ToME WikiNerdanelVampire: Dungeon litter has come to be an annoying problem in ToME in the deeper dungeon levels. This has necessitated the automatizer which while handy is in my opinion a band-aid over the real problem of Too Much Useless Loot. I think the generation of low-level items should be aggressively reduced in deep dungeon.
Justification: A high-level player is not interested in low-level items that have plenty of better equivalents. Why should high-level monsters be otherwise?
The method is as follows:
- 100% of {average} items will be generated at dungeon level 0. On dungeon levels 50 and lower only 5% of {average} items will be generated.
- 100% of {good} and {cursed} items will be generated at dungeon levels 50 and higher. By dungeon level 100 the percentage drops to 5%.
If an object fails its generation throw, nothing is generated. This can result in a dragon dying and dropping no loot at all. This is fine. The dragon has "left its loot in its lair".
- Some items, such as money and food, are always generated normally.
- Naturally, the dungeon level refers to the level the object's generated at, which can vary for different monsters.
(Exact numbers can be tweaked.)
Benefits:
- Reduces tedious sorting in a way that leaves the frequencies of useful items unaffected.
- Unrelated to character level, class, and equipment, giving the impression of a consistent world.
- Powerful good and bad items are treated equally, keeping ID important.
Drawbacks:
- Although cumbersome, rebalancing monster drops and item generation algorithms would be more elegant.
NeilStevens: How is the game supposed to guess what items the player wants or doesn't want, though?
Oh, and you seem to forget entirely the issue of consumables like potions, scrolls, and arrows here.
ReenenLaurie: Keep anything like potions and scrolls. Arrows should follow the same idea I guess (destroy "average" arrows). But generally this sounds like great idea... So what happens to those dragons killed in the wilderness?
NeilStevens: Dsetroying average arrows seriously threatens the ability of an archery-based character to stay in the dungeon as long as he'd like. Especially if we're also destroying junk, because that cuts off the avenue to ammo creation.
There's a reason the automatizer has to be as flexible as it is: different characters have different needs. Unless we tailor item *creation* according to the skills of the character (which to work would still require the game to foresee what skills the player WILL want later), no game-controlled squelching system will work as well.
NerdanelVampire: My idea isn't intended to replace the automatizer. Notice that both good egos and cursed egos are completely unaffected by the culling. The point is to diminish the tedium. It isn't too hard for a high-level character to gain access to infinite ID, but some of the ways can never become area effects and ID can easily take a lot of keypresses interspersed by resting to regenerate player or rod mana. Most characters won't want to destroy basetypes of items, and thus the automatizer doesn't get to do its job without the player identifying the entire pile of dragon pit loot. In deep levels something like a dagger (+1, +1) serves only to delay the player. I think junk should be among the types that are always generated (or better yet, there should be a less silly way for archers to make arrows than using things like broken pottery...) I think various magic items could probably use another look into what categories they pseudo-id. I think those aren't currently as useful as weapon pseudo-id results. (Should various useless damage rods REALLY be {good}?)
JohnGilmore: That's the point - no game-controlled squelching system will work as well. But it will work, and it will work better than what we have now - hopefully well enough for most high-level characters to do without absolutely requiring the automatizer, which the game now more-or-less does.
NeilStevens: Destroying necessary items isn't better. It's inferior, and you know very well that's what I meant when I said it won't work as well, heh.
I disagree about the average arrows though. Ego arrows are common enough. And a high-level archer who has done a lot of arrow creation will almost certainly have a bundle or two of artifact arrows, which never break. Auto-destroying junk would never happen anyway, precisely because it is useful for some high-level characters. We'd only destroy stuff which is useless to all high level characters. So scrolls of satisfy hunger would never be destroyed, nor would scrolls of curse armor etc.. There would undoubtably be low-level useless potions, scrolls, and such that we could destory, but the only one I can think of offhand is "treasure detection."
As for rebalancing the item distributions, I'm not sure that's an intrinsically better method. Killing useless average items (weapons and armor most noteably) would result in a basically different effect than attempting to rebalance the items list as a whole. And I think I would probably like it better. For instance, afeter rebalancing the items list, ego item creation would have to be almost completely rethought to achieve an even approximately similar effect. And even if the horde of chain-summoned GWoP's dropped only items that might concievably be usefull to somebody they'd still drop an awefull lot of stuff. The sheer quantity of it is intimidating, and I think that is what needs to be reduced. At the same time, we can't just say "after level 50 we'll give each 'drop' a reduced chance of generating an item" because the current distributions take into account how very many items high-level monsters drop. Therefore a reduction in the number of drops without increasing the quality would make it too difficult to fill out your kit.
NerdanelVampire: The "elegant" way I referred to earlier would indeed mean reconsidering all existing monster drops and diminishing them radically while at the same time making {good}, {great}, and {special} items and their cursed counterparts more common in the item generation. The good thing with this would be that it wouldn't be a kludge on top of an alread-complicated generation system, the bad thing that it would be immensely tedious to implement and harder to balance than my kludge.
ReenenLaurie: Lost souls would be slightly advantaged... seeing an item lying around has a bigger chance of being good. But Lost souls have the odds so stacked against them already.
NerdanelVampire: If lost souls are suddenly too easy, their number of starting ID scrolls can be diminished.
HarryErwin: I find my successful lost souls (1 Geomancer, 1 Mage, 2 Rangers) end up with scrolls remaining when they escape.
NeilStevens: You know, there's a HUGE difference between 'slightly advantaged' and 'too easy', heh.
BitsySpider: Going back to the original thought, I remember really liking the "pick up item: (y/n/k)" option in Zangband.