Never spawn some spell books

[NightLizard]

I have an idea that could work while both keeping feelings and work whether you have "no selling" or not.

If a book that you cannot use would spawn, just generate its value in gold instead. However, I'm not sure gold contributes to the level feeling (maybe not?).

[bio_hazard]

I'm not 100% sure that useless books are a problem that needs to be solved, but here's an off-the-wall solution: allow books to morph into a scroll. It's probably still going to be useless but at least there's some potential utility, and maybe this could provide rare access to some class-specific spells. Just a thought.

And I'll just advocate again for level feelings. For me, the downside of potential frustration of not finding/finding a useless item due to pursuing a promising level feeling is outweighed by the added interest in something breaking up 98 levels of dive/detect/fight/runaway.

[Derakon]

To be clear, I'm not at this moment advocating for removing level feelings from the game altogether. They're an option, I'm saying you should turn the option off.

At least try it, and if you really miss them then you can turn it back on.

[Nick]

I'm still thinking what to do about spell books - none of the solutions we've come up with so far quite tick all the boxes.

[Derakon]

Anyway, would it make sense to change the valuation of the book as far as it affects level feelings on a per-class basis? That is, zero out the book's impact on level feelings if the player's class does not match the book. Would that address peoples' concerns here?

Of course the book would still potentially consume valuable "slots" in vaults, but my impression from conversations here is that that's less of a concern. Certainly most floor tiles in vaults are consumed by other "worthless" items, so losing a few more to books you can't use has a fairly minor marginal impact.

[Pete Mack]

Derakon--
There are far bigger problems in vaults than books taking up spaces. The biggest one is that *all* deep "excellent" boots have M10 or M9 speed.

[wobbly]

Have we considered that the number of books dropping might be excessive in the first place? On my runs the no. of dungeon books I found seemed about right. The number of book 1s I found seemed to be well over the amount I'd ever use.

[spara]

A random thought. How about a variant of the selling option that allows the player to convert found objects to their worth of gold in the dungeon?

[PowerWyrm]

Originally Posted by spara

A random thought. How about a variant of the selling option that allows the player to convert found objects to their worth of gold in the dungeon?

Good idea. Tales of Maj Eyal does that. When you leave a level, all items in your inventory that you marked as "junk" are converted into a small gold portion and deleted.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by spara

A random thought. How about a variant of the selling option that allows the player to convert found objects to their worth of gold in the dungeon?

ZAngband (and presumably its descendants) have a "Midas Touch" mutation that lets you convert items to gold. I forget exactly how it works though.

Balance would be a little tricky, as sellers don't sell everything they find that they don't keep. They only take up the most valuable things they can fit into their packs. So you'd have to get only a fraction of the value of the item to keep the player from getting too much money too easily. Figuring out what that fraction should be is where the trickiness is.