Quiver at home?

[Derakon]

I like this on paper, but when I first tried ToME 4 something about choosing a difficulty setting at the beginning bugged me. I can't put my finger on what though.

I'd guess it has something to do with not wanting to feel like the computer has to go easy on you for you to be able to play the game. There's also an expectation that roguelikes be hard, so having an easy mode for one seems weird.

Generally I'd say that newbies should be trying in each game to make it further than they did in the previous game. It's fully expected that they lose several characters that make it past 3000' (past which point most of us would be assuming we had a win-capable character). Making it more likely that a newbie can win without so many deaths would remove a few instances of "WTF?! How is that fair?!" but would also greatly reduce the joy of your first victory, so I have to say I'm against it.

[LostTemplar]

Imho difficulty settings are bad. Noob-firendly is actually "interesting for a newbie", not easy. Even game, that is absolutely impossible to win can be noob-friendly.

[Hariolor]

tangental thought reading through recent posts on this topic...

how about a moderately rare ?recall_item that summons an item of the player's choice from home to the floor next to them.

to make it fair I think you have to pull the whole stack if it's a pile of consumables.

I'd guess at the rarity being somewhere around the same as ?*acquirement*, but it starts showing up much earlier. DL10 maybe?

This doesn't expand the size of the home itself, but having one of these effectively increases the size of the backpack by the size of the home.

on second thought, maybe this doesn't help as much as I thought. but it would give newer players easier access to the home without having to ?recall all the time.

[Gockel]

guess i'm pretty close to what could be called a noob (though i have to admit that i generally enjoy hard games) and i have to say that i wouldn't enjoy unlimited home even though it would probably improve my chances of achieving something...
i've thrown some useful stuff away in all my games until now (in my current one this would mainly be ?*destruction* and ?mass banishment), but for me this is part of the fun. i guess angband is a somewhat masochistic experience anyway (at least in the beginning) and the realization that you've dumped something important is just a small version of the usual "agh, smaug obviously isn't much like the average baby dragon - what a nice new piece of information in exchange for 20 hours of playing".

it honestly makes me feel good when i realize that something i've stored at home is useless or that it was a bad choice to dump something else. it makes you realize that you've taken one more tiny step towards becoming good at angband.
to me it's a big part of angband's appeal that you're forced to decide "is this necessary or isn't it? considering the way i play angband, will i need it later?"

of course this is only the way i see it, but to me angband would lose quite a bit of its charm if space at home was unlimited...