Experiences with Frog-knows

[Narvius]

Or just make Slow + 0 Energy general summoning sickness that always applies. That's less complicated and makes way for nerfing of mass removal spells.

[EpicMan]

Stepping back for a moment, why not just remove the scrolls/staves of summon monster? What purpose do they serve other than "screw the player who uses them unknowingly"?


If you know something is a staff/scroll of summon monsters, you (or at least I) squelch or ignore it; there's no benefit to the item other than creating monsters to fight, and there's a staircase for that.

I would put these items in the same class of potions of clumsiness, death, and detonations: they are there to penalize the player for IDing by use, and have no place (IMHO) in a game that wants to replace magic ID with ID-by-use.

[Timo Pietilä]

I would put these items in the same class of potions of clumsiness, death, and detonations: they are there to penalize the player for IDing by use, and have no place (IMHO) in a game that wants to replace magic ID with ID-by-use.

Occasional bad items are actually good for ID-by-use, as long as they are not instantly fatal like death and detonations or too annoying like potion of ruination and scrolls of curse armor and weapon. for example you could use mushroom of confusion in safe position to figure out if item gives you confusion resistance or potion of clumsiness to figure out if item has sustain DEX.

That was actually how things were done in old angbands for a long long time, *ID* was really rare, and you needed to figure out what the item does and then inscribe it to it at least until you had fully identified it. That did go away only after normal ID was changed to give full ID of the things. I remember collecting bad mushrooms and potions just for testing purposes.

I propose that with full ID-by-use we reintroduce potions of self-knowledge to ID everything you are wearing at once. These do not have to be as common as ID and definitely not town-items, but it would speed up some ID pain.

[d_m]

Occasional bad items are actually good for ID-by-use, as long as they are not instantly fatal like death and detonations or too annoying like potion of ruination and scrolls of curse armor and weapon. for example you could use mushroom of confusion in safe position to figure out if item gives you confusion resistance or potion of clumsiness to figure out if item has sustain DEX.

I agree with this. An item that is useless (and maybe tactically bad) but which doesn't cripple your character seems fine. You make a good point about Curse Weapon and Curse Armor.

In my branch which makes artifacts 1/2 as common I will remove Curse Weapon/Armor as a reward to see how it plays

[Derakon]

Curse Armor isn't too bad. You can live without one of your armor slots for quite a long time, and it makes for an interesting challenge. At least, that's my opinion on it after it happened to me. I had all these nice body armors stashed at home that I couldn't wear until I got this gooey awful leather scale mail removed. It was neat.

Curse Weapon is a different matter; melee is far too vital to many classes for the character to be stuck wielding a nerf bat until they can find enough Enchant scrolls (or a *Remove Curse*). Archery doesn't come anywhere close to being a practical replacement in the 500'-1500' range where you could plausibly read one of these scrolls without IDing it first. When I had this happen to a character, I tried to stick it out, but it just didn't work. Curse Weapon would work better if it just stuck a sticky-curse on the thing and didn't modify its damage; you're stuck with that weapon until you can uncurse it, but it's still as good at killing things as it was before you read the scroll.

Of course, I'm looking at both of these from the perspective of reading them when I'm still using early-game gear, since after that point I'm IDing everything before reading it anyway.

[UglySquirrell]

i was wondering if anyone knows how to make a character dump in this version. or what to name the file? i go into the C screen and hit <f>ile and try and use it but theres no name for the file e.g. Squirrell.txt i tried my characters name Asp.txt but it says Can't open file Asp: tried the files i found in frog Knows folder but no luck with those either. any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

[Nick]

I agree with this. An item that is useless (and maybe tactically bad) but which doesn't cripple your character seems fine. You make a good point about Curse Weapon and Curse Armor.

In my branch which makes artifacts 1/2 as common I will remove Curse Weapon/Armor as a reward to see how it plays

Surely I don't have to say what everyone knows I'm going to say here...

[Derakon]

Surely I don't have to say what everyone knows I'm going to say here...

"Good idea! I'll have to add that to FAAngband!"

