2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 03:19

2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

The purpose of having a second inventory (accessible, for example, through shift-i) is to streamline inventory management and eliminate some frustrating decision-making without interfering with the tactical considerations of a limited inventory. This menu would also have slots a-zA-Z, but many 3-rune games do not produce enough items to fill it completely. Concomitantly, players are realistically able to carry 5-15 more important items in their main inventory:

Food
Currently Crawl has 6 types of permafood and a handful of chunks. Shoving comestibles off into a second inventory will save players from having to purge 1 or more food stacks from their inventory, which is an uninteresting decision to make anyway. Will make the amount of food amusing (69 rations lol) without it being annoying. Will prevent some YASDs by newbies who leave all rations behind because they underestimate the magical ability of monsters to leave no corpses. Chunks are transient items, and their having to share space with persistent items is bothersome. Effectively, inventory space is expanded by 1 or 2 items.

Books, strategic scrolls, and useless scrolls
These are rarely of any use during a fight. Players prefer to drop/stash these to make more room in the inventory. Being able to carry these around is a mere convenience and does not actually empower the character. The main difference is that Trog's burn spellbook ability becomes more available and therefore more valuable.
Scroll of acquirement
Scroll of amnesia
Scroll of brand weapon
Scroll of curse armor
Scroll of curse weapon
Scroll of curse jewelry
Scroll of enchant armor
Scroll of enchant weapon
Scroll of identify
Scroll of noise
Scroll of random uselessness
Scroll of recharging
Scroll of remove curse

Essential scrolls
Most players keep these scrolls in their inventory at all times. Moving these scrolls out of the main inventory effectively makes the inventory hold 4 more items.
Scroll of fog
Scroll of teleportation
Scroll of blinking
Scroll of magic mapping

Desirable scrolls
The only remaining scrolls are useful to have, but tricky/situational/rare enough that dropping them is often preferred for making more inventory room. These 7 items suddenly become better because they can be carried without cluttering the main inventory space.
Scroll of holy word
Scroll of fear
Scroll of immolation
Scroll of silence
Scroll of summoning
Scroll of torment
Scroll of vulnerability
Last edited by Pollen_Golem on Friday, 29th May 2015, 14:52, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 06:06

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I most definitely carry holy word, fear, silence and summoning with me at all times.
DCSS: 97:...MfCj}SpNeBaEEGrFE{HaAKTrCK}DsFESpHu{FoArNaBe}
FeEE{HOIEMiAE}GrGlHuWrGnWrNaAKBaFi{MiDeMfDe}{DrAKTrAMGhEnGnWz}
{PaBeDjFi}OgAKPaCAGnCjOgCKMfAEAtCKSpCjDEEE{HOSu
Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 07:01

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I tend to carry Identify and Remove Curse with me, to make the identification game much more tolerable.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 10:30

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I actually like the principle of this, just as a tool of convenience. Although I would have the 2nd inventory for multi turn items only, item types that are distinctly for out of battle use (defiantly would keep all scrolls normal inventory, though fruit would probably not). I think it could do with a bit of thought on what consequences it would have. I'd think it'll free up about 2 inventory slots (from food) and people would be more learn/forget spells (you'd be able to easily list all available spells). Does it actually help that much, do people care that foods not as diverse as it once were or that they have to ctrl+F for spells the auto travel there. Does it make sense that you have all these extra slots just for books and food? At the expence your adding more keys and menus. As much as I would like the convenience of this, I don't think it's worth the effort in implementing it or even the slight complexity in controls.
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 15:01

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I'd like to clarify the main effect the second inventory: it simulates the optimum play of purging out-of-battle items from your inventory, without making you actually do it. As a side effect, you are also able to hold several more items in your inventory. Plus, some of the optional tactical scrolls become inventory freebies. The only reason the inventory has 52 spaces is because the English alphabet has 26 letters. From a design standpoint, if it was arbitrarily established, it may be arbitrarily expanded, as long as it's convenient. I don't think a whole lot in Crawl, if anything, has been balanced specifically around the 52-item limit. From recent forum posts, I gather that making inventory size slightly larger or significantly smaller would save players a lot of headache.

Sprucery wrote:I most definitely carry holy word, fear, silence and summoning with me at all times.

Sure, but the first three are near-useless in some branches, whereas summoning can be quite rare. I often run out of ?summoning.

1010011010 wrote:Although I would have the 2nd inventory for multi turn items only, item types that are distinctly for out of battle use


Keeping only rations and chunks in the new inventory? Transferring strategic scrolls out of the main inventory once they're identified? All scrolls become multi-turn with blurry vision, what then? People will see that scrolls/foods can reside in multiple inventories, and become pissed when the game doesn't let them move pizzas and ?blinking out of the main inventory. Even though the normally-multi-turn criterion is a simple rule, players expect the distinction to be made by item type (e.g. food and paper). Tons of games have a separate inventory for each item type.

1010011010 wrote:Does it make sense that you have all these extra slots just for books and food? At the expence your adding more keys and menus.


I don't think players seriously ponder about inventory in terms of whether it makes sense. Does it make sense that a plate armor takes up as much space as a single scroll? Not really, and it also doesn't really make sense why you can't bite off half a ration and leave the rest for later. Whenever inventory management changed in the past, players appreciated it in terms of UI, not sense. And come on: the expense of one more inventory (which is just 1 or 2 more commands) is less expense than needing to ^F for books, and other tedium (unless you're talking about coding expense).

