Hurkyl wrote:Siegurt wrote:Floor equipment makes critters more varied and therefore more interesting/challenging to fight, managing actual dangerous stuff you come across and preventing critters from picking it up is trivial, managing everything that might give a creature even a slight advantage is, while possible and tedious, also dumb, and therefore doesn't require fixing.
Why is it dumb? Is it dumb because such activities diminish your chances of wining?
Is it dumb because you like to handicap yourself to make the game more interesting to you, and this goes against the spirit of handicapping yourself? Not everybody likes to do so, or wants to choose this particular way to handicap themselves.
Or is it dumb because it's a lot of tedious work for a small amount of benefit and rare chance of major benefit, and you don't want to do a lot of tedious work for a small amount of benefit and rare chance of major benefit? If this, then it doesn't make for a very good argument.
I should clarify what I consider dumb vs. trivial: In this case the "trivial" is picking up things that could actually kill you, like distortion, curare, certain nastier wands, and *in the circumstance where you don't want to use it yourself* what there is to do is hold on to it, until the level is clear, then drop it then leave (Which I consider trivial effort, since I try to evaluate what I should be carrying with me from time to time anyway) The reason it's trivial is because the number of times such a thing spawns on a level which you would both have to worry about something picking it up, and in which you would be inclined to travel back to an area while a critter which could pick such an item up would still be dangerous to you is very very small (If you are escaping with the orb and encounter a kobold that picked up the dagger of disto that you left on level 3, it's not going to even be a speed bump for you) The circumstances where i feel like I need to "properly dispose of" a dangerous item come up maybe once every 2-3 games, doing something which takes 2 keypresses once every 2-3 games is 'trivial' and isn't something that needs fixed in a way that requires either a ton of effort rebalancing and tweaking things, or making the game less interesting and challenging.
What I consider "dumb" is picking up *anything and everything that could possibly be used against you and might ever potentially be better than what a monster spawns with* and disposing of it in some fashion (e.x. dragging all such things back to the upstaircase and dropping them on the level above before continuing to explore, this includes things like rocks and clubs and animal skins, because they might constitute an "upgrade" for the critter) The reasons it's dumb are: If you've found such things on the floor, and have time to "safely dispose of them" it's in an area that you've already explored, if you're exploring properly then the *only* things you have to worry about are things that spawn behind you in explored areas. So the cases where you have to worry about a critter is when something *respawns* behind you, which is capable of using a floor item to some advantage, if this isn't one of the "dangerous" items (from the trivial category above) then we're talking about something that slightly changes your tactics for dealing with a monster that you'd be easily capable of handling (a hobgoblin with a stack of stones is not significantly harder to deal with than one without, just requires different tactics and a little more thinking) It's only in a very very small set of cases where it will utimately make any difference at all. So (the cases I'm referring to as "dumb") result in a large amount of tedium for an *occasional* small benefit, with no chance of a major benefit at all.
My argument isn't that "You should never try to keep dangerous items out of the hands of creatures" it's that "Keeping genuinely dangerous items out of the hands of creatures takes little to no effort, and keeping minor potentially beneficial items out of potential creatures that may or may not be there is nearly 100% a waste of time. Fixing it so that it's *absolutely* 100% a waste of time rather than simply being *nearly* 100% at the expense of depriving the game of variety and challenge is something I think is a bad, rather than a good thing"