[Nick]

"Good idea! I'll have to add that to FAAngband!"

No, on this occasion it was "If you had FAangband curses already, you wouldn't have to", followed by the explanation that Curse Weapon and Curse Armour would just add a few more curses, not be totally destructive.

But that was a good guess

[UglySquirrell]

Cool, just found the short sword "Gilettar" in a small vault on level 29 now I just need to figure out what it does.

[Timo Pietilä]

Curse Armor isn't too bad. You can live without one of your armor slots for quite a long time, and it makes for an interesting challenge. At least, that's my opinion on it after it happened to me.

I find losing even one point of enchantment permanently extremely annoying (Cambeleg with +7,+7, Pain with +29). Losing entire armor would lose my interest of that character. I rather take potion of death than those scrolls. I know it doesn't make sense in long run, but that is how I feel and why I said it being too annoying, not fatal.

Potion of ruinations is also item that could be added back if those two scrolls stay, because same justification applies to it too.

[Derakon]

Again, I'm not talking about losing an artifact or even some good ego armor. I'm talking about if you read the thing when you're in the 500'-1500' range, which should be before you've found any armor you'd consider remotely vital. Past that point you'll be IDing everything before using it so Curse Armor stops being a factor.

[Timo Pietilä]

Again, I'm not talking about losing an artifact or even some good ego armor. I'm talking about if you read the thing when you're in the 500'-1500' range, which should be before you've found any armor you'd consider remotely vital. Past that point you'll be IDing everything before using it so Curse Armor stops being a factor.

This is about ID-by-use without ID spells available, so "past that point" doesn't apply. Current item distribution is too unreliable to be sure that you do find those at shallow depths, someone just recently commented that he found wand of magic missiles at dlvl 90+ down, and I have also found shallow items first time very deep in dungeon (different variations of scrolls of blessing for example).

Curse armor/weapon has no other use, so it is not just junk, it is harmful junk. Potions of confusion etc. do have other uses especially with ID-by-use, so they cease being pure junk.

Especially full artifact ID requires quite a few tests if we don't do rune-based system.

Rune-based system OTOH can be too fast unless you make knowledge of those grow gradually (first item having tested known feature doesn't yet trigger automatic recognition, tenth does. Something like that), so you might want to have those test-methods available even for that.

[buzzkill]

This is about ID-by-use without ID spells available, so "past that point" doesn't apply. Current item distribution is too unreliable to be sure that you do find those at shallow depths, someone just recently commented that he found wand of magic missiles at dlvl 90+ down, and I have also found shallow items first time very deep in dungeon (different variations of scrolls of blessing for example).

That's a farily good argument in favor of keeping ID around beyond full scale ID-by-use.

Because something is annoying to you personally isn't a reason to lobby for it's exclusion. Tell me how losing a single piece of non-artifact armour is game breaking instead.

Finding low level items extremely deep is an abnormality (likely heavily tied to play style) that shouldn't be accounted for in game balance, any more than egos or artifacts should be nerfed because they are sometimes found very early.

Curse armor/weapon has no other use, so it is not just junk, it is harmful junk. Potions of confusion etc. do have other uses especially with ID-by-use, so they cease being pure junk.

Yes. It is CURSED. It was never intended to junk. It was always intended to be harmful. Not everything should be useful. I don't know where the notion come from that everything must be somehow useful, and there can't be purely evil items that the player must beware of.

AAMOF, although I wouldn't want to play every game with the following feature, I'm having a great time playing my FA comp 110 character with severe buginess that basically restricts her to only cursed weapons and armour, and an extraordinarily limited selection of those.

[Timo Pietilä]

Yes. It is CURSED. It was never intended to junk. It was always intended to be harmful. Not everything should be useful. I don't know where the notion come from that everything must be somehow useful, and there can't be purely evil items that the player must beware of.

I'm not against junk items, but those scrolls are just annoying. IMO they should be just plain removed because they do not provide anything useful to game. ID or no ID. No excitement, no challenge, only annoyance. Even potion of death was more interesting, at least you would be dead and not crippled after drinking one.