If food/scrolls can be in both inventories, then it will become a problem: when you press 'r' (or 'e') you expect the arbitrary keybindings from each menu to have no overlap, e.g. you expect that 'h' will not stand for both ?blinking and ?amnesia. But, if all scrolls are kept in the second inventory, then it's ok for 'h' to be mapped to both ?blinking and your +2 helmet, depending on what inventory you're looking at, and whether you pressed 'r' or 'W'.
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 15:08

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Pollen_Golem wrote:The purpose of having a second inventory (accessible, for example, through shift-i) is to streamline inventory management and eliminate some frustrating decision-making without interfering with the tactical considerations of a limited inventory.

This proposal is exactly the opposite of "streamlining," since it adds an entire second inventory, with fiddly rules for what it can hold; I'm sure I'd get used to it, but the idea of juggling two inventories reminds me a lot of NetHack's miserable item-juggling midgame. It wouldn't even accomplish removing any of the decision-making, since I'm just going to fill those extra slots in the first inventory with other junk, and then you're back to square one. Even if you gave a second inventory with no restrictions, just an extra 52 slots, I'd probably still end up carrying 103/104, because why wouldn't I? Alternate armors, alternate weapons, every rod and deck and evoker, etc., because why would I leave a slot empty?

I don't think it's possible to "solve" inventory management in a game with a functionally limited inventory. Instead, I think it would be far preferable to approach this problem from the other direction, and look into ways to move strategic items out of the inventory altogether, collapse some item "sets" (launchers and ammo being prominent examples, food variety being another), and remove chunks to avoid the annoyance of having to leave a slot open for your fluctuating food source.

Of course, all that presumes that inventory management is really a bug and not a feature.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 15:15

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I think first we should agree on how ideal inventory looks like.
1) Unlimited inventory.
2) Large inventory where you have all potions/scrools/rods/evocable and 20+ rings/amulets/wands
3) Small inventory where you cannot have all potions/scrools/rods/evocable and 20+ rings/amulets/wands

1) Bad for everyone, you will spend ages looking for particular item even with improved search. Having every possible ring can be OP.
2) Good for some players, bad for other players. Almost no time is spent on inventory management.
3) Again good for some players, bad for other players. Much time is spent on inventory management.

So it looks like "large inventory where you have all potions/scrools/rods/evocable and 20+ rings/amulets/wands" is ideal (though personally I don't like it).

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 15:33

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

archaeo wrote:This proposal is exactly the opposite of "streamlining," since it adds an entire second inventory, with fiddly rules for what it can hold


NO! This is not a second inventory that "can hold", it's a second inventory that simply holds all food and paper, and nothing else. These items cannot go into the main inventory.

archaeo wrote:look into ways to move strategic items out of the inventory altogether


Isn't that exactly what this proposal does? 8-) As for collapsing the ammo set, that's a different matter entirely. Devs could have rune-ified ammo long ago if they felt like it, and I don't think it's worth discussing here.
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 15:54

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Pollen_Golem wrote:NO! This is not a second inventory that "can hold", it's a second inventory that simply holds all food and paper, and nothing else. These items cannot go into the main inventory.

So? I fail to see how this is meaningful; my main inventory is still going to be clogged with items, just different ones. Again: if I can hold 52 items, I will hold 52 items. If I can hold 104 items, I'll hold 104. Unless you have a functionally unlimited inventory, it will get filled up, because it's stupid not to carry something that might be useful in the future.

Your proposal fails to accomplish anything except providing a handful of slots in exchange for a complicated, arbitrary new inventory system.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 16:15

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

archaeo wrote:So? I fail to see how this is meaningful; my main inventory is still going to be clogged with items, just different ones.

You don't find it meaningful that your inventory will be clogged with survival items rather than ?id, ?rc, and so on?

archaeo wrote:a complicated, arbitrary new inventory system.

You remember this is a forum for a very complex game, right? Food and paper go to "I", everything else goes to "i": not that complicated or arbitrary.

P.S. Why does "unlimited inventory" keep coming up? Is this some kind of meme?
P.S.S. By archaeo's logic, chunk and fruit and throwing net reforms, which made these things take up less space, were meaningless.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 16:35

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

archaeo wrote:the idea of juggling two inventories reminds me a lot of NetHack's miserable item-juggling midgame.

Nearly all of the reasons to play Nethack's item-juggling midgame don't apply to Crawl.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 17:02

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

There aren't actually enough useful items to fill 104 slots -- or at least, by that stage you're running into strongly diminishing returns on the marginal item (second and third fire/flame/frost/cold wands etc).

The reality is that there are straightforward heuristics that will produce an essentially optimal inventory including everything whose removal would make a significant difference for almost any character and your "extended inventory," stash, is literally infinite. I'm a bit perplexed by the "cognitive load" argument being advanced in these threads. There just isn't an interesting problem to consider in what to carry and what not to in current crawl. Moreover, in a 3 rune game, the distinction between stash and inventory is marginal. You can always go back to stash at the price of testing your patience with the game.

I would suggest that stash is for most purposes just a place where items exist that you can get any time, except combat. An ability that allowed you to grab things out of a portable hole at time cost comparable to changing armor would have almost no balance implications in a 3 rune game (unless you consider turncount, which we pretend isn't a thing in these discussions). There's this notion that stash is a really natural and intuitive thing, yet using it reasonably intelligently involves advanced movement features, waypoints and autotravel, that neither exist nor are needed in most games. This gets you into still other issues of recent debate in GDD: monster spawning and autotravel interruption.

