel capable of using GDA well if I had good Armour skill.

Another question, if I were to move this to the Wiki (with the exception of Weapon Stats, since it is already there), should I move each request separately? Or should I lump them under Transparency? Or . . .?