dpeg wrote:The idea that you can carry all that you want is a bad one. Nethack has it, and is a worse game for it.
Where's you proof or reasoning for that?
1) The interface gets worse. More pages to read through == bad.
How can the interface possibly have more pages than the current interface? Ctrl-f finds 90% items you are not interested in at all - hundreds or thousands in total. How could inventory management get worse than that?
2) This move would remove choices: consumables are limited, may be destroyed and are valuable. With your approach, you'd carry all of them, drop all when entering a new level etc. Same with food, wands etc. Often a non-issue, but consider Pan, portal vaults, banishment.
I never said that items are forced into the magic sack and that it should be impossible to take them out and drop them on the floor. And while it would certainly be possible to drop all potions, scrolls or wands from the magic sack, doing so will kill you as quickly as it does now. I don't see much of a change for consumables - if you want to drop them, you can do so.
But see below.
3) Stashing is not scumming. Where are its gameplay benefits, however small? Scumming = tedious, riskfree activity + actual gain.
1. If there were no benefits in stash management while it certainly is tedious and risk free then people would not do it.
2. That reasoning is flawed anyway: If it's a design principle to remove tedious, yet lucrative activities that involve little risk and that tend to bore players, it should be even _more_ a design principle to remove tedious and not lucrative but necessary activities that involve _no_ risk that tend to bore players. So what you said is a reason for my point of view, not for yours.
4) Stashing may be tedious to you, but it is not necessary at all.
Scumming may be tedious to you, but it is not necessary at all. So, where is the reason that stash management is treated differently from scumming? (Not to speak of the fact that there are weird people like me who do things like trying to bring every skill to 27 _without_ boring themselves.)
We're aware that many players stash a lot, and the interface is good enough to do it with grace.
Well, if you compare it with the many _worse_ interfaces in other games, then yes, crawls interface is good enough. From an objective point of view you might come to a different conclusion. Certainly there has been put a lot of effort into the usability of the interfaces. Yet the question remains whether the positive facets (e.g. strategic planning) of stashes outweigh the negative ones (e.g. boredom). In my eyes, that benefit of stashes is rather small, _and_ it can be simulated without stashes:
* You have a maximum set of 52 items that can be accessed immediately ("active inventory").
* You also have a "passive inventory" with unlimited capacity for items and weigt.
* Putting items into the passive inventory or taking them out takes extra time, maybe two extra turns to open and close it - enough that it's risky in tight situations; or the stash can not be accessed while there are monsters around (or both).
* The passive inventory cannot be dropped as a whole.
* Scrolls and Potions in the passive inventory could be protected by a conservation effect, but in principle items in the passive inventory can be destroyed.
* Items can be swapped between the active and the passive inventory.
Pros and cons:
+ No more running back to the stash because you forgot a specific piece of armour, a weapon, food, or can learn a new spell.
+ The flow of the game is not interrupted by forced visits to the stash. Games may also become more interesting to watch.
+/- It reduces the incentive for weak characters to raise their STR.
+/- You can carry home everything from a Ziggurat.
+/- Pretty much removes the possibility of starvation in most of the same (except at the start of the game, if you use too much food overall or harpies plunder the passive inventory).
-/0 It is not realistic. But then, how realistic are cats that can carry twenty rings, ten amulets, thirty scrolls, twelwe potions and 10000 gold with STR 4? (And why do characters never use a toilet if that's realistic?)
0 Strategic decisions "stash vs. inventory" become strategic decisions "active vs. passive inventory". There is still a reason to put a few valuable consumables in a safe place (to prevent that they all get destroyed).
0 You can still put everything on the floor, if you want to do that as "art".
Why should your bad habit lead to a worse game for everyone else?
Hey, come on, first you don't manage to produce any comprehensible reasoning for your point of view, and then you come down to personal insults?