Recent development wrt to monster-item interaction strongly suggests an idealized situation where stashed items exist in some other place inaccessible to any threats from monsters. Now that that place is just the floor at some centralized location in the dungeon, we seem to be realizing we didn't want our stash to be in a physical location on the map in the first place.

Portable hole 2016.
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 17:17

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

mps wrote: stash is for most purposes just a place where items exist that you can get any time
Portable hole 2016.

That's actually how "stash" is defined in-game as far as I know. viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16280 is for discussing portable holes like you. (I couldn't resist.)
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 17:26

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Pollen_Golem wrote:You don't find it meaningful that your inventory will be clogged with survival items rather than ?id, ?rc, and so on?

Not particularly. It might provide a marginal expansion in my turn-to-turn options, but even with the current inventory system, I can't really think of a situation where an item that would've saved me was on the floor.

You remember this is a forum for a very complex game, right? Food and paper go to "I", everything else goes to "i": not that complicated or arbitrary.

P.S. Why does "unlimited inventory" keep coming up? Is this some kind of meme?
P.S.S. By archaeo's logic, chunk and fruit and throwing net reforms, which made these things take up less space, were meaningless.

Complexity has a cost, both in terms of the cognitive load on the player and the amount of time it takes the devs to code and maintain. I think basically every recent version of Crawl has eliminated bad complexity, and that it's more or less a core part of the design philosophy. Your idea is bad complexity, because it has a high cost in exchange for a pretty small player buff.

People bring up "unlimited inventory" because it's a) the status quo since the floor is a bag of holding you spend turns/irl time to access and b) functionally unlimited inventories are the only way to ever avoid all the problems you talk about, since I don't think there's some imaginary objective curve on which one can find the perfect ratio between inventory size and inventory management costs.

I also don't get your "By archaeo's logic," as I said just a few posts ago that reforming the inventory is far less meaningful than reforming the items that fill it, even if that item reformation is just "these items stack." That's semantics, though.

Hurkyl wrote:Nearly all of the reasons to play Nethack's item-juggling midgame don't apply to Crawl.

I meant this more in the sense of just having more items to sift through and manage. Obviously, Pollen_Golem's proposal wouldn't get anywhere near the madness of NetHack's chests and bags and terribleness, but I'm personally resistant to the idea of offloading the inventory management time costs ("what do I need to drop to pick this up") and putting it into inventory use ("Oh, I need to remember I have all these items that I need to use before every combat/when x happens"). e: though that said, inventory use time costs are maybe a better use of the player's time than inventory management, but w/e, it's all probably a matter of taste.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 17:30

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

@Pollen golem: I was mostly responding to archaeo. His posts fail to to consider that there are not a lot of items to carry in the first place. I'm not even sure what he'd fill his inventory with. Weapon/armor swaps? Every piece of branded ammo he finds + bad wands?

[edit:] Okay, maybe not, but I still don't see the "I'll fill a 104 slot inventory" thing.

In any case, as others have said, your proposal has no real merits. On one hand, as I said above, there is not a real problem to be solved here. On the other, your proposed solution is silly in its complexity. The portable hole concept engages your fix, though, in that it's a secondary inventory that meaningfully solves problems in current crawl.
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 17:35

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

mps wrote:@Pollen golem: I was mostly responding to archaeo. His posts fail to to consider that there are not a lot of items to carry in the first place. I'm not even sure what he'd fill his inventory with. Weapon/armor swaps? Every piece of branded ammo he finds + bad wands?

Yep, that's what I'd fill my inventory with. If I can carry all those items, as well as the good ones I'd carry otherwise, why wouldn't I? I already carry more items than I use in every game.

edit to your edit: Yeah maybe 104 is an exaggeration, though I could easily see myself reaching the limit carrying around a ton of junk, like every bolt wand I find, every reasonable armor, all possible weapon brand permutations, a big stack of ammo, all my books, etc., etc. Indeed, to some degree, playing optimally will always mean maxing out your inventory, as an item you have at that moment is faster than the item you can ctrl-f to.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 17:38

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Okay, I can see that. If you don't have to throw away your trash, you just don't. I agree, that's what would happen.
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 18:12

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

archaeo wrote:I'm personally resistant to the idea of offloading the inventory management time costs ("what do I need to drop to pick this up") and putting it into inventory use

OK, moving on:
("Oh, I need to remember I have all these items that I need to use before every combat/when x happens"). e: though that said, inventory use time costs are maybe a better use of the player's time than inventory management, but w/e, it's all probably a matter of taste.

Huh? What are you saying?

archaeo wrote:edit to your edit: Yeah maybe 104 is an exaggeration, though I could easily see myself reaching the limit carrying around a ton of junk, like every bolt wand I find, every reasonable armor, all possible weapon brand permutations, a big stack of ammo...

Oh, come on, seriously, how much space will you free up by offloading your scrolls and food out of your main inventory? 15 spaces, tops? That doesn't exactly allow for every bolt wand, reasonable armor, and all possible weapon brand permutations, for a normal character. I don't know how you play but it's not all about you. Many players express stashing tedium. Some experienced players say that on every level, they have to make difficult decisions about what to drop. With effectively ~10 more inventory spaces, and less choice vis-à-vis scrolls, these decisions just might turn from stressful dilemmas to gentle pruning.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 18:55

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

When making decisions about what items to carry, it doesn't really matter how important the items are, when we're talking about the time spent on these decisions. Whether they're very significant choices or barely important, it still takes about the same amount of time to decide which items are worth carrying. Increasing inventory space does not help reduce the amount of time spent deciding what to carry, but it does make these decisions less significant, and at some point they're not worth it because too much time is spent deciding things that don't matter. If a player decides that these decisions are not worth bothering with: "these items are all pretty garbage, I don't care which one I take" then the inventory limit is a pointless mechanic. It should either be made infinite, to remove messing around with dropping useless items, or made tighter, to make the decisions more valuable.

