Combine Scroll of Noise and Fan of Gales

[bt]

Seeing as Fan of Gales (FoG) is being removed, maybe there's some value to adding it's admittedly niche effect (pushing back monsters and clouds) to an already existing Scroll of Noise (SoN), because the effect of FoG is tactically interesting (not being just different type of damage) and very uncommon, and it would be a shame to lose it completely.

SoN itself has an even more niche effect, so giving it something extra would make the item just a bit more relevant. It can also be recoloured purple like immolation, vulnerability etc.

Balance-wise to be usable new scroll (Scroll of Gales, Scroll of Squall, Scroll of Storm...?) should probably have a guaranteed pushback of at least a couple of squares at point blank range. While this is a powerful effect for a relatively common consumable to have, the huge noise (which maybe should be increased), I think, balances it out and makes using the scroll as an escape tool more dangerous, since alerting out-of-LOS monsters probably will make your situation much worse in short order (in case of escaping upstairs, it makes the stairs in question very dangerous to use again).

Combining these items also works well for flavour reasons as both have fairly "airy/windy" type effects.

[duvessa]

Scroll of fear is enough, imo.

[bt]

Scroll of fear is enough, imo.

I don't think there's too much overlap. Main difference (besides the effect itself) being that the knockback scroll is 100% reliable and affects all monsters, when ?fear is MR check dependent and affects only living. Some redundancy is to be expected though since ?fear is more general "yellow" type, while proposed scroll would be more situational "purple".

Also it's not like the proposal is to introduce a new consumable, it's to make an already existing one, that's a bit lackluster, a tad more interesting.

I also think, that having an escape consumable with a downside is interesting design, that's not really present in crawl currently (unless I'm missing something, or unless you count berserk potion for that purpose).

[duvessa]

Also it's not like the proposal is to introduce a new consumable

It effectively is. The only function of current scroll of noise is to weaken scrolls of identify, it's not a useful item that you should carry around.

[petercordia]

It's a pity really. It would be lovely if ?noise would mark you.
But I agree that if ?noise had pushback, it would take the inventory-slot currently occupied by the fan of gales, and removing the fan was done entirely to free up inventory space (if I understand it correctly).

[bt]

I guess, I just don't get the whole inventory space argument. As I see it, there are two possibilities:

1. You want to have inventory management as part of your game
In this case having more useful items than you can carry is a feature, not a bug - player has to make a decision what to have on hand when situation goes pear-shaped.

2. You don't want to have inventory management as part of your game
In this case making potions and scrolls not take any inventory space (like books) solves the problem almost completely for the foreseeable future (unless there are some technical limitations), while removing a couple of useful items doesn't solve anything, since they would just be replaced with less useful ones.

Redundancy argument also doesn't sound convincing to me, since removal of Fan of Gales, an item with unique mechanic, unless you count a couple of spells, coincided with introduction of Tremorstones, an AoE damage item similar in function to wands of acid, iceblast, clouds, rod of lightning, lamp of fire, phial of floods and a ton of spells.

[chequers]

I think it's a little reductive to say the only reason fan of gales was removed is "inventory management". I also think you are giving a false choice when saying there are only "two possibilities" (remove all inventory management vs accept all inventory management). A third option is "there should be a little less inventory management".

  Code:

This results in lots of inventory slots being
    dedicated to evokers, a worse interface when picking items, and a lot of
    uninteresting choices between similar items. Narrowing down the list of evokers
    substantially will allow them to have a smaller number of distinct effects,
    without taking up so much inventory load.

    The fan of gales AoE knockback is a very niche escape effect, and isn't really
    interesting enough to dedicate an item to - it falls into the category of
    evokers that end up always being carried around even though in practice it's
    only quite rarely useful.


I see a few other reasons:

* Having more items in your inventory when picking items is a worse interface (I assume this means when trying to decide "what consumable to I use now?")
* DCSS should have fewer evokables with more distinct items than it currently does (or at least did, before this removal)
* Inventory load is bad (I read this as meaning even if you had a dedicated 53 slot inventory for evocables, an extra item still adds to the player's inventory load. This might also be called cognitive load.)
* The effect of Fan of Gales is niche (only used for "get away from me so I can use these stairs"), uninteresting (very similar to other items like scroll of fear)
* Since there is no cost and there are unlimited uses, all characters in all situations are encouraged to carry it, which is not great design

[bt]

I think it's a little reductive to say the only reason fan of gales was removed is "inventory management". I also think you are giving a false choice when saying there are only "two possibilities" (remove all inventory management vs accept all inventory management). A third option is "there should be a little less inventory management".

I never said it was "the only reason" (if you replying to me, that is), duvessa and petercordia mentioned the inventory management, so my reply focused on that part.

Regarding two options of inventory management, I think, you are splitting hairs. "Less inventory management" is still inventory management. In my experience it goes like this: Fan of Gales and Lamp of Fire gets removed, so now I have no reason to drop my wand of polymorph and ring of positive energy, my inventory is still full, I still will have to manage it when I find a more useful item. Until the amount of useful items will be significantly lower than free inventory space (accounting for throwables, swap gear, manuals etc.) the inventory management issues will stay as they are. Personally, I don't care whether there's an inventory management or not, but giving it as a reason for item removal seems inconsistent to me.

I see a few other reasons:

* Having more items in your inventory when picking items is a worse interface (I assume this means when trying to decide "what consumable to I use now?")
* DCSS should have fewer evokables with more distinct items than it currently does (or at least did, before this removal)
* Inventory load is bad (I read this as meaning even if you had a dedicated 53 slot inventory for evocables, an extra item still adds to the player's inventory load. This might also be called cognitive load.)
* The effect of Fan of Gales is niche (only used for "get away from me so I can use these stairs"), uninteresting (very similar to other items like scroll of fear)
* Since there is no cost and there are unlimited uses, all characters in all situations are encouraged to carry it, which is not great design

* I don't really understand how it's a worse interface, and again removing a couple of items won't make your inv. load go from 52 to 50. It'll still be 52, just with different items.
* Fair enough, no strong opinions on that one, although I don't see how Tremorstones are meaningfully distinct from other AoE damage items, except for being more niche.
* Same as point one, removing items doesn't influence inventory load, just quality of carried items.
* It's also useful to escape constriction, move clouds around and clear blocked escape paths. I agree it's niche, I disagree it's uninteresting (also, what "other items", besides scroll of fear, differences to which I described in previous post?).
* "No cost" is pretty much like any other consumable, "unlimited uses" is inaccurate, recharge mechanic means it's about one use per serious fight, "all characters in all situations are encouraged to carry it" applies to pretty much every useful item in the game, including swap gear, darts, wand of random effects etc., if you have spare inventory space, you are "encouraged" to carry this stuff.