Should Junk by consumable

[Mark]

I was thinking about the Too Much Junk issue, and thinking how other games deal with it.

Often something that was slightly valuable at the start of the game, but has no value for 95% of the player experience thereafter, can be consumed to become useful again.


WoW - lets you disenchant 'junk' items to get components to enchant your non-junk items.
Card games let you take two low-level cards and fuse them into a more evolved version of that card, more powerful.
Card games let you take multiple 'junk' cards and 'feed' them into a card to increase it's level.

In theory, Angband allows you to sell junk (before no-selling) for gold, but sadly gold is mostly junk for the second half of the game. Other ideas:

• Allow any ego item to be consumed as a scroll of *enchant armour/weapon*
• Allow any magic device to be consumed as a scroll of recharging (maybe with no fail chance on the recharge attempt)
• Allow 5 x heal potions to be combined into a heal potion of the next power up. CLW -> CSW - > CCW -> Heal -> *Healing* -> Life
• Allow magic books to be consumed through casting any spell it contains without requiring mana (and possibly at zero fail rate).

None of those ideas are probably worth the time to implement, but I just wonder if there is a solution to junk that isn't simply removing it, but providing another way to get good things. It would be nice if finding a 5th dungeon spell book enabled my character to fuse them so that all the spells cast within it were now 1% less fail rate than before. Keep more loot interesting for longer...

If we had a rune-based system, removal and insertion of runes would be an obvious way to harness value from junk.

[Timo Pietilä]

Card games let you take two low-level cards and fuse them into a more evolved version of that card, more powerful.
Card games let you take multiple 'junk' cards and 'feed' them into a card to increase it's level.

That's really odd version of poker.

[fizzix]

I think your proposed solutions would make significant difference to how the game proceeds, and I'm not sure that's such a good thing. Right now, character progression goes like this.

You get stronger on a relatively smooth curve for the first 10-15 character levels

After this, character levels aren't enough, and you need gear and stat potions to get stronger. Stat potions are also a relatively smooth progression, but gear is extremely jagged. You can bum around with a terrible weapon for a while, then all the sudden hit careth asdriag or something similar and your power goes up a tremendous amount.

Crafting stuff would make character progression much smoother, as you will continually improve your gear.

Smooth progression is desirable for multiplayer games, but I'm not sure it's as desirable for roguelikes. The memorable games (for me) are the ones where you struggle and struggle, being completely outmatched by enemies that you aren't capable of taking out, until finally you find a key gear piece that allows you to compete. Having a smooth progression would ruin that.

The problem with two much junk is a UI problem. I don't think we should really be looking for gameplay solutions.

[bio_hazard]

To the OP- sounds like you would like the ToME 2 Alchemist class. They can extract essences from virtually any item and use them to create new stuff.

I recently mentioned this in another thread, but I wonder about adding item degredation like Diablo 2 had. Normal and good weapons and armor would gradually become less effective the more they are used. Egos would also do so, but at a slower rate. Artifacts would not degrade, so by the time you are approaching your end-game kit, your gear would be immune to this.

I don't know if this is the right way to go about solving a tmj issue, but it would help in that slightly more things in the dungeon will be of interest if your kit is slowly getting worse. It could also lead to more tactical decisions if there is some variability in how durable monsters are or how fragile gear is. For example, as a warrior you might want to swap a sharp but fragile sword for a durable ball and chain while hacking through a bunch of armored uruks or squaring off against a stone golem.

[Mark]

I suspect fizzix is right as usual.

Oh well, it's nice to share ideas.

[Carnivean]

I suspect fizzix is right as usual.

Oh well, it's nice to share ideas.

Don't be discouraged. Vanilla is meant to be a lean framework that can be honed to a fine balance. Things that can't easily be balanced are still valid, and often form the basis of variants.

Hopefully the refactor will make it easy enough for you to fork a variant of your own and you can march your blacksmith-warrior through a dungeon with a MOD with 80 runes on it, only to watch it break taking out a summoned to 5000' Lagduf with Morgoth down to 1 star. Sometimes balance can go to hell, I want to stride the corridors of Angband like a demi-god.

[Magnate]

I suspect fizzix is right as usual.

Oh well, it's nice to share ideas.

It's a good idea, but it only works in games with a clock of some sort, and Angband has no clock. (Food is not a clock in Angband, hence the frequent discussions about removing it.)

So without a clock, you could just harvest infinite amounts of low-level junk and craft some overpowered stuff. There is an argument that says that the Angband philosophy ("play it how you like") should be unfussed by this: if it was already in the game it would probably be left, but it's unlikely that anyone will do the work to add it unless some inspired individual comes along to create the blacksmith-warrior ...

Adding a clock to Angband (whether it's food, monsters, persistent levels or whatever) is of course contrary to the whole play-how-you-like ethos. Clocks force you to do stuff, and Angband doesn't.

[Egavactip]

Rather than the current universal "always pick up" and "always pick up duplicates" options, I would like something more similar to "killing," where I can toggle by item. For example, I might want to always pick up heal potions, but never pick up spellbooks.

[Carnivean]

Rather than the current universal "always pick up" and "always pick up duplicates" options, I would like something more similar to "killing," where I can toggle by item. For example, I might want to always pick up heal potions, but never pick up spellbooks.

That sounds exactly like what squelching does.