Why is inventory management gospel??

[Daniel Fishman]

ToME has a "Mathom House" of the same size as one of the player houses. Unfortunately you can't get stuff back that you've donated though. I think players often use it for informal challenges (for example- to store monster corpses). I usually use it for bad junkarts, quirky randarts (like random artifact filthy rags), or the cursed true artifacts.

ToME has a player house in each regular town- granted there's more stuff in ToME but I pretty quickly max out any new house I earn.

Recent versions (2.3.x, IIRC) of ToME have an unlimited Mathom House.
Entro/Heng also has a Museum with the same functionality (though they also have unlimited home, making it a lot less used!)

[bio_hazard]

Recent versions (2.3.x, IIRC) of ToME have an unlimited Mathom House.
Entro/Heng also has a Museum with the same functionality (though they also have unlimited home, making it a lot less used!)

I guess I've never gone past the second screen in the Mathom House. Of course, I've never gone past CL 42 either. I end up selling most things that I can sell. Probably if each town had a Mathom House equivalent I would use it more, but once I'm basing out of Gondolin or Minas Anor, I'm not likely to travel back to Bree just to put Shadowfax's hide on display.

[Bodkin]

This seems a very basic conceptual point, but worth saying: as long as one's inventory is finite (as it most emphatically should be), there will remain a need to manage it. Inventory management is not "gospel," which would imply that it has been imposed from on high by some kind of arbitrary decree. Rather, it is an unavoidable fact of reality.

[PaulBlay]

This seems a very basic conceptual point, but worth saying: as long as one's inventory is finite (as it most emphatically should be),

You're imposing that from on high, then?

there will remain a need to manage it. Inventory management is not "gospel," which would imply that it has been imposed from on high by some kind of arbitrary decree. Rather, it is an unavoidable fact of reality.

Inventory management is only unavoidable because that is the way Angband is coded. That isn't at all to say that the way Angband is coded is wrong but it would still be a perfectly good (if rather different) game even if you could buy bags of holding for 600 gold in the general store and have as many pages of inventory as you want.

Different people find different aspects of games interesting but there is a large (or possibly just vocal ;-) faction that seems to be 'all about the min/maxing'.

[buzzkill]

More inventory ideas...

What would happen if we assigned all items a 'mass' as well as their current 'weight'. Then, the number of inventory slots would vary would vary according to mass, and would also be limited by weight/burden.

Mass would not be based strictly on size, but rather on the difficulty of realistically carrying such an item. Larger, more bulky armours, and large or long weapons, would have a greater mass and there for consume more pack space regardless of weight.

Small items such as wands and rings would consume very little pack space and would therefore have to limited in some other way, so I came up with with. Smaller items of a like type would be hard to differentiate from one another in a pinch. Therefore, the more like items that are present the harder/longer it would take to select the proper one. Zapping the proper rod or wielding the proper ring is no longer a quick/no fail operation. The greater the number of like item the higher failure rate/wrong item chosen/longer it will take to use. The solution would be for the player to self limit the number of small items cluttering up your pack.

It's a raw idea. Have at it.

[PaulBlay]

More inventory ideas...

What would happen if we assigned all items a 'mass' as well as their current 'weight'. Then, the number of inventory slots would vary would vary according to mass, and would also be limited by weight/burden.

Call your 'mass' 'encumbrance' instead. It's one of the basic elements of the D&D ruleset. A 10 foot long wooden pole may not weigh that much, but just try sticking it in your backpack and walking down narrow winding tunnels with it.

[takkaria]

More inventory ideas...

What would happen if we assigned all items a 'mass' as well as their current 'weight'. Then, the number of inventory slots would vary would vary according to mass, and would also be limited by weight/burden.

Mass would not be based strictly on size, but rather on the difficulty of realistically carrying such an item. Larger, more bulky armours, and large or long weapons, would have a greater mass and there for consume more pack space regardless of weight.

Small items such as wands and rings would consume very little pack space and would therefore have to limited in some other way, so I came up with with. Smaller items of a like type would be hard to differentiate from one another in a pinch. Therefore, the more like items that are present the harder/longer it would take to select the proper one. Zapping the proper rod or wielding the proper ring is no longer a quick/no fail operation. The greater the number of like item the higher failure rate/wrong item chosen/longer it will take to use. The solution would be for the player to self limit the number of small items cluttering up your pack.

It's a raw idea. Have at it.

I'm not convinced that the increase of complexity here would be fun or improve the experience of the game in any way.

[PaulBlay]

I'm not convinced that the increase of complexity here would be fun or improve the experience of the game in any way.

Increasing the 'accuracy' of encumbrance factors isn't going to make much difference while the purely artificial (if well established) limit of 23 inventory slots still applies.

[zaimoni]

Inventory management is only unavoidable because that is the way Angband is coded. That isn't at all to say that the way Angband is coded is wrong but it would still be a perfectly good (if rather different) game even if you could buy bags of holding for 600 gold in the general store and have as many pages of inventory as you want.

And a new category of Yet Another Stupid Death: being so greedy you let yourself get down to -5 speed, on nothing but consumables and ego items, on DL 30 as a Warrior/Paladin/high-STR Priest.

(Aside: an even stretchier webbing backpack than what @ is issued in Angband, would need the internal implementation to have equipment before the pack rather than after. This transition severely uglifies the source code. [It will be in Zaiband 3.0.10 alpha. I'm thinking of how to do monster inventory without falling into RAngband-style Too Much Junk, and that entails not giving the humanoid monsters backpacks at all.])

[Zikke]

A D&D-style "Bag of Holding" is the only "realistic" way to fit that crazy amount of loot in one bag and carry it with you.

15 copies of "Magic for Beginners"? Check.
Four full-sized sets of swap plate armor? Oh yeah, no problem.


I always figured that was how games like Diablo and WoW worked.

[Onyxia's Severed Head] goes right next to the 80 servings of [Roast Quail] and the magical boulder from that you may or may not ever get around to turning in...

[Magnate]

A D&D-style "Bag of Holding" is the only "realistic" way to fit that crazy amount of loot in one bag and carry it with you.

15 copies of "Magic for Beginners"? Check.
Four full-sized sets of swap plate armor? Oh yeah, no problem.


I always figured that was how games like Diablo and WoW worked.

??? Boggle. Diablo has a severely limited inventory - much more so than Angband. (But then it has no magic devices to speak of, and trivially other consumables.)

CC

[PaulBlay]

??? Boggle. Diablo has a severely limited inventory - much more so than Angband. (But then it has no magic devices to speak of, and trivially other consumables.)

Didn't somebody post a link to this recently? Great fun.

[CJNyfalt]

Diablo has a severely limited inventory - much more so than Angband. (But then it has no magic devices to speak of, and trivially other consumables.)

Which is why it felt like there was less inventory management needed in Diablo.

[Zikke]

The principle still holds in Diablo; you had a large amount of full plate armor and huge axes and a million potions, etc. to hold in one "backpack".

This flash game is great.