InventoryLOS

[Pollen_Golem]

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

Someone who cares would have to implement it.

I would think it to be an attractive prospect, because implementing it would be trivial compared to other global experiments like the recent square LOS.
It would only hasten the progress toward easy inventory management, which is how Crawl has been inexorably moving.
There are so many debates about inventory management here, and it has more impact on gameplay than, say, LOS inconsistensies.
Could I be wrong?

[Siegurt]

Yep.

[duvessa]

There are so many debates about inventory management here, and it has more impact on gameplay than, say, LOS inconsistensies.

There's no way this is true. LOS shape matching movement or not has a big effect on tactics starting on D:1 and ending never. The item limit has little to no effect on character power, and literally no effect at all in early game since you don't have 52 useful items yet.

[Pollen_Golem]

There are so many debates about inventory management here, and it has more impact on gameplay than, say, LOS inconsistensies.

There's no way this is true. LOS shape matching movement or not has a big effect on tactics starting on D:1 and ending never. The item limit has little to no effect on character power, and literally no effect at all in early game since you don't have 52 useful items yet.

But I meant impact as something negative, as in, meaningful ramifications, not just 'it influences your play'. This is the difference between a reoccurring stumbling block and Spock-worthy peevishness


You see your LOS shape, you see the shape of AoE spells - transparency makes it easy to adapt to any LOS. The fact that diagonal movement takes the same amount of time as orthogonal movement isn't even spoilery, especially if one pays attention to time.

Why do you even mention 'character power'?

[johlstei]

Thinking and reasoning about LOS is a big part of playing well, especially in the early game when monster damage is really high relative to your hp and you don't have many resources to burn. Using LOS properly to avoid even one bad fight can easily save your character's life.

[byrel]

Pre square-los, I guarantee you I thought about abusing LoS shape more often than inventory management. Now I think more about inventory management. Aside from occasionally being grateful for the safety and simplicity square los provides. But that's only one metric for 'gameplay impact'.
I think the metrics we've had mentioned in this thread are:

• Impact on character power
• Frequency of decisions
• Annoyingness (subjective, but legit)
• Portion of game with gameplay impact.

I think you need to clarify exactly what you're thinking about when you say 'gameplay impact' for us to be able to reasonably compare LOS changes to inventory changes.

[Pollen_Golem]

Of course you have to take into account what kind of LOS you're playing with. You either have circle LOS, and exploit its geometry, or you have square LOS, and you don't exploit that geometric inconsistency. It's like the difference between playing with a football, and playing with a baseball. Either works, though you give more thought to one than the other.

The current inventory situation, where foods/scrolls/books absurdly share space with everything else, is like having a ball and chain attached to your ankle. At first you hardly notice it, but as the game goes on, the chain gets shorter and tighter while the ball gets larger and heavier. Eventually you either have to keep track of the ball, and move it room-to-room, or take a bullet and just lug it around in your backpack. Metaphorically speaking.

• Impact on character power the original post demonstrates that the impact on character power is positive but small (and duvessa is already convinced of this, as you can see from duvessa's last post) but this isn't really about nerfing/buffing anything, nor was the square-LOS change.
• Frequency of decisions decisions is so vague - do you mean specifically 'mandatory and meaningless decisions'? if so, frequency is diminished, which is probably a good thing
• Annoyingness (subjective, but legit) this is the big one. A lot of what the 2nd inventory does, by and large, is shrink the gap between theoretical, optimal play and actual, fun play.
• Portion of game with gameplay impact. for most characters, this is from the time you find Lair/Orc onwards. Not a negligible part of the game, I would say.

I said similar things elsewhere above, so maybe you mean something else that I'm not getting?

[Kate]

[exciting mod colour]Split out inventory/LOS comparison stuff from GDD.[/exciting mod colour]

[Pollen_Golem]

Is this because I used pictures? It must be the pictures.

[Pollen_Golem]

I'll share some more of my early experience with Crawl to drive this point home.

To the inexperienced crawler, there are just so many items lying around. You get so little feedback on their value when you use them. It is hard to actually figure what something is worth just by using it, because it is depends on so many factors. My early games had me keep shedding my inventory until I couldn't know what more to drop. Eventually I would just stop picking things up. I'd advance several levels without picking stuff up. Then I'd give up and abandon the character. Just start a new one instead. So, I could have a dozen+ characters "in progress". As this included characters like Ogre Berserkers, weight wasn't even an issue sometimes.

Some crawlers I corresponded with feel the same way.