Should the scroll of delights be a tome instead?

[mciul]

I just tried out a quick game to see all of the new additions. It was fun! It seemed a little easy, though. I got the scroll of delights (and identified it), and managed to win the game without too much trouble. It was exciting, though.

Things I observed:

• Ment is a win-win option when you have the portal to Montenoir forming
• I think the scroll of delights came from the pile of body parts, though I'm not sure. I definitely didn't pickpocket anyone

What I was thinking is that the scroll of delights has a big effect not unlike some of the tomes. Should it perhaps be a tome?

• Tomes normally only show up in the arcane vault, so they're naturally very rare.
• There is precedent for people carrying tomes, since Nomos gives you the Tome of Law. Then again, I'm not sure you can ever pick up a tome yourself. What if Malygris sometimes carried a Tome of Delights, but you had to read it "over his shoulder" while he was sleeping or immobilized, without taking it? I dunno, maybe that's weird.
• On the other hand, an unidentified scroll of delights could be an... ahem... delightful surprise early in the game.

Either way, I wonder if it should be a little bit harder to win - like maybe you need to read it multiple times to finish forming the portal (like the tomb in the Mausoleum). That would be a pro-Tome argument, I think... although it could be a very, very long scroll that you can't finish reading in one turn.

[VictorGijsbers]

It definitely wasn't my intention that the scroll of afternoon delights could be found anywhere except in Malygris's inventory! I must have misjudged how scroll generation works, I'll look after it.

I think its effects are so overwhelming that we probably shouldn't have it lying around just anywhere.

If the scroll is too easy right now, we can simply change the number of turns it takes for the portasl to form. I believe I implemented five stages, with a 25% chance each turn of going to the next stage. That gives an average of 16 turns for the portal to form (though it can take as few as 4 turns or as many as, well, in theory infinitely many). We can just lower the probability to tweak the difficulty, e.g., bring it to 20%.

As for making it a tome, I think that if we want to have this scroll only in Malygris's inventory, to reward pickpocketing, a scroll makes more sense -- you can grab it (you can't grab tomes), and run away with it to read it in quiet.

[curiousdannii]

You can get any scroll from the pile of body parts. I'm not sure how hard it would be to special case it.

[VictorGijsbers]

That shouldn't be too hard (just a new adjective?), I'll look into it.

[mciul]

There is some code in the Alchemical Machine to make sure you don't get a copy of the Blessed Grenade. I might have already implemented an appropriate adjective for grenades that we could reuse. It might be extensible to scrolls. Also, maybe we should make sure you can't get the cranial grenade from the Alchemical Machine.

You know, there might be an adjective for weapons that belong to specific monsters - perhaps that could be applied to other things that they carry.

[VictorGijsbers]

I'm also making sure the cranial grenade doesn't come from the alchemical machine.

[mciul]

Would you be willing to add a test for that to the Blessed Grenade Test? It would give me a chance to see how working with the automated tests is for other people.

[VictorGijsbers]

Sure, let's reopen it.