If we look at Crawl's inventory, I think that the decisions on what to carry are pretty low value. If we did what you suggest and removed scrolls from the inventory and freed up 10 spaces, the decisions would be even less important. That's why, like I said above, it would be better to make it infinite at that point. But what I would prefer is going the opposite way and doing what njvack said in the other thread: remove strategic items, worn equipment, worn jewellery from the inventory and make the inventory smaller so that the decisions matter more.

I don't have a problem with the current Crawl inventory at all, but if it was changed then the change should at least make sense and hopefully improve it.
Last edited by Wahaha on Friday, 29th May 2015, 19:19, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 19:03

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I'm saying that part of Crawl involves using every advantage you can, and this can lead to play that I don't find particularly fun. This includes ring swapping, weapon slot juggling, using all the available wand charges, casting every buff before any non-trival fight, etc. If I have more inventory slots, I'm going to fill them with more stuff that's optimal to do, even when I really don't like to.

Like I said, this is a matter of taste, and I def. am not laboring under a delusion that it's "all about me." I agree that inventory management is a pain, but your proposal does both too little and too much at the same time. It won't fix the problem and it'll introduce new ones.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 19:28

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I think 104 items would be plenty and would not fill up. Just prefix the extra 52 items with an underscore _. If you do manage to actually pack a 104 item inventory to the brim, it wouldn't be much trouble to just drop 50 useless items and get back to an inventory like what you can have now without losing anything really useful. And you'd only be doing that a couple times a game at most, instead of constantly like now.

I think this conversation needs some actual game inventories to talk about. Here's my current VpWz inventory (51/52), having just finished both lair branches. It's pretty typical for what I carry and I don't see a need to carry a ton more items (partly because they haven't dropped yet). So 52 items is enough to have virtually all the items that would be useful to me in combat 99.9% of the time, but also I do have to continually drop things to pick up more things which is annoying. A 104 sized inventory would be effectively infinite and solve that problem.
  Code:
Inventory:

Hand weapons
 a - the +7 rapier of Mamy {freeze, rElec MP+9 Str+5}
   (You found it on level 6 of the Dungeon)   
   
   It has been specially enchanted to freeze those struck by it, causing extra
   injury to most foes and up to half again as much damage against particularly
   susceptible opponents. It can also slow down cold-blooded creatures.
   
   It affects your strength (+5).
   It insulates you from electricity.
   It affects your magic capacity (+9).
 b - a +9 quick blade (weapon)
 c - a +1 blowgun
Missiles
 m - 13 javelins (quivered)
 K - 123 poisoned needles
 Q - 4 curare-tipped needles
Armour
 k - a +1 shield of protection (worn)
 y - the +1 robe "Rugapt Dudel" (worn) {rC+ Int+3 Dex+2}
   (You found it on level 1 of the Spider Nest)   
   
   It affects your intelligence (+3).
   It affects your dexterity (+2).
   It protects you from cold.
 B - a +2 robe of fire resistance
 G - the +2 pair of gloves "Seitieh" (worn) {Str+4 Dex-5 Slay+3}
   (You found it on level 1 of the Spider Nest)   
   
   It affects your strength (+4).
   It affects your dexterity (-5).
   It affects your accuracy and damage with ranged weapons and melee attacks
   (+3).
 J - the +1 pair of boots "Tianao" (worn) {Dex+4}
   (You acquired it on level 4 of the Swamp)   
   
   It affects your dexterity (+4).
 L - a +0 helmet (worn)
 U - a +2 cloak of magic resistance (worn)
Jewellery
 e - a +6 ring of dexterity (left hand)
 l - an uncursed ring of protection from cold
 p - an uncursed ring of poison resistance
 q - an uncursed amulet of stasis
 s - an uncursed ring of protection from fire
 w - an amulet of resist mutation (around neck)
 N - the ring of the Mage (right hand) {Wiz MR++ Int+3}
   (You found it on level 14 of the Dungeon)   
   
   [ring of wizardry]
   
   It improves your spell success rate.
   It affects your intelligence (+3).
   It affects your resistance to hostile enchantments.
 R - the amulet "Utem Qam" {rMut rElec rF+++ Int-3 Dex+3}
   (You found it in an ice cave)   
   
   [amulet of resist mutation]
   
   It protects you from mutation.
   It affects your intelligence (-3).
   It affects your dexterity (+3).
   It renders you almost immune to fire.
   It insulates you from electricity.
Magical devices
 o - a wand of hasting (3)
 D - a wand of cold {zapped: 5}
 F - a wand of paralysis
 H - a wand of fireball
 W - a wand of digging
Scrolls
 d - a scroll of vulnerability
 f - a scroll of silence
 h - 9 scrolls of remove curse
 r - a scroll of fear
 C - 3 scrolls of blinking
 I - 9 scrolls of teleportation
 M - 4 scrolls of recharging
 O - a scroll of magic mapping
 P - 7 scrolls of fog
 Y - a scroll of summoning
Potions
 i - a black potion
 j - a potion of haste
 n - 5 potions of might
 u - 11 potions of curing
 v - 16 potions of blood
 z - a potion of resistance
 A - 3 potions of heal wounds
 E - 7 potions of agility
 S - 2 potions of magic
 T - a viscous purple potion
 V - 2 potions of flight
 X - 3 potions of brilliance
 Z - a pink potion
Miscellaneous
 g - a legendary deck of wonders {the Alchemist}
 x - a sack of spiders


