Sil: What are your least liked features of Sil?

[Patashu]

gorged is the only situation in which a herb of emptiness has some utility. you rarely see people use it, but i thought that everything but skeletons is supposed to do something sometimes.

Is a Potion of Slowness ever useful?

[debo]

Is a Potion of Slowness ever useful?

Throw them at orcs and hilarity ensues

[HugoVirtuoso]

Throw them at orcs and hilarity ensues

Same for Potions of Confusion, too!

[half]

Is a Potion of Slowness ever useful?

I find these and potions of confusion/poison useful for safely identifying free action, clarity, slow poison.

[groovy9]

At the risk of necroposting... I just started playing Sil in the past week. My only beef is the beef I (nearly) always have with roguelikes. I HATE the inventory ID game. Hate it. With the burning passion of 1000 horny teenagers.

So I edited one line of code and am playing a version of Sil that auto-identifies items for me. I'm fine with it not identifying monsters. I can get Loremaster if I really want that too.

I do like the fact that basic weapon and armor stats don't require identify, and Loremaster is there, but frankly, the game is hard enough, considering I still haven't gone past 500 feet with a Noldor. I figure once I beat it with an Edain, I can switch off the identify feature. But frankly, I'm never likely to pull that off.

Feature suggestion that just came to mind: Since Sil already uses races as a form of difficulty setting, you could give one of them an innate loremaster ability. Or give it to everyone until the first time you win, then take it away. Just a thought.

[absolutego]

id-on-sight is a very significant change and i don't think you'll find much traction here. i would lobby for id-on-use though. it's pretty much what you get in practice without the ridiculous edge cases (no need to wait 100 turns next to a worm or a spider so it poisons you and you can id !slow poison for xp, bashing doors so you can get stunned to id clarity, farming slowing or blinding traps, weird food thingies not id-ing unless you cross a satiation threshold, etc). the only things that wouldn't work are never-cursed, equippable items like hunger, blight, winter's chill, but those are not very well-designed to start with (as opposed to e.g. treachery or the cursed weapon egos).

you might want to try marvinpa-sil sometime, it does alleviate some of these things (no perception checks, artefacts always id, a few more consumables id on use, and lore-keeper is a bit more useful). very late edit: haha i forgot to mention monster recall; i would *refuse* to play without that.

[debo]

I always wondered how the game would play if you got the xp for a new item discovery even if you don't know what it is yet. So, I see a red potion, I get 100XP, and identifying it strictly serves to let me know when and how to use it safely.

[locus]

They don't exactly get it free, but lore-master is a lot more accessible to the House of Finarfin.

[Infinitum]

the only things that wouldn't work are never-cursed, equippable items like hunger, blight, winter's chill, but those are not very well-designed to start with (as opposed to e.g. treachery or the cursed weapon egos).

+1. Actually I think only Winter's Chill wouldn't be affected (out of serpent/frost troll depth) - Hunger is easily ID'd by going down a hunger level whilst wearing it (ditto sustenance items) and carrying around poison potions in order to test unknown armors for Blight works as inventory space allows.

The only items that are hard to use-ID as long as you know the tricks to it are +0 stat jewelry, adornment, cold/fire affecting items (since the monsters they protect from are generally best left alone) and Staffs (unless you don't mind setting up ridiculously elaborate situations that is - then again the only -important- staffs that don't auto-ID are Sanctity and arguably Freedom; the rest can wait until knowledge), and there are more than enough knowledge charges to go around for those.

I have mentioned this before but the ID system gets quite formulaic after a few playthroughs; It does add some space tension for the inventory but that's about it really. I could stand to see it go as well.

[absolutego]

i forgot danger which is arguably the most important one, but also the easier to fix: curse it, give it a good ability. ideally ("imo") there would be one cursed, "mixed blessings" ego type on each slot and none that are just plain bad. (jewellery items with negative enhancers should go too; i think half's mentioned this at some point).

a while ago i had a branch where i played with this stuff but there was no way to get any traction so i got bored and dropped it. seemed doable though.

