Acquirement Reform
Scrolls of acquirement are spoilery items. It benefits the player know internal game logic in order to make a decision on which choice is the most likely to give a desirable acquirement. This logic isn't something we'd like to display in-game. While some acquirement logic could be simplified to reduce the amount of spoilers, it's probably not feasible to fully do this as long as acquirement uses the player character's data to affect item generation.
This page proposes to mostly remove acquirement spoilers by having the scroll present a set of fully generated items as choices instead of asking for a choice of item categories. There are various choices we need to make in implementing this approach, as outlined below. Balance will be an important consideration, since we're letting players easily avoid bad acquirement items (RIP scrolls of disappointment).
This is a basic first proposal, but see the sections below that outline some alternate choices we could make for the implementation.
Reading an acquirement scroll opens a popup menu presenting 5 generated items:
- It always generates food and gold acquirement item.
- For the remaining three items, it chooses three categories without replacement from the six available.
- Each randomly chosen category has an equal chance of being chosen.
- The menu has a toggle between selection and inspection, to allow inspection of generated items.
- Because of the toggle, it would be good to confirm any selection in selection mode.
- The menu is uncancelable to prevent problems with unrand item generation.
There are currently 8 acquirement categories: weapon, armour, jewellery, book, staff, evocable, food, and gold. Presenting 8 items is bad for UI and especially for balance. We'd like to avoid having to make the scroll rarer for balance reasons. Having the scroll randomly choose a limited set of categories for which to generate items is an approach that addresses both problems.
It's probably best to always give a food acquirement choice for species that can eat. Food acquirement would always be available to help characters facing starvation. Gold is likewise a universal item for all character builds and would be reasonable to guarantee. We probably don't want to present more than five items in the menu, so that would leave 3 randomly chosen categories. If we don't remove any of the existing categories and guarantee food and gold, choosing from 6 categories without replacement gives each category a 50% chance of occurring in an acquirement.
It's possible to choose the item categories with replacement, meaning a specific category can be chosen multiple time. We'd make sure to guarantee distinct item results for any repeated category. This approach has the benefit of reducing the strength of acquirement, since one category is generally always significantly more valuable than the others but is less likely to be offered.. It also introduces some fun instances where a player is deciding between two good items in the category they want most. However this would re-introduce some of the "scroll of disappointment" frustration.
Additionally we could consider having non-uniform weights for the categories, thus allowing something like weapon acquirement to be more frequent. This doesn't play as well with sampling with replacement, since it would increase the number of repeated categories relative to uniform weights, but would work fine for sampling without replacement.
We could remove Evocations acquirement, since this includes a bunch of powerful consumables. Consumable acquirement is harder to balance relative to equipment acquirement, since gaining multiple items of a specific type of equipment is generally not useful but gaining multiple consumable items of a specific type is useful.
Staff acquirement is a category that could potentially be folded into weapon acquirement. Offering a stave versus a ranged/melee would need to consider weapon skill training relative to spell school training.
Some acquirement categories are especially good, for instance weapon if the player doesn't yet have a strong melee weapon. We have the option to tweak the rules for these categories to make them less desirable. I'm not proposing any such changes right now, but if we want to bring the value of the different categories closer together, it may be necessary to make changes to what they produce on-average.