Notice how I am carrying some fairly useless items. I could easily drop the amulet of resist mutation (because I have the other rMut artifact amulet), the poisoned needles (by this stage of the game), and even that artifact rapier (I can use excruciating wounds on the quickblade) without any problems. Also the wand of cold (wand of fireball + recharging is enough, and I probably won't even use the fireball wand either). As I find more items that are useful, I will drop those things to make room. It's this constant picking up of nice items and having to bump out lame items to make room, that is annoying.
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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 21:13

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Berder wrote:I think 104 items would be plenty and would not fill up. Just prefix the extra 52 items with an underscore _.

That’s pretty inelegant, and Archaeo’s comments would apply to that case. Your inventory would indeed be filled with useless clutter you wouldn’t even consider using. Archaeo's replies have been as if I suggested expanding inventory space to 104 slots (which I didn’t) and Archaeo sounds like what I would expect from a rational Crawler if I really had suggested that.

Why is this a huge difference? Well, most character have about 40, give or take, must-have inventory items. If you decrease that number by ~10 by removing scrolls/food from the main inventory, the buffer of nonessential items approximately doubles. On the other hand, if you simply double the inventory to have 104 items, the buffer increases five-fold or more, and gets littered with junk.

You guys say the second inventory introduces new problems. It only seems weird because of Crawl convention – we are used to all carried items/stacks sharing precious inventory spaces. And as I mentioned, Crawl isn’t really balanced around this convention. In plenty of games, certain kinds of resources get their own inventories. (A major point in favor of multiple inventories is simplicity and reduction of cognitive load - you know, the opposite of silly complexity.) It would take about 5 minutes to get used to it, and it will seem completely natural thereafter.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 21:55

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

This seems like the sort of thing that needs to be tested, rather than predicted.

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Post Friday, 29th May 2015, 22:15

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Now, I did say that
Pollen_Golem wrote:I don't think a whole lot in Crawl, if anything, has been balanced specifically around the 52-item limit.

but Crawl is still balanced around you having a considerable pool of resources of your choosing at your fingertips, which is why
Wahaha wrote:what njvack said in the other thread: remove strategic items, worn equipment, worn jewellery from the inventory and make the inventory smaller so that the decisions matter more.

requires considerable rebalancing to work, and will promote insane degrees of stashing.

mps wrote:You can always go back to stash at the price of testing your patience with the game.

You say this as if a mechanic that tests a player’s patience is not a design flaw.
archaeo wrote:It won't fix the problem and it'll introduce new ones.

Everbody, put this in your response to any proposal you don’t like. :twisted:

archaeo wrote:I don't think it's possible to "solve" inventory management in a game with a functionally limited inventory.

This reminds me of other all-or-nothing angles floating around this forum. As if whittling a problem to 50% or 10% or 1% of its original size isn’t meaningful. Death to limited inventory in all its forms! Finished! Kaput! Never again! Nothing less is acceptable! Sometimes it is fully justified, e.g. squareLOS, but extremism can cloud thinking. If the simple 2nd inventory means that you backtrack 5 times less, well then by golly, backtracking stops being an issue, like, ever. It also mitigates
mps wrote:other issues of recent debate in GDD: monster spawning and autotravel interruption.
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Post Saturday, 30th May 2015, 01:03

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

While we’re posting char dumps, here’s my recent Pan victim. What items could I most easily part with? Plain bolts, 2 +9 quickblades, 2 of 3 sacks of spiders, potions of heal wounds, maybe a rod, and scrolls of tele/id/rc/immo. That’s about 10 sacrifices that aren’t excruciating, and this is a Trogger! I’m not even carrying any elemental evokers, unless you count Horn of Garyon, because I ran out of space.

  Code:
 a - a +9 eudemon blade of holy wrath
 b - a +9 quick blade of electrocution
 N - a +9 antimagic quick blade
 P - the +9 hand crossbow of Conformity {freeze, Dex+3}
   (Trog gifted it to you on level 7 of Gehenna)   
   
   It causes projectiles fired from it to freeze those they strike, causing
   extra injury to most foes and up to half again as much damage against
   particularly susceptible opponents. They can also slow down cold-blooded
   creatures.
   
