User talk:Testbutt/Removables

Additional suggestions

• Zruties.
• Wood and mountain nymphs.
• The spells of detect food, cure blindness, and invisibility. Also the scroll of food detection.
• Water trolls.
• Wargs.
• Any 3 (but not all 4) from the set of panther, lynx, tiger, jaguar.
• Possibly lemures (veteran players would probably notice them missing on Juiblex I guess)
• Titanotheres, baluchitheria.
• Steam vortices.
• 2/3 centaurs, but not all 3.
• Violet fungus.
• Either hill or stone giants, but not both.
• Straw golems.
• Sandestins.
• Either horned or barbed devils, but not both.
• Possibly jellyfish.

Noting from IRC my opinion that I don't believe things on this list should be mercilessly slashed from the game; rather, identifying the forgettable stuff presents an opportunity to change it to be better differentiated and more interesting.

--Phol ende wodan (talk) 17:59, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Opinions

I'm not at all fond of the "deletion first" approach in general, much less in this particular case of considering what to do with seemingly superfluous elements of the game. I personally think it's a better show of creativity to rework or rearrange, rather than remove outright (in terms of what to do first anyway), so keep that grain of salt in mind when reading - I'm perfectly fine with finding common ground on things that could use improvement, not unlike Phol above.

With all that said, I shall proceed in no particular order:

Misc.

• "The "sucker" penalty for not wearing armor over your shirt."

It's literally the same rationale as the Hawaiian shirt. I've lived in NY for years, plenty of that kinda thing in Manhattan. It - and, well, inclusion of stuff like the Tourist to begin with - provides a refreshingly silly sort of modern touch on the usual setting.

• Extinction counters.

I get that it doesn't serve a purpose to you, but conduct support is a p. big driver of the game's replayability, and it doesn't make much sense to remove for me in any aspect.

• Secret doors. (proof of concept: UnNetHack. Players certainly notice secret doors when it's frustrating, but when secret doors are removed, they just play normally without comment.)

Ambivalent at best, I probably wouldn't miss it and wisdom is fairly easy to train anyway, but I'm not in any particular hurry to phase it out, either. Sure it makes sense with the inclusion of Croesus and vaults, but beyond that if they go, they go.

• Tin openers.

...? It's the quickest way to open a tin in the game and saves several possibly vital turns you don't want to spend using a spare dagger to pry open. I don't think I'd enjoy dying to the lid on my homemade nurse being stuck. Narrow perhaps, maybe could bit a bit faster, but worth considering.

• Score, especially wrt tournaments

See comment about extinction counters - low score/high score runs and other scoring-based challenges are still a valid form of play.

Monsters

• zruties

I'd prefer the Zouthern Animals approach at least one variant has taken - I also wish zruties had more distinguishing features beyond that, but it's a start regardless.

• gray elf, green elf, brown elf, orange elf... consolidate 'em all!

Again, why consolidate when you could differentiate? This is a recurring problem with the page overall and the methodology on display, I feel.

• Water trolls.

Improvable by making them spawn more often and/or (running theme here) giving them appropriate additional properties.

• Possibly jellyfish, piranhas.

The real issue is that both are among the weaker types of sea monsters: by the time they spawn, they're not usually a threat to you - so make them a threat. (EvilHack places some in the early Mines, 3.7 plans to give piranhas more speed and a second bite attack...)

• Sandestins.

Not seeing a real reason behind this one. Sandestins favor nasties and only appear in Gehennom - they work to keep the player sufficiently challenged and on their toes, imo.

• Wargs

Again, not much reason. Not to say they can't be improved from "wolves but bigger and tougher" (a good suggestion was made wrt orcs, and again, EvilHack), but I can't say they have no impact - especially not when dealing with werewolves.

• Possibly lemures (veteran players would probably notice them missing on Juiblex I guess)

Funnily enough, this would make the most sense to remove outright, and even then I would think making them far more powerful goes a long way, on top of a few other ideas. (Perhaps make it a member of the ghost monster class...?)

• Violet fungus.

Hallucination source that isn't yellow mold or human, and another food source for vegetarians and horses.

• Steam vortices

They make as much sense logically as any other vortex, and are basically the opposite number to ice vortexes.

• Titanotheres, baluchitheria.

Both are fine as midgame quadrupeds, though they could potentially use a buff.

• Either horned or barbed devils, but not both.

...Or just keep both and (further) differentiate and distinguish them as above.

• Either hill or stone giants, but not both.

See above - both types have different AC and damage, and thus present at least somewhat different challenges.

