Saturday, 1st February 2014, 21:46 by and into
@dpeg:
To clarify, I like that you have to ID things in the game, in general.
It is very specifically scroll identification that I wonder about. I'll try to outline the reasons more thoroughly and charitably than I did in my OP.
1.) All potions do something directly to your character—you drink them, they do something bad or good. Scrolls produce a variety of effects, some of them affect your surroundings, some affect creatures around you, some affect your items (two affect everything in LOS including you, and one—amnesia—affects just you). There have already been a lot of (in my opinion, reasonable) changes to how and when things identify, because, e.g., having to find a rat for read-ID of ?fear was a bit silly in terms of game play, even if made sense in some ways ("this thing affects enemies, so there need to be enemies around for its effect to be clear and for your character to identify it"). But because it resulted in some silly game play decisions, the flavor of the scroll was cleverly tweaked so it makes sense that it IDs even if you use it when no one else is around ("You assume a fearsome visage"). Then, for a long time, scroll of recharge wouldn't ID upon use even when you already knew ?identify and ?enchant armour, which was an interface annoyance; I believe this was just recently changed (again, a change for the better). While that is all good, some weird cases remain, especially with species that have armor restrictions. You get weird interactions and game play still, because you carry around armor as a draconian you can't use in order to figure out what ?EA is, and the whole case of felids is pretty strange as dck points out. So the whole scroll ID minigame interacts weirdly—and sometimes badly, according to Crawl design—with many species. I don't think that when choosing what species to play, nor when in game development devs are thinking of new species to add, the scroll minigame should be a consideration. In this sense it is a minor impediment perhaps, but an impediment nonetheless.
2.) It is nearly always the case that the whole curse system, which is supported almost entirely by scrolls, matters only for Ash worshipers. Ash is one of my three favorite gods, and I'm fine with those items existing largely for Ash's benefit. But because scrolls matter for every character, it adds a bit of annoyance to those characters. I'd like to keep Ash, keep curses, keep scrolls, and remove that annoyance. Auto-ID of scrolls seems the clearest and most direct way to do this, even if it is radical. (I actually don't think it is that radical, personally, but if a dev considers it radical I defer to his or her judgment.)
3.) Keeping information from the player is good and can be interesting. There may be some differences in how people go about doing this, but honestly if you read ID all scrolls that you have multiple copies of by D4 or D5, the chance that one of those larger stacks happened to be (e.g.) ?blinking is already low, and the chance of having that one (potentially) wasted scroll coming back to bite you is incredibly low, especially since in this scenario your one wasted ?blinking is being compensated by the fact that you now have one or two identified scrolls of blinking. Things are sometimes a bit more interesting when you have had a scroll-scarce early game, but I think having fewer scrolls than average is in itself interesting and puts a lot more pressure on the player to find other ways to compensate (perhaps thinking outside the box a bit), which isn't aided by the whole scroll ID thing, but just made somewhat aggravating. (That's my experience, at least.)
As far as tactical scrolls are concerned: A lot of potions give straight up buffs or healing, whereas tactical scrolls are innately interesting. ?fog, ?fear, and ?teleport either need to be used somewhat intelligently in terms of terrain and position, and thus require a bit of nuance, or (in case of ?teleport) carry an element of risk built in. So to my mind it makes sense that !potions are more unequivocally helpful, but non-identified, whereas ?scrolls require a bit more thought to use well and thus already are interesting for game play without erecting knowledge barriers. (The relatively rare ?blinking is an exception to this, admittedly.)
4.) Even with all the changes to make identification of scrolls better, there are still bad kinds of game play encouraged, as I and others have pointed out. This can sometimes apply to potions, as well, but you generally deal with scrolls first for a variety of reasons, one of the major ones being that you want to figure out what ?identify is so that you can begin figuring out all your other consumables. So scroll identification tends to bear the brunt of this, I think.
Final point: Tangentially related, but if this hasn't been done in Trunk yet, rings of sustenance and hunger should auto-ID when worn. Or else just removed. Actually removal should be better because people actually do stuff like swap on rings of sustenance while auto-traveling...
- For this message the author and into has received thanks:
- duvessa