   It affects your dexterity (+3).
Missiles
 e - 127 bolts of penetration
 H - 33 bolts (quivered)
 V - 110 silver bolts
 X - 68 steel bolts
Armour
 c - a +1 pair of boots of stealth (worn)
 d - the +0 helmet of Purpose (worn) {rN++ rCorr}
   (You bought it in a shop on level 4 of the Orcish Mines)   
   
   It greatly protects you from negative energy.
   It protects you from acid and corrosion.
 g - the +2 cloak of Starlight (worn) {rElec rC+ EV+4 Stlth--}
   (You bought it in a shop in a bazaar)   
   
   It affects your evasion (+4).
   It protects you from cold.
   It insulates you from electricity.
   It makes you much less stealthy.
 q - a +1 shield of protection (worn)
 F - a +10 crystal plate armour (worn)
 T - the +2 pair of fencer's gloves (worn) {LBl+4 SBl+4 EV+3 Dex+6}
   (You found it in an ice cave)   
   
   It affects your evasion (+3).
   It affects your dexterity (+6).
Rods
 k - a +6 lightning rod (13/13)
   (You acquired it on level 6 of the Lair of Beasts)
 l - a +5 rod of ignition (13/13)
   (You bought it in a shop in a bazaar)
 o - a +9 rod of clouds (13/13)
   (You bought it in a shop in a bazaar)
 r - a +9 rod of destruction (16/16)
   (You found it on level 3 of the Vaults)
 Q - a +3 iron rod (14/14)
   (You bought it in a shop on level 3 of the Vaults)
Jewellery
 t - the amulet "Yngier" (around neck) {Spirit rElec rC++ MP+9 Dex-4}
   (You found it on level 3 of the Tomb of the Ancients)   
   
   [amulet of guardian spirit]
   
   It causes incoming damage to be split between your health and magic.
   It affects your dexterity (-4).
   It greatly protects you from cold.
   It insulates you from electricity.
   It affects your magic capacity (+9).
 u - the ring of Ashenzari's Favour (right hand) {rF+ rN+ Dex+2}
   (You took it off a vampire mage on level 3 of the Crypt)   
   
   [ring of positive energy]
   
   It affects your dexterity (+2).
   It protects you from fire.
   It protects you from negative energy.
 E - the ring "Seor" (left hand) {Fire +Inv rPois MP+9 Str-4}
   (You found it in a bailey)   
   
   [ring of fire]
   
   It enhances your fire magic, and weakens your ice magic.
   It affects your strength (-4).
   It protects you from fire.
   It makes you vulnerable to cold.
   It protects you from poison.
   It affects your magic capacity (+9).
   It lets you turn invisible.
Magical devices
 m - a wand of digging (5)
 p - a wand of heal wounds (0)
 v - a wand of teleportation (5)
 x - a wand of hasting (5)
Scrolls
 i - 5 scrolls of blinking
 j - 7 scrolls of remove curse
 n - 2 scrolls of silence
 s - 9 scrolls of recharging
 z - 22 scrolls of identify
 B - 12 scrolls of immolation
 G - 10 scrolls of fog
 I - 5 scrolls of holy word
 M - 12 scrolls of teleportation
 W - 2 scrolls of summoning
Potions
 f - 6 potions of agility
 h - 31 potions of curing
 w - 5 potions of heal wounds
 C - 4 potions of resistance
 D - 8 potions of restore abilities
 L - 15 potions of might
Miscellaneous
 y - a legendary deck of changes {Placid Magic, drawn: 1}
 J - the horn of Geryon
 K - a legendary deck of defence {drawn: 3}
 O - a legendary deck of defence {the Shadow, drawn: 3}
 R - a sack of spiders
 S - a sack of spiders
 U - a sack of spiders {used: 3}
 Y - a disc of storms
 Z - a lantern of shadows (in hand)
Comestibles
 A - 22 meat rations

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Post Saturday, 30th May 2015, 01:16

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I wonder why we didn't read those scrolls of holy word. They might save the kobold.
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Post Saturday, 30th May 2015, 01:27

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Blurry vision mutation from the same pan level, but that's off-topic.

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Post Saturday, 30th May 2015, 04:07

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Pollen_Golem wrote:
Wahaha wrote:what njvack said in the other thread: remove strategic items, worn equipment, worn jewellery from the inventory and make the inventory smaller so that the decisions matter more.

requires considerable rebalancing to work, and will promote insane degrees of stashing.
It would have less stashing than now because strategic items are always with you.

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Post Saturday, 30th May 2015, 04:13

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Sandman25 wrote:I wonder why we didn't read those scrolls of holy word. They might save the kobold.

What he said about blurry vision. Also, in trunk, holy word no longer resets the energy of vulnerable creatures. It does some more damage instead to compensate.
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Post Saturday, 30th May 2015, 06:51

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Wahaha wrote:
Pollen_Golem wrote:
Wahaha wrote:what njvack said in the other thread: remove strategic items, worn equipment, worn jewellery from the inventory and make the inventory smaller so that the decisions matter more.

requires considerable rebalancing to work, and will promote insane degrees of stashing.
It would have less stashing than now because strategic items are always with you.

Right, sorry - I forgot about the "remove strategic items...from inventory" part. About that - in njvack's system, there needs to be a way to keep track of strategic items, even if they're not in "the inventory". Suppose for a moment he approved the 2nd menu for food and paper, as a solution. Take a player who likes always keeping ?id, ?rc, ?recharging, and the desirable scrolls on-hand, so he saves about 15 spaces thanks to the 2nd menu. Further suppose he is fully decked out in gear, including a weapon and a shield - that's 10 equipped slots that disappear from the inventory in njvack's system. (I'm picking an example to help my case.) The normal 52 items he hauls shrink to 52-15-10=27. That's about as much as njvack's proposal of a 26-item inventory. Thus, introducing the second inventory and shrinking the first doesn't affect such a character's decisions at all, except deter stashing. I suppose njvack might prefer scrolls to be kept in the main inventory unless they have been identified as strategic - which is possible, if ungainly.

