tealizard wrote:The truth is there's only one number of possible pips that is perfectly clear. We just need the courage to try it.
Ironic tavernposting aside, it's not immediately clear to me that removing resistances would be a good thing for mainline Crawl.
In terms of base item clutter -- yeah, you'd get rid of a few ring types, which is always nice, but past that it's just affixes.
You'd also eliminate incentives for gear swapping, which has knockon of further reducing inventory clutter.
As mentioned, you'd reduce player information load and clear a whole bunch of space in the character window.
What do you lose for this?
Well, you lose the effect of some areas being more dangerous if a resistance hasn't generated, thereby reducing the dynamic strategic decision space for players, thereby making all games play more similarly as path optimality simplifies.
Anything else that I'm forgetting?**
I'd be curious to hear ideas to get rid of resistances while preserving the dynamic branch/portal decision space.
(Frankly, I think that dynamic path optimality in mainline Crawl needs to be enhanced, not reduced or eliminated. I've advocated in the past for moving Crawl to a linear branching dungeon layout for several reasons, this among them.)
**edit: There's an obvious extremist argument above in favor of removing *all* passive items, converting anything you decide is worth keeping into a charge-based system; retaining only charge-based items (and probably goldifying as many of those as you can), and a game based off of Crawl and reduced to that extent would probably even be fun to play, but it's pretty far from Stone Soup.