duvessa wrote:if you're playing a xom or jiyva char then you carry around two pieces of headgear: a helmet to wear while you don't have horns/antennae, and a hat to wear when you do, and you get to switch between them manually every time your god mutates you
i don't see why we need two different base types for the same item slot when the only difference is that one gives you 1 or 2 more AC and becomes unwearable at level 1 of mutations instead of level 3, and the other one has magic resistance sometimes; it's annoying for any character that mutates (particularly with the 52 item limit) and I don't see what would be lost by just removing helmets and only having hats for the head slot, other than losing a lot of player annoyance.
minotaurs being able to wear lear's hauberk wouldn't be a problem, and if it would, you can just do the reverse and remove hats but leave helmets - mutating chars will still have to manually put their helmet back on all the time but at least they won't have to run across the dungeon to grab the hat they left on the floor 2 hours ago
So, as I see it, this post is really covering three separate problems:
1) Transient mutations that lockout equipment slots. These probably shouldn't exist. If a slot gets locked out once *per game*, permanently, that would be much less of an annoyance factor: Yes, it would still be annoying, but players by definition would only have to bother with dropping their now-useless slot item once on any character.
2) Stone Soup's middle ground WRT inventory management is awful. An inventory limit of 52 is too large to force interesting hard choices. As has been discussed many times before, for the sake of playability this needs to either be uncapped or drastically decreased. (Personally, I'd prefer the drastic decrease, although this comes with its own set of changes that would be necessary to reduce annoyance.)
3) DCSS has too many items with overlapping function. This is maybe-sort-of-okay for items with limited uses, as players will naturally experience some inventory churn there, but when it comes to items that players want to equip once and leave equipped this becomes more of a problem. Each filled aux slot here is effectively a permanent inventory tax (coming in the form of increased player annoyance through more frequently having to break gameflow and press i).
By merging hats/helmets you're addressing problem 3, and by merging items as an adjunct you're beginning to address problem 2, but neither of those things have fuckall to do with problem 1, which is what this thread is putatively about. What about gloves and claws 3, or hooves and boots? (Assuming that those things haven't been removed in recent years.)
Wouldn't a more elegant solution to the stated problem be to either remove slot lockouts from mutations entirely, or alternatively, to make slot lockout mutations unremovable once gained?