Town services?

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Derakon posted this:

Mm, as far as shopping is concerned, the only items you really need to have to continue into the dungeon are a) Word of Recall, b) stat restores (in egregious situations), and c) spellbooks. If you add a service to restore stats, and change the town spellbooks to be indestructible but weigh 6 pounds each, then the only remaining item that the stores would have to refresh their stock on would be Word of Recall scrolls.

Specifically, the notion of a "service" to restore stats. This got me to thinking, what other "services" could we implement? Note that this is related to the town shops/restocking/scumming issues, altho some of the ideas go beyond the scope of that.

So, we could have the following services:

a) Healer [Temple]: restore stats, restore XP. Restore HPs too, perhaps, altho this would only be meaningful VERY early on. No need to scum for stat restorers.

b) Enchant weapons/armor [weapon/armor shops]. Make the price to enchant variable, NOT fixed. Eliminates enchant weapon/armor scrolls from the stores.

c) Recharge wand/staff [magic shop]. Probably should work like Recharge III, and not be an automatically successful recharge. Would help e.g. the warrior types looking for ID and detection staves and the like.

d) Improve item [black market]: would let you raise the bonuses on items that are, right now, NOT normally improvable...so that +1 Int ring could be made into a +3. Definitely in the Black Market, definitely using the x3 cost adjustment. Would, of course, NOT work on artifacts. With this, the 'best possible items' the stores can offer, could be greatly reduced.

Those are the ones I can think of, right now...

[Derakon]

Maybe in variant territory, but I'm actually now (after some more discussion in the "making the game harder" thread) of the mindset that the only one of these that would be useful without being unbalancing is recharging, and that only because item identification is still such a huge part of gameplay. Remove the need for _Identify and you don't need any town services IMO.

[Whelk]

Fireproofing and insulating consumables could be handy (scrolls and potions, possibly staves and wands). This service would make the consumable item protected from destruction via fire, cold, and electricity. Make it add to the item's weight a bit to balance it. Explain the weight gain by saying you're encasing the item in some sort of material that's protective but heavy.

[nppangband]

Just a quick note that NPP pretty much does all this now. Except changing the items weight.

[bulian]

Derakon, why do you consider restoration of stats at the temple unbalanced?

[Derakon]

Bulian: more like unnecessary. Count the number of times you need to buy stat restore potions in any game, and I'll bet it's less than 5 per stat. So if we move to a no-restocking shop system with preset inventories, for example, then you can just stock 5 of each potion in the alchemist at the start of the game and be good to go. It'd encourage rationing your use of the potions, which introduces more choices without horribly punishing you for the time that your STR got drained to 8 by Dreads.

[buzzkill]

Ration by price...
1st potion (x1) costs 500 (normal price)
2nd (x2) costs 1,000
3rd (x3) costs 3,000
4th (x4) costs 12,000
5th (x5) costs 60,000
6th (x6) costs 360,000

[ewert]

Ration by price...
1st potion (x1) costs 500 (normal price)
2nd (x2) costs 1,000
3rd (x3) costs 3,000
4th (x4) costs 12,000
5th (x5) costs 60,000
6th (x6) costs 360,000

Before all these seemingly nice ideas like price rationing, look at the end result:
6th potion is unattanaible until you slaughter dragon pits etc. Even 5th is way too much for realistic use, heck 4th is iffy.

Overall, I like NPP style services. And I don't see much reason to reduce vanilla town stuff anyways, I actually want the last bothersome thing which is ?WoR be stocked with more than small stacks always. For me that is pretty much the last game feature that causes unnecessary resting/scumming behavior anymore.

[buzzkill]

Before all these seemingly nice ideas like price rationing, look at the end result:
6th potion is unattainable until you slaughter dragon pits etc. Even 5th is way too much for realistic use, heck 4th is iffy.

That was the point. Instead of a hard limit of five, I'm proposing a soft limit of 4 or 5, maybe 6 (my no-selling winner ended up with more that 500,000 GP).

You can always still find (and horde if you like) potions from the dungeon.
You can still cast restoration spells.

I'm wasn't suggesting such a steep curve be used for all potions, but rather than a hard limit of 5, a soft limit of whatever demand dictates. That's pretty much how it works in the real world and no one seems to have a problem with it. I think this system could work and it could be modified with lesser multipliers to fit other frequently abused consumables.

[ewert]

Yes I understood the point, but questioned the value of doing it. :P

Is there anything wrong with town having unlimited restores? It saves irritation from devastating stat loss and no restore available.

Though as Derakon said, experienced players need them very rarely. It would hurt and change to more difficult the game for newbies, I remember having to restore a lot once upon a time.

Hurt newbs, no matter for pros. I vote unlimited restore services ...

Btw, my no-sell and thus no-shop-recharge warrior did just fine for id with bought, found or ?recharged id, no need for store-recharge. I think with current item distribution zero-fail recharge is not necessary.

[Lord Fell]

For me, if I get stat drained while I'm deep in the trenches, I'm going to tough it out until it's convenient to head back to town... and once I do that, I want to get those stats cured.

I think having it as a "service" rather than as a potion would mean I never have to scum for it (I don't actually "scum" for stuff I "need," I just cut my Dives short until I get the potions and scrolls I'm looking for). Encouraging scumming would be a design flaw.

I think anything like this, something that forces "ironman-like play" on players who didn't sign up to play ironman, is undesirable.