Other "redundacies"

• Morning stars, ranseurs, guisarmes, etc - any weapon that's effectively identical to other weapons. (proof of concept: Fourk, and others)

Morning stars by themselves are probably salvageable with a bit of imaginative power. The rest is an artifact of the D&D influence - early/advanced D&D had a thing for polearms (why is anyone's guess). I wouldn't object to those going or at least being retooled/somewhat slimmed down, preferably the latter.

• The spells of detect food, cure blindness, and invisibility. Also the scroll of food detection.

...? RNG can be stingy about food so it's worth having just for that (ditto food detection) and the fact people can and often do misjudge the exact age of corpses they haven't paid attention to makes the food appraisal intrinsic nice to have.

Cure blindness... yeah, that's unfortunately pretty niche, and unlike cure sickness it can get completely superceded by unihorns or like, a well-timed blindfolding.

Invisibility... I feel similarly, the wand and blessed potions completely superceding that spell is... eh. Honestly, my issue there is one of having permanent invisibility so easily gained (not like it's ultra-vital, see invisible is everywhere on late-game enemies), but that would be more easily solved by making a few of the other sources (particularly blessed potions and wands) temporary sources as well, albeit stronger ones. That would potentially give the spell more purchase in comparison, at least.

• things that spawn on the ground with a less than 0.5% chance, such as CoMR

What.

The cloak of magic resistance is already heavily RNG reliant for one to spawn anywhere to begin with, removing randomly generated ones does nothing to solve that problem - and I'm p. sure that'd apply to all the other items under this banner too.

• only a few price tiers / variations of gems are needed.

Price identifying begs to differ. As for gems, see my comment regarding score - that and the entire point plot-wise of entering the dungeon is to amass loot.

• candy bars and fortune cookies both serve as traps for unwary vegans; fortune cookies are mildly interesting.

Both are interesting enough to warrant eating and serve a role in food strategy. Fortune cookies can be #read if the player doesn't want to eat them, and both those and candy bars can just be used as pet fodder.

• Remove three of apples, bananas, melons, oranges

...so vegans having food options is suddenly a problem?

• chests and boxes

As with so many others, (further) differentiate and distinguish them. Perhaps make boxes somewhat less durable in return for being lighter to haul, for example?

Anyway, take this as you will. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 03:22, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

"This page seems to have put a few people up in arms. Note that I didn't say these features should be removed, only that they could be removed - and due to the low impact, few would notice the absence. Other options include: making it more reasonable (score), interesting (monster variants), or useful (tin openers). But getting defensive about game features, getting reactionary? Well that hardly helps anyone."

I literally included other options and reasonings for why at least some of those changes wouldn't have a low impact. My comments (because let's be real, it's me specifically you're referring to in spite of the coyness) aren't about defending features so much as criticizing the thought process behind calling them "low-impact" - and I made suggestions to the end of distinguishing the listed features and actually echoed similar sentiments to you in quite a few instances, so to be labeled "reactionary" seems especially dismissive. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 05:59, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Hi Umbire, let me chime in because I wanted to thank you for making this very good, detailed list. And like you, I don't get why you received such a dismissive reaction; that you didn't even receive the answer here in the talk section but had to find out that the "answer" to your post was sneakily added to the main article particularly baffles me. That's bad manners, in my eyes, talking about someone like that when one could be talking to them instead. Anyway, while I agree with most of the points of your list, I want to give an overview of the few where my opinion differs; everything I list here is just my personal opinion of course:

• Jellyfish and piranhas already serve a purpose, as they're kind of the "cannon fodder" of the semicolon class; who says every single member of a monster species has to pose a dire threat to the player? We already have giant and especially electric eels, which make players fear the ; glyph, so I'd say there's nothing wrong with also having a few less dangerous semicolons.

• Lemures are about the same: a low-threat (or potentially even zero-threat?) monster by the time it appears, to make the game a bit less stressful. Maybe they're a bit too similar to manes, but IMHO they don't need to be buffed to the point where the player has to be super careful around them.

• By all means, the polearms should remain because they provide variety :) Of course care should be taken that no two types of polearm are exactly identical, but otherwise they're fine.