[skadefryd]

The main motivation behind the way the gorged status works is the 'realism' aspect. We don't want players to be able to eat all their food all at once rather than having to hold it in their inventory. We do want herbs and potions to help stave off starvation in an emergency, so they are folded into the food system.

Thanks for bringing the problem up.

Is the realism all that critical? It's unrealistic anyway that one quaffs a potion or eats an herb and immediately benefits from its effects––if realism were the goal, they should all take time to kick in.

[intently]

It would be more psychologically pleasing if light weight items were shown with to-hit and evade bonuses rather than showing heavy items with to-hit and evade penalties, even if the net result were the same as now.

So I know this change might introduce other problems But one of the things I like least about the gear selection is how everything has penalties. Putting on new gear should make you feel awesome, not ambivalent. Trade-offs make for compelling game-play, but you should trade-off benefits against each other, not penalties.

For example, here are some armors now:

Robe
Leather Armor [-1,1d4]
Mail Corslet (-1) [-3,2d4]

And here's how it would look with my proposed change:

Robe (+1) [+3]
Leather Armor (+1) [+2,1d4]
Mail Corslet [0,2d4]

Obviously this change would mean that a character would hit and evade better while wearing a robe than while naked, which isn't very realistic... however, no one walks around with empty gear slots anyway except at the very beginning of the game.

[locus]

It would be more psychologically pleasing if light weight items were shown with to-hit and evade bonuses rather than showing heavy items with to-hit and evade penalties, even if the net result were the same as now.

So I know this change might introduce other problems But one of the things I like least about the gear selection is how everything has penalties. Putting on new gear should make you feel awesome, not ambivalent. Trade-offs make for compelling game-play, but you should trade-off benefits against each other, not penalties.

For example, here are some armors now:

Robe
Leather Armor [-1,1d4]
Mail Corslet (-1) [-3,2d4]

And here's how it would look with my proposed change:

Robe (+1) [+3]
Leather Armor (+1) [+2,1d4]
Mail Corslet [0,2d4]

Obviously this change would mean that a character would hit and evade better while wearing a robe than while naked, which isn't very realistic... however, no one walks around with empty gear slots anyway except at the very beginning of the game.

Boots and cloaks are already pure-upside like this.

I dunno, it seems really weird to me that putting on a heavy mail corslet should give you +1 to evasion just because it's lighter than a hauberk which would give you +0. Even if you made it mechanically equivalent (possibly by allowing the player to start the game with a set of ordinary clothing), I think it would hurt the flavor more than it would help the psychological aspects.

I might be in favor of giving all body-armor +1 to evasion, so that Robes would have equivalent stats to Cloaks, and then Leather Armor, at least, would be all-upside. You could balance this pretty well by giving all monsters outside the first 150' a +1 to hit.

You might also give all handwear +1 accuracy, and then you wouldn't have any weird items that didn't do anything (except Crowns I guess, but those are supposed to be ornamental). Again, you'd have to balance it by increasing enemy evasion.

[taptap]

Again, you'd have to balance it by increasing enemy evasion.

Or by a significant dexterity reduction for everyone.

Why would you for a "flavour"-change tremendously unbalance the game and make early smithing a required pick? What is the point of that apart from seeing higher numbers in the game?

[intently]

Why would you for a "flavour"-change tremendously unbalance the game and make early smithing a required pick? What is the point of that apart from seeing higher numbers in the game?

I agree, my proposed change is messy... it was meant mostly as an example. I agree that it wouldn't be good game design.

My overall point is that it is less fun to trade off penalties than to trade off bonuses. I'd rather choose between [+2,1d4] and [+0,2d5] than between [-1,1d4] and [-3,2d5], even though the choices are functionally equivalent.

From a game design perspective, penalties on gear or skills should be rare and should be used to balance out exceptionally powerful abilities. This isn't realistic, but it makes for a better player experience. In order to create trade-offs for the player without having penalties everywhere, you can "simply" scale your bonuses to make the penalties "invisible".