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I like the rune based idea, but am also all for mages keeping an identify spell. Mages are already under significant handicaps and removing their ID spell would remove one of their few advantages. Maybe I'd be okay with the spell only identifying a single rune, provided it's not random, e.g., fails if it picks an already identified rune.
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“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead -
I can see this as a potential problem, but I suspect not really a very big one. I think it really needs to be tested out to see. This is the reason it is being done in a feature branch, so that testing and tweaking can be done.
I'm also not above abandoning an approach completely if it doesn't work.One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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I like rune based id. Some remarks from other games that use it.
Sil only gives you a chance to understand the effect if you observe it, based on some skill the char has. With the plethora of effects Angband has, this is probably a bad idea for Angband.
Brogue has a mixture of identify by use (potions, staves, etc) and identify by wearing (armor, rings, etc). That is, if you equip an item for long enough, you will figure out what it does, even if you have never seen the effect in action. Some version of that could be nice for Angband as well. Take an example like free action, the player suspects one of his items gives free action, but trying it out on a monster with paralyse is still quite dangerous in case none of the items gives free action.
Having a dungeon only scroll of identify that discover an unknown rune is a good idea. There could also be a new item class which is just a single rune, not attached to an item but with an instruction manual. If you find a 'fire res rune' item you char learns about this rune and can identify it from then on.
Giving mages a spell of identify seems too much to me. Maybe mages have knowledge of some basic runes from the start, at level 20 they learn a few more and at level 40 they can identify all runes on sight or something like that.Comment
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That seems good to me, and dovetails nicely with the special leveling effects experienced by warriors (rFear), rangers (extra shots), and priests/paladins (wider area of effect for OOD). Sure, mages get an extra meteor in meteor swarm on leveling up, but it's a far rarer use (I almost never use it at all, especially after finding out there's no fire damage) than OOD. Having rune knowledge based on level up seems a good compromise for axing the mages identification spell.“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadComment
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Will scrolls like summon monster, summon undead, potions of poison, etc. still exist without identify? Currently, once you find a source of identify, you can avoid finding these the hard way. If we are going to keep these, it would be a reason to allow mages to keep the spell since the negative effects of these items can be more detrimental to mages than to other classes.Comment
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So drudgery of identifying is replaced by the drudgery of having to pick up, and even worse, wield every single thing we encounter just in case it has something not yet identified? Currently at level 11, a mage knows everything about every object in the game with a quick cast of a single spell. Not sure there's sufficient compensation for this loss in the current proposal.Comment
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You don't have to pick up every item, as you can see at a glance all the runes on it. If you recognize all of them then the item is automatically fully identified without having to cast a spell at all. By the time you're level 30 or so, I would expect that the vast majority of items would be fully identified automatically, and you'd know that an item that isn't fully identified at least does something novel!
Also please be aware that people play other classes than mages.
This change will likely affect different classes in different ways.
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If we're going to rune-based id and eliminating (or restricting to mages) magical identify, then there needs to be some alternative way for players to test for the various possibilities other than walking up to monsters carrying a "hit me" sign. Perhaps we should supplement the existing "bad" potions (poison, sleep, confusion, etc.) with potions that do a small amount of elemental damage, one type for each element that has a resistance. Likewise a potion inflicting minor experience drain for testing hold life. And an additional summoning scroll that specifically produces ghosts, which will help with testing for see invis. And probably a potion that inflicts fear, unless we want to use the existing mushroom of terror as the main fear-tester. Then add an additional shop that sells all of these items. This not only allows a reasonably secure supply of rune-testing gear, but provides a means other than quaff-testing for players to identify the harmful potions--which is important, if we're eliminating magical id.
Most of the remaining runes that are not tested by the sorts of potions described above are abilities that will become obvious after simply equipping the item for a short time. A few will require further mechanical tweaks, though. For feather falling, add a mechanic allowing a player to create (and immediately fall into) an unspiked pit by digging in the > direction. For stat sustains, have those be revealed whenever the player drinks a stat potion of the corresponding flavor (and perhaps also when the stat is reduced by one of the +/- stat potions).Comment
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You can throw out the runebased system without any "intended" methods for identifying each rune, and see what players come up with. If some runes turn out to be annoyingly hard to find out, new methods and ways can be devised by the designer, but I wouldnt make too many assumptions about how the gameplay is going to pan out. Its a big change.
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I think making it hard to find out the runes is a good thing, what I wouldnt like to see is a lot of difference between character and player knowledge of runes.
For example, you are fairly sure that rune X does Y, but you would have to go to great length to force the game to admit it. This is when some easy new test should be considered.Last edited by Estie; November 26, 2015, 02:09.Comment
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But if that is the case, what is the motivation behind all this? Why change something just to see what happens? And then spend the next code iterations tweeking it for who knows how long. In the meantime introducing a whole new mechanic that is bound to introduce new bugs and increase code maintenance time.
I'm not dead set against change, but I honestly don't see the gameplay benefit of any of this. Other methods, like a drastic reduction of magic identify sources (admittedly staffs of identify are the worst) could be implemented in just one version of the game and would achieve a similar effect in order to promote, but not force entirely, identification by experimentation.
I guess my argument is why remove entirely magical identification means? This is what I don't understand.Comment
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The overarching goal is to remove the tedium from the identification process, where you find a bunch of unidentified items and then you have to figure out what they all do. Ideally we would also not lose the concept of mysterious items whose purpose you have to figure out, which is why we aren't just making all equipment items identified from the start (though this would be trivial to implement).
"Rune-based ID" as a concept has been bandied about for years now. Plenty of people think it'd be worth trying out. However, it loses meaning if players can trivially identify all the runes -- that'd mean players would just "cast identify" in whatever appropriate manner (spell, scroll, etc.) until they've identified every rune and then ignore identification from then on. Basically they completely ignore the new mechanic. So a corollary to rune-based ID is greatly restricting magical sources of identification.
As has been said before in this thread, there will doubtless be many bugs, undesirable behaviors, etc. that will need to be tweaked. But if the devs are willing to try it and the players are willing to playtest it, then I see no reason why it shouldn't proceed. Obviously if it can't be made to work then it won't end up in an official release.
As a side note, though: we may want to consider retaining a reasonably common (and possibly castable) "Flavor Identify" ability for IDing potions and scrolls. While I'm not aware of any seriously detrimental items out there where ID by use would be problematic, I'd sure hate to ID-by-use a Teleport Level scroll on a vault level, or Potion of Life pretty much period. There's still a significant period in the early game where characters will be IDing scrolls and potions by use, and I think staves/wands/rods are all pretty safe to ID by use (mm, maybe not Staves of Destruction...). Well, something to think about anyway.
Maybe we just have scrolls of Identify Potion, Identify Scroll, Identify Rune, etc. and they have variable rarity depending on how important we think it is that the player be forced to ID-by-use the relevant item type.Comment
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