User talk:Phol ende wodan/WardProposal

No offense, but this seems to me to be a system similar to the one in dnethack with minor changes and the same problems, mainly that 1. you still have to remember which ward repels what and 2. in the very early game, where you're most likely to actually need a ward in the first place, you'll often not know the specific one that would repel the monster killing you, while later on, when you know all the wards, you're also probably strong enough to simply kill everything without needing a ward. Not sure how to avoid these problems in a ward system though.

Also, if this actually gets implemented in xnethack, I hope there will be something that dnethack still seems to lack: a way for the player to display which wards they know, without actually trying to engrave one. Trying to check which wards you know in dnethack while standing on an altar can be very frustrating, because it results in you making a motion towards the altar and angering the god! --Bluescreenofdeath (talk) 13:26, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

The dnethack encyclopedia appears to give flavor relevant passages and some information about reinforcing and time to draw, but not what the ward actually repels specifically. My plan was to have the encyclopedia say exactly what each ward repels and how long it takes to draw.

Regarding you not knowing the proper ward at the proper time early in the game, this is something I've heard from other people, and it seems to be due to Elbereth being so ingrained in everyone's head as an omnipresent strategy. Yeah, you might have to take a different tactic since you don't have a free way to scare off the monster. A system that makes sure all low level characters have an available way to scare off arbitrary monsters is basically just Elbereth. And there are certainly use cases for wards later in the game - pentagrams and hexagrams are useful in Gehennom against demon gating, and Luxidream pointed out that heptagrams could be used on Astral to repulse the angels there.

The plan for the interface was that E brings up a menu of all known wards and an option to engrave text (a : Pentagram, b : Heptagram, - : write text) without actually engraving anything. Selecting any of those options would mean your character starts to try to engrave, possibly angering altar gods, but cancelling out of the menu wouldn't do that. So the list of known wards could be viewed in the E menu without consequence. --Phol ende wodan (talk) 18:23, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

I personally like this idea and would like to see it in vanilla. Elbereth strategies are so easy that they border on cheesy, and properly implemented wards could work much better. --Red kangaroo (talk)