YANI - Fix wishing



Having played Nethack and followed this group for 5 years or so, I've
noticed a few recurring complaints:
- "all ascended characters look the same"
- "there are lots of useless artifacts"
- "there are lots of useless DSMs"
- "the Ascension Kit is too standardised and lacks variety"
- "the endgame is boring"
- etc

It strikes me that a lot of these problems could be alleviated by
rethinking how the wishing system works. At the moment the only risk
if you wish for "+3 blessed fixed speed boots" is that you may end up
with +0 blessed fixed speed boots. Big deal.

In order to add challenge and variety to the game, I suggest that we
consider moving to a Crawl-style wishing system, where you wish for a
category of item rather than a specific item - i.e. wish for "armour"
instead of speed boots.

What you get is down to the wishing algorithm. This would need to be
pretty carefully thought out, but some suggestions would be:
- quality of item received increases with happiness of deity
- quality of item received increases with luck
- quality of item received increases with dungeon depth
- certain items can be wished for and are guaranteed (I'm thinking of
candles)
- preference for items not already encountered / identified

I suppose that in an ideal world the definition of "quality" above
needs to take into account race, role, alignment, existing equipment
and unbroken conducts, amongst other things.

This should help to alleviated a lot of the problems outlined above.

This may necessitate some changes to the deities - it may help things
if they handed out something other than weapons and the odd spellbook.

Simon

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