Gold and no_selling

[PowerDiver]

Would that include Farmer "get one good item for free" Maggot? Count me in. The whole town mini-game has always looked silly to me --- with street urchins on the top of the list.

I don't particularly care, but my solution would be to put him in the dungeon with the same depth and rarity as his hounds, whatever that is.

[PowerDiver]

What I do find is that with no-selling I will not even bother picking up or identifying 95% of weapons and armour in the early game, until I have _Perception, as they are unlikely to be better than what I already have.

Other thoughts I have about it are Sangband-specific so probably not appropriate here.

That is because the cost to identify is higher than the expected value of the item. The changes made in V 3.1, ID-by-use and much faster pseudo, make all the difference.

IIRC in S you get a single chance at pseudo when you pick up the item and if you fail you'll never know whether it is safe to test-wield. That means it makes sense to toss anything that doesn't pseudo when you pick it up.

[buzzkill]

Would that include Farmer "get one good item for free" Maggot? Count me in. The whole town mini-game has always looked silly to me --- with street urchins on the top of the list.

Maggot? Maybe I'm dense, but I don't recall ever seeing Maggot in V. I don't think that I ever killed him. Admittedly, I don't play a lot of V, but still, I think I would have noticed.

Now The Complainer... there's a NPC I kill, every time. Sure, he usually has a good drop, but that's not my motivation.

[Derakon]

Maggot has been in Vanilla since 2.4 frog-knows, mate. I used to savescum his drop when I was a kid.

[EpicMan]

It may not be very useful now with ID-by-use, but I like the idea of a chance at instant-pseudo of an item when you pick it up. You could even maybe pseudo it when you walk over it assuming you can see (area lit and not blind). You could implement it with a bit flag that is flipped when the item is pseudo'd or fails to be pseudo'd.

Warriors should have the best chance to pseudo, while mages and priests the worst (being least familiar with weapons and such). It's probably not feasible to make exceptions (priests somewhat better at pseudoing blunt weapons and mages even worse at pseudoing gloves/gauntlets).

You could also expand this to cover magic devices, with a different order of pseudo chance than weapons/armor (mages best, then rogues, rangers,...whoeverisworstatmagicdevices). Pseudo in the case of magic devices would be used to determine the number of charges left, assuming ID-by-use does not do that for you right now. I haven't played V far enough to know much about ID-by-use.

[Nightmarjoo]

Instead of just universally multiplying gold drops by 5 or whatever you've decided on, why not keep it at x3 where it feels like you have too little gold and add more variation in the drop-amount; so maybe you'll have too little and then you get lucky and find 5k gold in a single drop. Makes gold droppers more exciting, no?

I haven't tried no_selling yet so I don't know how it feels, but gold has always been pretty boring to me with selling enabled, so I'm eager to try out no_selling. I always just get by with whatever I had, use my first Westernesse weapon, sell the second and I'm rich for the rest of the game.

[PowerDiver]

Instead of just universally multiplying gold drops by 5 or whatever you've decided on, why not keep it at x3 where it feels like you have too little gold and add more variation in the drop-amount; so maybe you'll have too little and then you get lucky and find 5k gold in a single drop. Makes gold droppers more exciting, no?

There are occasional extra-large bonus drops in the current code.

This is meant to be a style option, not a difficulty option. If you want a harder game, petition for a difficulty option you could apply in addition. One possibility would be to increase the prices shops charge by some factor. That would affect the difficulty of selling games as well.

[Magnate]

There are occasional extra-large bonus drops in the current code.

This is meant to be a style option, not a difficulty option. If you want a harder game, petition for a difficulty option you could apply in addition. One possibility would be to increase the prices shops charge by some factor. That would affect the difficulty of selling games as well.

Nightlies will shortly have all buying prices cut to 1/3 of the selling price. This will obviously only affect selling games, but is a step towards reconciling the two. (It may of course be reverted before 3.3)

Personally I think the jackpot drops are not good - IMO gold drops should correlate very closely to monster power, with very small variance. But YMMV.

[Derakon]

If you want variation in treasure size, just make the monster drop more treasure "items" by modifying their entry in monster.txt, like how hydras drop lots of money. It's simple enough to do.

[takkaria]

Nightlies will shortly have all buying prices cut to 1/3 of the selling price. This will obviously only affect selling games, but is a step towards reconciling the two. (It may of course be reverted before 3.3)

That means stores will buy for 1/3 of what they sell for, right, not the other way round?

[Magnate]

That means stores will buy for 1/3 of what they sell for, right, not the other way round?

Er, yes, that's right.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

I would prefer stores buy for 1/2 instead of 1/3, but that's minor. However, if this is done, I'd like to see the shopkeepers' maximums set to at least 10K.

[d_m]

I would prefer stores buy for 1/2 instead of 1/3, but that's minor. However, if this is done, I'd like to see the shopkeepers' maximums set to at least 10K.

I don't understand the relationship between those two. If selling price is divided by 1/3, the effective maximum is already x3 higher.

[camlost]

I don't understand the relationship between those two. If selling price is divided by 1/3, the effective maximum is already x3 higher.

Two things limit the amount of money you get for stuff -- the selling price, and the store cap. Since we're reducing one, it may be prudent to relax the other.

Imagine that you find yourself in the situation of raising cash for something. You'll need to sell the expensive stuff in order to buy what you want, doubly so now because of the reduced selling prices. A 5K cap in the weapon smith adds insult to injury.

[PowerDiver]

Two things limit the amount of money you get for stuff -- the selling price, and the store cap. Since we're reducing one, it may be prudent to relax the other.

Since the main point of the one is to reduce the money in the game, changing the other to increase the money in the game is perplexing to me.