• Price identification is IMHO a terrible idea to begin with and should just be removed completely (one of the few cases where I advocate a removal), because it's not only super tedious to have to price-ID stuff in every single game, but not doing it also makes the game significantly harder in an annoying way. I'd rather just have price ID be gone and instead provide more alternate methods of identifying items, which may well mean buffing the potency/frequency of identify scrolls, but making use-testing less punishing could also be a way. Anything where the best strategy isn't "drop item, note down price, #name item with said price, pick it back up, take a look at the spoiler page to figure out what it could be, rinse and repeat for the other 25 unidentified items you've accumulated" would be fine ;)

--Bluescreenofdeath (talk) 18:24, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

This page seemed kind of... destined? to be interpreted as "I think these things serve no value and should be removed from the game", even if that's not the intent. Calling it "Removables", and adding text to the effect of describing how certain specific items would be removed, will do that. It also doesn't help that the criteria for what a "removable" is, are fuzzier than anticipated. On the one hand you have Testbutt with "sufficiently rare random item drops are all removable", on the other you have Amy with "no polearms are removable so long as they all have slightly different damage stats".

Contributing my share of insufficiently differentiated stuff was fun, but now I'm not sure what the point of the whole thing is. --Phol ende wodan (talk) 19:07, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Wondering on some

Three thoughts:

• Why tin openers?
• The alternative to getting rid of Wargs is to enlarge them further and have orcs able to ride them.
• I definitely agree on the shirt thingy for T-shirts (with regard to the argument about "the messages are silly" or whatever, I don't know of any penalty for the alchemy smock...).

-Actual-nh (talk) 19:24, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

I do think there's a variant that special-cases Wargs to be rideable by orcs, which is neat. And you just never actually need a tin opener, the benefit it provides is incredibly narrow, etc. it could be more interesting if it had more uses, but in its current state... meh. Testbutt (talk) 20:42, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

A tin opener would be worthwhile if, say, a blessed one allowed you to not only open a blessed tin instantly, but be able to eat (a normal turn's worth of) it instantly as well. (Combat with Famine, anyone?) -Actual-nh (talk) 21:17, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

CoMR is not a removable

Hard disagree that no one would notice if the cloak of magic resistance was deleted from the game. Earlygame Wizards would definitely feel the loss, and it's a vital component of many ascension kits. Unless the standard here is extremely loose, like "new players who have never heard anything about NetHack would not notice this missing" (and in that case, what isn't removable?), this isn't an item that could be removed with no fuss. --Phol ende wodan (talk) 22:09, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

i don't think you read that entirely Testbutt (talk) 22:20, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

FWIW I found a randomly generated cloak of magic resistance on the floor once and certainly wouldn't want that random chance to be gone. What the game needs is more variety, not less; vanilla already gets dull and repetitive quickly enough and if we now start removing stuff... yawn! (just my opinion of course) --Bluescreenofdeath (talk) 08:20, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Having item probabilities differing more by level (say, by level difficulty) might help. -Actual-nh (talk) 17:18, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Score

Regarding score (including making it more interesting):

• It would make it more useful for AI research - and potentially more of interest in general - if some of the things currently added in only at game ending were available earlier, when possible (as some variety of "predicted score if ascended" in addition to "score so far", ideally). To prevent this from being an easy means of price identification without a shop, I'd only count identified items as having value.
• Score relative to turns (or realtime) could be an interesting goal. A plot of 3.6.# ascended scores vs turns/realtime could be useful to derive a baseline function.
• Beginner status - should that be removed?

-Actual-nh (talk) 17:18, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

BTW, I am guessing that wizards are different for the beginner cutoff as a joke on "wizard mode"? -Actual-nh (talk) 06:11, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Testbutt, others: How would you say to make score more reasonable/interesting? -Actual-nh (talk) 06:16, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Sam = Kni

• Knight starting inventory is focused on the steed, and though they get their own intrinsic speed at XL 7, a hasted horse is generally always faster. Samurai have a bit of food and intrinsic speed from the start, and so aren't reliant on a second monster that can be killed. I feel like that's a significant divergence right there.

• The STR/CON disparity - as pointed out in the Knight article, they're not guaranteed the high stat in either to the degree a Samurai is (there's a reason Sams are/were popular zen candidates).

• Starting ranged options - samurai have yumi and ya, knights have a very heavy lance.

• Code of conduct - Knight is advised against attacking fleeing/immobilized foes and overeating. Samurai, not so much - mostly focused on not attacking those who aren't already attacking you, e.g. attacking peacefuls. Discouraging poisoned weaponry is something they have in common though, lawful gods dislike that regardless - same with grave-digging and theft.

• There's a lot more but I'm just offering these as a start. Will admit to being fascinated by the "Gratuitous French" concept for the Knight. --Umbire the Phantom (talk) 15:57, 30 March 2021 (UTC)