I don't know if njvack said it on a whim or not, but effectively cutting the inventory down to below the current 52-item limit will lead to a form of tactical stashing, microstashing. People will leave behind items that are suboptimal for the branch/fight they're going to next, so that they carry only the items they need to survive battle. For example, before going into Spider with rPois, you would drop all !resist, !flight, !cancellation, and run in search of hex wands you were too full to pick up earlier. This impacts newer players hardest because they can only have fuzzy understanding of item appropriateness. Actively reducing wiggle room is not the best thing to be doing for Crawl at the moment.

Wahaha wrote:When making decisions about what items to carry, it doesn't really matter how important the items are, when we're talking about the time spent on these decisions. Whether they're very significant choices or barely important, it still takes about the same amount of time to decide which items are worth carrying.

I failed to catch this earlier, but it's not true. (Unless you've played a thousand hours of Crawl and have a hierarchy of item value pre-mapped in your mind, with which you mechanically process your inventory. In which case, why would you even bother picking up the less valuable items, and why would you complain about having picked up items you know you'll drop soon.) The more important the items are, the greater the consequences of making the wrong decision, and the more time you should dedicate to ensuring that you're making the right decision, unless you're baiting YASD.

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Post Saturday, 30th May 2015, 08:32

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Pollen_Golem wrote:cutting the inventory down to below the current 52-item limit will lead to a form of tactical stashing, microstashing. People will leave behind items that are suboptimal for the branch/fight they're going to next, so that they carry only the items they need to survive battle. For example, before going into Spider with rPois, you would drop all !resist, !flight, !cancellation, and run in search of hex wands you were too full to pick up earlier.
This is something that people including me do now, there would be no difference. If the inventory size is reduced even further so that less tactical items can be carried than now, I don't think it will increase the frequency of stashing tactical items, because you only know what tactical items you need in advance when you enter a different branch. Sorry if this is offtopic by the way, I don't intend to hijack this thread with a different idea.

I failed to catch this earlier, but it's not true. (Unless you ... have a hierarchy of item value pre-mapped in your mind, with which you mechanically process your inventory. In which case, why would you even bother picking up the less valuable items, and why would you complain about having picked up items you know you'll drop soon.) The more important the items are, the greater the consequences of making the wrong decision, and the more time you should dedicate to ensuring that you're making the right decision, unless you're baiting YASD.
To be fair I have never played a Crawl where I had to make important decisions about what to carry, so I can't say for sure that it takes about the same amount of time. But I think that what would happen is players would develop a hierarchy of item values like you said, after only a few games, and then decisions would be fast. At least they would be decisions with important consequences and not "should I carry a wand of draining or wand of lightning?".

Moving scrolls and other stuff to a 2nd inventory to free up 5-15 slots is an attempt to get an inventory size that has barely any restriction on the items carried. At that level of item decisions, it really doesn't matter what the player chooses. If that is the goal then why not just keep the scrolls in the same inventory and make the inventory infinite? Or increase the size. Is it the difference in the difficulty between implementing an infinite inventory vs a 2nd inventory for scrolls? Yeah I'd say a 2nd inventory is easier but in this case it's probably better to do it right the first time. Not that I support this idea, because I like deciding what tactical items to carry.

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Post Monday, 1st June 2015, 10:10

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Not sure what to think about all this, but...

Why add only one more inventory, when it seems more logical to have an inventory for scrolls, one for potions and one for food separate from items you might want to interact with in other ways (enchant, recharge...)

Without item weight and destruction there's literally no sense to drop anything unless you run out of space. So accessing scrolls with 'r' and potions with 'q' seems much more logical to me than having some sorta 'strategic' inventory. The only time you want to access scrolls and potions without the intention to use/list them is during identification. As there would be a change to the Id menu anyway this seems fine.

This would have the benefit of being able to fix a letter to a given scroll in a given game. So 'rc' for example would be 'teleport' no matter what stuff you picked up. Useless scrolls/used up scrolls could be grayed out.

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Post Monday, 1st June 2015, 11:28

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Simplified inventory rules:
-If you can read it, eat it, or drink it, it takes no space.
-If you are wearing it, it takes no space.
-Ammo takes no space
-You have two slots to carry things, called "L Hand" and "R Hand." If you wield a one or two-handed weapon, then you have fewer slots. Octopodes and formicids have more.

So you can pick whether to carry a backup launcher, a wand, a rod, an evocable, or a staff, or whatever makes sense to you in your free hand.

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Post Monday, 1st June 2015, 12:11

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Make characters start with low number of inventory slots. Characters can get more slots by training corresponding skill ("Inventory"?). You even can have different species/backgrounds start with different number of slots and have different aptitudes of course. No more complaints about spending too much time on inventory, it was your own fault for non training Inventory skill high enough :) As bonus you are partially solving "there is too much XP in 3 rune game" problem.

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Post Monday, 1st June 2015, 12:17

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

An enemy that attacks inventory slots, which can be gained back through XP gain, could be interesting. Put It in the labyrinth and the Abyss.
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Post Monday, 1st June 2015, 17:23

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

jejorda2 wrote:An enemy that attacks inventory slots, which can be gained back through XP gain

We already have an enemy similar to that, it's called food. :P
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 08:01

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Hurkyl wrote:This seems like the sort of thing that needs to be tested, rather than predicted.

That tends to be true for things easier to implement than figure out.

What are the barriers to making this a playable branch on berotato webtiles?
It could have 2 sub-branches: one has a 26-item main inventory, the other has a 52-item main inventory.
This kind of thing might settle a lot of discussion around reducing/expanding effective inventory space.

