Randarts and power

[Pete Mack]

Well, isn't the point to make it so the player can't carry everything they want to? So we should be aiming for at least a little under what is "enough".

This sounds like a good way to make ironman miserable.

[Derakon]

10 CCW seems a bit short, 20 imho would be more balanced. i regularly carry 30+ of them almost down to DL60.

Well, isn't the point to make it so the player can't carry everything they want to? So we should be aiming for at least a little under what is "enough".

[Estie]

How do people feel about removing the restriction where special artifacts (rings, lights, amulets) in randarts match the standard set in type and number? I imagine there would still be a minimum of three lights, and probably a similar minimum for rings and amulets, but the preservation of light activations might well go.

Well the activation for light already has gone with the Phial´s shift downwards. My warriors carry staves/rods of light as a matter of course and rarely find the Phial early enough to be useful for lighting up rooms.

A simple way to keep the Arkenstone´s behaviour in the game while freeing the artifact lights would be to introduce a rod of enlightenment with the level mapping effect. I would like that, but I´m not going to fret if it goes.

[Sky]

10 CCW seems a bit short, 20 imho would be more balanced. i regularly carry 30+ of them almost down to DL60.

[Derakon]

How do people feel about removing the restriction where special artifacts (rings, lights, amulets) in randarts match the standard set in type and number? I imagine there would still be a minimum of three lights, and probably a similar minimum for rings and amulets, but the preservation of light activations might well go.

I imagine a lot of players are really attached to getting a light-room activation, and later an enlightenment activation, on an equipment slot that tends to have little competition. But I say go for it!

[Nick]

How do people feel about removing the restriction where special artifacts (rings, lights, amulets) in randarts match the standard set in type and number? I imagine there would still be a minimum of three lights, and probably a similar minimum for rings and amulets, but the preservation of light activations might well go.

[bio_hazard]

Fair enough! I'm not sure I can always tell a pure brainstorming thread from a 'let's critique ideas' thread, but I'll try harder to do so.

[Derakon]

I thought I was fairly politely stating my opinion. Apologies if my comment came across as snarky. I'm all for brainstorming, and lord knows a lot of my comments on future directions have been of the "wouldn't it be cool if" variety.

Oh, you weren't rude in the slightest. But when people are trying to brainstorm new ideas, don't react negatively. The process of brainstorming is one of throwing out a lot of ideas. It's fully expected that few if any of the ideas will actually be followed through on. But when you naysay one of them, you're discouraging the person who suggested it from making further suggestions -- and you never know, their next idea might have been amazing.

If you don't have any way to positively contribute to or iterate on an idea, the best thing you can do is simply ignore it. We can take it as given that ideas that people don't like won't be implemented, without having to actually say "I don't like this", no matter how politely.

[bio_hazard]

There are no bad ideas when brainstorming. I'm putting these thoughts out there not necessarily because I think they are things that should be done, but because I think they are interesting and they might help someone else be inspired to the idea that's so good that it's Obvious In Hindsight.

Rather than say "this is a bad idea", you can suggest ways that it might be improved. Hold off on the naysaying until someone actually says "that's brilliant and I'm going to do it".

I thought I was fairly politely stating my opinion. Apologies if my comment came across as snarky. I'm all for brainstorming, and lord knows a lot of my comments on future directions have been of the "wouldn't it be cool if" variety.

[Derakon]

To follow this down the road to realism, race (i.e. height) would determine number of bulks you get, and the biggest armors and weapons might take up multiple bulks.

Let's not go down that road.

There are no bad ideas when brainstorming. I'm putting these thoughts out there not necessarily because I think they are things that should be done, but because I think they are interesting and they might help someone else be inspired to the idea that's so good that it's Obvious In Hindsight.

Rather than say "this is a bad idea", you can suggest ways that it might be improved. Hold off on the naysaying until someone actually says "that's brilliant and I'm going to do it".

[Nomad]

Seems like one relatively simple change to make might be to modify the stack size setting in constants.txt to allow setting individual stack sizes by tval. Even leaving aside the difficulty factor, that's going to be useful for things like fine-tuning autopickup of spellbooks where you only want a relatively small max number in a stack before the game stops weighing you down by picking up more.

[Nick]

I implemented both a difficulty option, -3 slots, and an easiness option, +3 slots. That was pretty easy.

Note that in 4.0+ this is now very easy - you just edit constants.txt.

If you want to go a little deeper, the inventory calculation is all in one function; it would be pretty easy to write a new one to behave how you like - limit inventory by weight, for example.

[bio_hazard]

To follow this down the road to realism, race (i.e. height) would determine number of bulks you get, and the biggest armors and weapons might take up multiple bulks.

Let's not go down that road.

[Derakon]

So maybe the way to have the pack be "modifiable." So weapons don't stack. Arrows stack to 40 across types. Potions stack to 10 across types (so you can have 9 !CCW and 1 healing in one inventory slot, but 11 !CCW take 2 slots.) and so on.

As a further extension of that, you could imagine a bulk-based inventory, where e.g. the player can carry 20 "bulk", and a potion uses 0.1 bulk, arrows .025 bulk, etc. Then every 1 bulk corresponds to a single backpack slot in the current game, and the player wouldn't have to worry about stacking at all. Beyond the UI nightmare produced by having 200 potions of different types in their inventory...and nothing else.

I think that's probably a bit more logical, in a real-world sense, than using slot-specific bulk, but I don't know if it would produce a better game experience than the system you proposed. And real-world logic should only inform our game design where it produces a fun game.

[Estie]

The perfect solution would be inventory Tetris ala Diablo. Too much to ask for ASCII, but maybe it could be done with tiles.