loot.md

One thing I'm struggling with is figuring out what stuff is for. It seems like you should find a decent amount of treasure -- money and items -- as you explore the dungeon. It's a drag if all you do is grind and kill.

But I'm having trouble coming up with enough useful stuff, or to make money enough worth having. The player wants:

• A good set of equipment.
• A continuous supply of frequently used consumables like healing potions.
• A stock of rarer consumables used for things like boss fights and getting out of trouble.

Other games balance this out much better. Now that I think about it, Diablo doesn't drop that much loot, compared to, say, Angband. Instead, I think it relies more on the narrative as a reward to pull players through the grind.

Angband drops a ton of loot, but:

• Cash is worth accumulating throughout most of the game because it's a ticket for very expensive but rare black market items like Boots of Speed.

• At least in the early game and for some classes, you need to spend money on food and light sources.

• There's a good bit of useful stuff to have on hand -- spell books, identification, restore life levels, word of recall, etc.

• Equipment can be damaged.

• Needing to detect equipment to see if it's good changes the play experience. In Hauberk right now, if a piece of equipment drops that isn't better than what you already have, you know it's totally useless to you instantly, even before picking it up.

  I always found churning through detection annoying in Angband, but maybe there's something to it.

• Bows needs arrows. Crossbows need bolts.

I have some ideas, but nothing is really there yet:

• My hope was that the crucible would ensure equipment is never useless. Even a piece of equipment worse than what you have can be used as a roll of the dice to maybe generate something better if you bother to pick it up and bring it to the town.

  I kind of tabled this when I added cash and stores, but maybe I should have stuck with it.

• Not having items stack makes it a lot more annoying to have a good stock of consumables.

• Gems, runes, and other things that can be used as recipe ingredients to turn equipment into something useful would be good.

• Simply more helpful utility consumables. Detect monsters. Wands.

• Giving monsters more interesting moves and conditions will give us more items to protect against. Confusion -> cure confusion. Drain exp -> restore life levels, etc.

• Acid and other attacks could weaken equipment. They could spend money to repair it, or replace it if it gets totally destroyed. This should help suck money out of the economy.

• Prices are totally untuned right now.

• Adding some random generation to the stores, especially a chance to sell really nice things, would make them worth visiting. Though, in general, I'd like to avoid a necessary chore to check every store when you visit the town. Feels like busy work.

• Could re-introduce food items for regeneration instead of using the explore mechanic.

• More monster attacks that reduce inventory: acid melts, theft, etc.

• More weaker items that can be used, but are mostly worth coalescing in recipes.

• Items that are only useful as recipe ingredients. Stacking would make this a lot less of a chore. Having your inventory half full of black feathers is annoying.

• Bad and worthless items.

• More useful consumables around detection. Detect monsters, mapping, etc.

OK, given all that, I think the biggest negative right now is the lack of item stacking, so I'll start with that.