Potion Acquirement

Potions that might be worthy of an acquirement are the following:

* Experience: Yes, it's worthy of an acquirement. Too worthy. The chances of getting it from a scroll of acquirement should be very, very low, perhaps nonexistent.

* Cure mutation: The one that people would want to acquire most often. I should add further that the number of scrolls of acquirement found in a typical game is usually close to the number of potions of cure mutation.

* Gain Intelligence/Dexterity/Strength: These are of varying desirability. Generally only spellcasters would want any of these: melee fighters tend to have more than enough Str/Dex. Casters, on the other hand, usually would want more Int to increase spell power and negate hunger costs. And occasionally more Str, since they tend to be short on that.

* Magic: These are a powerful and generally somewhat rare escape option. Probably 2-3 would be appropriate for an acquirement.

* Heal wounds: Possibly, though given the chance of acquiring a wand of healing, which is lighter and less breakable, I think most people would pass on this.

Acquirement already looks at your current character in deciding what item to give you. So, for potion acquirement, I would have it be something like the following:

An unmutated character has a 5% chance of getting a potion of experience. If not a potion of experience, 1/3 chance of cure mutation, and 2/3 chance of d3 potions of gain stat. If the character's highest non-Dodging non-Armour skill is a spellcasting skill, then the chance becomes 1/3 cure mut, 1/3 d3 gain int, and 1/3 1+1d3 potions of magic. This may be too deterministic and/or gameable, but I think it reasonably well accords with what most people would want for their characters.

However, the acquirement should detect if you are malmutated. This should not be as simple as “one bad mutation means you always get cure mut” - it would be very bad to encourage players to leave Dex-1 in place, just so they could stockpile cure muts from scrolls of acquirement. Instead, non-native bad mutations should be given a weight - these correspond to a chance that the acquirement will simply override the normal mechanics and give you a potion of cure mutation. The chances would add together. Some examples might be (bear in mind that the base chance of getting a cure mut is already roughly 33%, and bear in mind I might have a bias against certain mutations):

* Negative stat mutations: 3 per level

* Slowness: 1: 50, 2: 60, 3:70

* Teleportitis: 1: 50, 2:60, 3:70

* Fast metabolism: 1: 15, 2: 30, 3: 45

* Shoutitis: 1: 10, 2: 20, 3: 30

* Berserkitis: 1: 15, 2: 30, 3: 50

* Herbivore: 1: 10, 2: 30, 3: 80

If people are interested in this idea I'd be happy to come up with the rest of the numbers. An example situation would be as follows:

Player A had a bad encounter with a neqoxec. He got Slowness 1 and Berserkitis 1. This means that if he acquires a potion, there is a (50+15)% chance that the acquirement will just give him a cure mut. Even if that roll fails, he still has a second ~33% chance to get a cure mut potion.

It is indeed possible for the chance to go over 100%, in which case the acquirement is certain to give you a cure mut potion - I don't think there's anything wrong with this, since in order to get that far you'd have to pretty heavily mutate yourself, to the point that one cure mutation's not going to fix it.

The emphasis of this proposal is pretty heavily on potions of cure mutation. The reasoning behind this is simple: I think it presents an interesting strategic choice to the player - do they blow a scroll of acquirement in hopes of getting a potion of cure mutation, given that there's often a fairly good chance of finding one on the next level? At lower levels of malmutation, the acquirement has a decent chance not to give that cure mut. At higher levels, one cure mut's probably not going to cut it. Either way, I think it's interesting while not being particularly scummable or game-breaking, though obviously it would need to be tweaked.

Seems kind of narrow in focus. Do we want a whole acquirement category that revolves around getting a few extra cure mutation potions? It would degrade the utility of Zin and Jiyva, and cheapen mutation removal in general so there's less reason to play with a mutation set that is only marginally bad rather than making it go away. In exchange, we get another super-simple acquirement to go with food that is 100% likely to get something mundane and useful, never something special. I'm not actually sure, based on the numbers, whether this would be the new always-acquire category like armour or whether this would be another only-acquire-in-emergencies category like food, but neither case would be ideal. – KoboldLord 2011-11-07 05:59

Well when you compare to other acquirements, it's not really all that narrow. Food acq → just food. Weapon acq → just a weapon. Wand → wand of healing/hasting. As for jiyva/zin, you could make the same argument (and it'd be stronger for these!) for food (jiyva/zin), weapon (trog/oka), armour (oka), jewelry(xom), books (sif). Duplication of effects is everywhere in crawl, the more the better imo. And jiyva needs to be changed regardless, it's already a trivialized god for the most part. — greepish 2011-12-06 10:40