| Name | Item Destruction |
|---|---|
| Summary | Why item destruction should be removed |
| Added by | Galefury |
Consumable item destruction (and food destruction) as it is currently implemented is a terrible feature, and should not exist.
The purpose of item destruction is (as far as I know) to limit the number of consumables players want to carry, and to a lesser extent to discourage bringing potions or scrolls into certain areas. It reaches the main goal by encouraging players to drop part of their items, and backtrack when they need them, which means a lot of extra inventory management. This is terrible for two reasons:
I will first go into why limiting the amount of consumables players want to carry in addition to existing limitations (item slots and carrying capacity) is fairly pointless. First off, consumables are by definition a limited resource (if you are able to safely scum for them you don't need them anymore). If the player, through luck or good play, managed to save up a stock of this resource, why should he not be allowed to use it? Or, everywhere but in portal vaults, abyss and pan, why should the player have to walk back and forth a bunch to use it?
Throughout almost the whole game, item destruction only limits consumable availability during each single fight. If you are able to leave the level, you can restock. Very few consumables benefit from using many of them in a single fight. For the majority, using more than one per fight will not provide any additional benefit. The notable exceptions are teleportation scrolls and potions of healing and curing. Two of these also exist as wands, which also provide a very large amount of extra uses of their effect via recharging, which is far more important than removing the per fight limitation of uses. The per fight limitation of consumables is simply very rarely relevant.
Limiting access to consumables in places where you cant easily restock is more interesting, because the limitation is on a much longer time scale. Also, for the abyss and portal vaults you don't usually get to restock before you enter. However, when I enter Pan I usually don't need to care about item destruction anymore, because I both have a nice stock of consumables, and don't need to rely on them as much as in the 3-rune portion of the game. For the abyss and portal vaults, I argue that they have enough distinguishing features that they don't need to also cut you off from consumables to provide a very different gameplay experience. Item destruction does have an interesting effect in this very limited scope, but this is not worth the many disadvantages.
Finally, item destruction discourages bringing certain consumables into certain areas (ice cave, volcano, Geh, Coc). But these areas are so dangerous that I usually either don't go in, or just bring the consumables I need to survive anyway. So while this could theoretically be somewhat interesting, all it currently is is a newbie trap.
Even if, against reason and common sense, an additional limitation of the number of carried consumables is desired, its many unpleasant side effects make item destruction a very bad way to enforce this limitation. These include
If people carrying lots of consumables really is a problem, this can be solved far more cleanly using the existing inventory limitations. The most simple way is to increase their weight. Slightly more complex changes would be limiting their stack size, or limiting the total amount of scrolls or potions the player can carry. If you want to prohibit consumable use in certain areas, simply don't let people use consumables in these areas at all, or introduce a chance for item destruction on use in these areas, like in bh's branch.
I suggest simply removing item destruction. No replacement is needed. If item destruction was not in crawl, people suggesting to add it would be called crazy. It's ridiculously deep in bad ideas territory.
This proposal is not very objective (yes, even to me) so I'm not actually motivated to discuss the points it tries to make. If anything, the most plausible statement I took away from it was “certain wands are too powerful”.
However, removing item destruction has such huge implications on overall game balance that there need to be actual arguments that could justify putting work into it.
Of course if item destruction didn't exist from the very start, that balancing had happened over several years already, but how does this relate to the current situation?
— chris 2013-07-19 02:34