Randarts vs Standarts?

[Nick]

Randmonsters and/or randuniques would be both brutal and fun.

Z+Angband has them, I believe.

[AnonymousHero]

I play randarts but shamelessly increase the size of the home.

I actually tried that, but it doesn't really work all that well to just adjust the number in store.h (or whichever header file it was) -- you get garbage for some of the "selection" characters (both in dumps and the UI) and it doesn't seem to add pages IIRC. (Running current 'master' at the moment.)

[DaviddesJ]

If the current small home is here to stay, it would be great to have a birth_largehome parameter to set.

I know stashing things makes the game easier, but it's just more fun for me than finding so much cool stuff and yet immediately throwing almost all of it away.

[damerell]

I actually tried that, but it doesn't really work all that well to just adjust the number in store.h (or whichever header file it was) -- you get garbage for some of the "selection" characters (both in dumps and the UI) and it doesn't seem to add pages IIRC. (Running current 'master' at the moment.)

It's easy enough to add more selection characters (and I do).

[DaviddesJ]

Personally, I'd like to see an unlimited home size. I mean, there's no reason you couldn't keep a hundred times as much stuff as you can carry, in your house.

[eMeM]

Agreed, I don't like current home size limit. No fun, annoying, pointless, makes me squelch items I would use from time to time.

I don't like inventory limit too. I don't understand why I can hold 40 swords but not 40 different rings. It should be limited only by weight. Many things in dungeon are garbage just because we don't have free inventory slots.

[Derakon]

From a gameplay perspective, the home limit is a lot harder to justify than the player's inventory limit. We don't really care all that much if the player decides to hoard every item they ever find in the home, because those items aren't readily available to the player when they're in the dungeon. The player's inventory while in the dungeon must be limited, so that the player is forced to make choices about what to carry.

A weight- or bulk-based inventory limit system runs into the problem that swap gear becomes very hard to justify compared to more consumables. A potion weighs .2 pounds; a suit of armor weighs 15+. I can't envisage any system in which a) inventory limits are still forcing the player to make interesting choices about what to carry, and b) the armor is still sometimes worth carrying as a swap, that doesn't use something like Angband's current slot limit.

[Scraper]

I see both sides of the arguement and frankly I have to say that I side with the larger home option. Why not make the size of the home a variable that the player can affect. Why not make page 2 openable by say a payment of 100,000 gold or whatever figure is reasonable. That way people can extend the storage space of their home by spending gold to do so.

If this devalues gold too much, for every extention made to the home, the price of items in the stores goes up exponetially. i.e After 2 home extentions, each potion of stat gain in the black market is 2.4 million gold instead of 24000 gold. Each CCW is 32500, or whatever they cost; bolts are 100g per 0/0 bolt.

This would certainly bring the economy side of the game back into play, as well as provide additional space for those of us that crave it.

[Derakon]

Honestly the main problem with making the home bigger is technical. Earlier in this thread was a brief discussion about making the home bigger (and as a side effect making all the stores bigger too, since they share the same code) -- the first problem you run into is being able to select the new slots. What's really needed is a pagination system like the old homes and stores used to have; with pages you'd be able to have a home of arbitrary size.

[quarague]

I guess a cheap work around for the page system would be a two layer choice. If you go to your house, you first choose which room to go with letters from a) to whatever and once inside a room you can drop things and use the letters from a) to whatever again. If maxed out this goes from the current 20 something slots in a house to 20 something squared slots but even having 3 to 5 rooms would probably be more than enough and then you can give the rooms reasonable names.
You could even model them on item type, have an armor room, a weapon room and a room for magic devices and consumables.

[DaviddesJ]

I don't like inventory limit too. I don't understand why I can hold 40 swords but not 40 different rings. It should be limited only by weight. Many things in dungeon are garbage just because we don't have free inventory slots.

This is true, and yet I think it's part of the character of Angband. Other games use a pure weight system, and that's fine too. But those of us who have spent 20 years with a system where you can carry 99 potions of one type but can't carry two different potions instead, I just think it's become central to what the game is. (Reducing the max from 99 to 40 is annoying, but still not a fundamental change in character, I can live with it.)

If I were designing a game from scratch I'd probably use a different system entirely. But I wouldn't change this now.

The home, on the other hand, can really be of any size (at least as an option) without changing the core of the game, to me.

[MattB]

I guess a cheap work around for the page system would be a two layer choice. If you go to your house, you first choose which room to go with letters from a) to whatever and once inside a room you can drop things and use the letters from a) to whatever again. If maxed out this goes from the current 20 something slots in a house to 20 something squared slots but even having 3 to 5 rooms would probably be more than enough and then you can give the rooms reasonable names.
You could even model them on item type, have an armor room, a weapon room and a room for magic devices and consumables.

I actually wouldn't like an infinite home because otherwise you would always be able to build a full-resist set of kit (eventually). I like the room idea though. I'd be as happy as a hummerhorn if I could have two pages of home, one for equipment and one for consumables.