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 16:04

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Pollen_Golem wrote:[What are the barriers to making this a playable branch on berotato webtiles?


Someone who cares would have to implement it.

(Also, it seems like the collective memory in this thread doesn't go back very far. Once upon a time there was weight, and your inventory size was affected by str, and anything that could cause str drain would potentially make you go overloaded so you'd have to drop stuff or have various penalties. Several of the ways of that happening are in fact moderately common in the abyss. This all sucked and crawl is better without excessively restrictive inventory systems.)

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Post Tuesday, 28th July 2015, 01:38

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Zwobot wrote:Not sure what to think about all this, but...

Why add only one more inventory, when it seems more logical to have an inventory for scrolls, one for potions and one for food separate from items you might want to interact with in other ways (enchant, recharge...)

Without item weight and destruction there's literally no sense to drop anything unless you run out of space. So accessing scrolls with 'r' and potions with 'q' seems much more logical to me than having some sorta 'strategic' inventory. The only time you want to access scrolls and potions without the intention to use/list them is during identification. As there would be a change to the Id menu anyway this seems fine.

This would have the benefit of being able to fix a letter to a given scroll in a given game. So 'rc' for example would be 'teleport' no matter what stuff you picked up. Useless scrolls/used up scrolls could be grayed out.

The last part is easily integrated with a 2nd inventory in this way: when you pick up unidentified scrolls, they fill up the A-Z slots, and when scrolls get identified, they move to their default a-z slots, for example teleport would go to 'c'. If you somehow pick up an unidentified scroll and the A-Z slots are full, it gets put in the a-z slots, but you're asked for confirmation if you try to read-ID it, which you probably don't intend to do.

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Post Thursday, 30th July 2015, 19:41

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

There's a certain degree of strategy involved in choosing what to fill slots with in the present inventory system... but much of this is a kind of low tactics, i.e. keeping slots clear so you can drag a bunch of stuff back to Temple or Hell all at once.

Whether or not you can haul unlimited food, I wish you could haul unlimited CHUNKS. The reason for this of course is that you're constantly having chunks go bad, then you pick up some other item, then you kill something and you're deciding which item to toss in order to grab more chunks. The "workflow" would be cleaner if you decide what item to keep or toss at the moment you pick up an extra item, rather than later on when you just want to clear a corpse.

Another reason to handle chunks this way is that you're *already* having chunks massively automatically managed compared to how it was when I last played this game in the early 2000s. You used to pick up chunks of this meat and that meat, they'd go rotten, you'd constantly be tossing rotten ones and deciding which ones were oldest but not rotten to eat and so forth. I think you even had to remember in your head which ones were mutagenic? If you make chunks totally separate from inventory, you can actually *restore* some of the color (but not the nuisance) and show a special inventory full of seventeen different kinds of meat, if you're really curious ... but if you're not you can just eat and trust the machine to pick the oldest not-bad chunk for you.

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Post Thursday, 30th July 2015, 20:22

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Chicken wrote:CHUNKS

The game could keep track of chunks as a non-inventory item, like gold. To make simulacrum work, it should not require you to wield chunks, just like sticks to snakes no longer requires you to wield arrows. Decay-inducing chunks are or should be inedible. Not sure how mutagenic chunks could work.

Chunks are a relatively minor issue because they now take up only 1 space. Scrolls and books, on the other hand, take up way more space, and are also a kind of 'low tactics' as you mentioned.

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Post Thursday, 30th July 2015, 20:36

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

Chunks are annoying though, because their slot is frequently empty, and gets filled by autopickup.
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Post Sunday, 2nd August 2015, 19:04

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I approve of limited space for 'tactical' items. And I approve of not having to go running around ctrl-Fing for the non-tacticals when I'm ready to enter a new branch. I absolutely 100% agree on the 'backend inventory'

It's just a matter of what should go there and what should be in the 'tactical inventory'. Obviously Tactical needs to have weapons, potions, and jewelry. Obviously backend needs food and books. My proposal would be to put armor into the backend, because it takes several turns to swap and most characters want to fill as many armor slots as they can anyway. Food+armor clears up probably 8-10 slots out of the main 52, and lets you carry all those rarely-used scrolls and evokables instead. Plus the convenience of being able to carry books around instead of stashing them. In this situation, the backend inventory can probably be limited to 26 slots instead of 52, still a significant net gain, but its not enough to backpack every single glowing armor you ever see.

I'm okay with having enchant weapon and enchant armor be in the main inventory since you will probably only ever use them on the one or two best non-artefact equipment you find.

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Post Sunday, 9th August 2015, 04:44

Re: 2nd inventory just for food, books, scrolls: analysis

I completely agree with this, I'm not really getting the opposition. People are complaining about the added complexity, when this is literally just taking the entire floor and putting it in another button. Sounds simpler to me?

As for this making the game a bit easier by letting you carry every evocable item you want and back up rings for any situation, that sounds like a problem with having too many evocable items lying around, and I already do that with rings.

Edit: Here is the problem that this solves. You can have an easier time currently if you sweat over 3-4 inventory slots currently than if you don't, and that's pretty lame. People shouldn't be awarded for tedious activities.

Edit: Also, if there really is a concern about this giving the player too many possibilities, then this should follow with a decrease in the tactical inventory size, while having the strategic inventory be unlimited. If people wanting super optimal play really want to stash some rings and potions, they can go for it, but stashing books and food is really silly for everyone.

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