Why not just include the ability to build bridges in the woodcraft skill instead?

Because not all characters have woodcraft and as a whole, woodcraft is in my opinion too broad a skill to be something taught by the carpenter overnight, even if he has the prerequisite knowledge.
Additionally, my suggestion completely circumvents the limitation of skill level and training that would determine chance of success for something as situational as building a bridge section.
Knowing about trees and wood in general does not equal being able to construct a bridge from them.

So Yrrigs will teach woodcraft instead of bridge building. Solved.

Read my previous post first, where I explained why I don't think it's a good idea.

Trying to build bridges admittedly can be tedious compared to blasting with a frost bolt. But like woodcrafting, I don't think bridge building is something a carpenter can teach in a few hours. After all, we're talking about building them over wide bodies of water, raging rivers and lakes full of piranhas, unable to support the logs from the other side until the bridge is finished. Technically bridge building might be the most difficult thing you can do in Adom.

But yes, it does seem a bit useless considering wands of cold aren't that rare, and I usually ignore it completely even if I've done the carpenter quest. Maybe instead it could be made more useful? Hmm.. I might make another RFE about a location where it would be of use.

You can learn healing, herbalism, gardening, magic, a bunch of thief skills, another bunch of combat skills, swimming, etc in a short time, but not how to build a brigde?

Yes you can learn that, hence the idea of making it a learnable class power.
But bridge building is too narrow a specialty to warrant the existence of a separate skill devoted only to that task, while woodcraft is too broad in my opinion and doesn't fit into it.

However, most important of all, woodcraft would just be another skill to train to use effectively, just like BB is now.
My aim is to give a flat chance to build a bridge 3 out of 4 attempts without reliance on obscure skills.
It's not like we're constructing Golden Gate here.
It's not rocket science and I always felt that bridge building in adom was little more than simple wooden planks put together over a small body of water.
You don't need complex supports, spans, lines and hell knows what else to make it work.

I think the biggest problems with bridge building are:
-You can't build bridge planks in advance and have to carry around multiple 800s logs to build a bridge. This is really the killer. A typical river is 4 planks long, High Kings is 3 (and for whatever reason there's no forest on that side of the mountains!), and given construction failures, you're looking at maybe a dozen logs to build a short bridge.
-You can't train the skill at level up without carrying around a one-of-a-kind manual. If the manual is destroyed, too bad. Trolls, who start with the skill, can't train it.

I think a simple fix would be to allow you make planks for bridges in advance (which weigh, say, 200s each), and either remove the manual requirement entirely, or have Yriggs give/sell you a new manual if you lose your old one.

Rather than getting rid of the skill, wouldn't it be better to introduce a location or mechanic making it more useful? As of now it's much easier to just freeze the water or even drown your way through save for one place in the game and that disparity in the ways of dealing with bodies of water is what is the problem in my opinion, not the skill itself.

Agree with the last two posts. Or make BB a more solid option by having ice bridges thaw away automatically after a number of turns

Me too.
First of all bridge building shouldn't be so hard:
1. PC could make 200s bridge sections as suggested above.
2. Underground river levels could have some trees (this was suggested before as well in the separate RFE).

And nerf is required for ice bridges, e.g.:
1. Ice could be even thinner then now.
2. Ice should melt with the time especially in rivers.
3. Moving from water square to ice square isn't that easy task, probably it should be completly disabled or should be successful only in a small chance when PC has high dexterity and low weight.

Probably there could be another bridge building uses in game, e.g. location where PC can't swim, can't teleport, water refuses to freeze but PC has to cross the water. E.g. volcano location could have lava river.

A wooden brige on a lava river? No thanks ;)

:D :D :D
I would try to build one to see how it burns)))

Probably I need other example like recently suggested acid lake...

Ice bridges don't need nerfing. Standard bridges need to be less boooring to make.

I quite agree with Blasphemous. In general, ice OR wooden bridges are pretty useless. By midgame you almost 100% have a waterproof blanket, swimming is easily learnable to mitigate much of the drowning damage, plus many other ways to get water breathing: lucky corruption, helms (not uncommon by the time you reach TotHK for instance) or a single blessed ring of the fish which have relatively low DL. I never use even ice bridges except for maybe the very, very early game, before the inconvenience of making sure my weight is under 2000 stones is greater than the inconvenience of switching out all my rustable equipment. Even late game that inconvenience is totally gone because you'll have lots of spare potions of oil/oils of rust removal to rustproof things.

literally the only place where it's worth it to build bridges is for the TotHK. You use it one time then never touch it again, maybe even not that one time if you find a wand of cold because that's almost certainly more convenient.

I don't see how you can make BB a worthwhile skill without making water in general *much* more of an obstacle to the PC. As it is now, it's a one time gimmick that even then isn't useful in most playthroughs.

Agree but it's just yet another thing to balance. All choices (swimming, freezing, bridge building, teleportation) should have their own pros and cons and every of them should have place in game. Sadly for now most of the time teleportation or swimming is just the best and the easiest choice.

Oh good grief, bridgebuilding doesn't fit with woodcraft? You are making the bridge out of wood. You are crafting it from wood. *You are woodcrafting*. Wood. Crafting.

I don't even know what woodcraft does and I've been playing 15 years. We don't need either skill, to be honest.

Look, we are talking about spending all this time and energy to make bridge building viable. Bridge building is probably the most random skill I've encountered in any game I've ever played. Blas, I know you are going to disagree with this, but do you really think you would miss bridge building if it had never been implemented to begin with? Can you really imagine yourself starting a game of ADOM and saying "wait, something is missing here...I know what it is, I should be able to build a bridge!"

You're just hanging on to what's familiar, you aren't assessing the intrinsic value of anything here.

I didn't say it doesn't fit. I said BB is a narrow specialty while woodcraft is broader.

Woodcraft is in my opinion about simpler things made of wood - weapon handles, arrow shafts, maybe shields and staves.
On top of that it's dealing with logs as the source of wood for that plus general knowledge about forests.
Bridge building is a science of construction, it just so happens that the type of materials available is limited.

Nobody ever said bridges have to be built from wood; adom simply has abundance of trees and thus it's the obvious material.
But the bridge building itself is something entirely separate from woodcraft from a scientific point of view.

Woodcraft in Adom reduces the time required to cut trees. If it was about crafting wooden items, it still would be more about measuring and designing. Bridge building is about engineering - calculating dead, live and environmental loads, and how to keep your bridge standing even before it's finished. While I agree it's not rocket science, building bridges across lakes and rivers is a bit more complicated than laying down planks of wood.

The intrinsic value of bridge building is that it adds flavour to the game. It's a sort of kitchen sink, something you don't expect but which makes sense. Also, it's useful for characters that don't manage to get ice spells, and guarantees that every class can cross the piranha lake regardless of the quest they choose in Terinyo. Sure, if it hadn't been in the game I wouldn't miss it. But neither would I miss spellcasting, for I would have just thought it's a hack & slash game. Or artifacts, or Mana Temple. So I think appealing to what we wouldn't have missed is just idle speculation.

It's also no coincidence that the early quest rewards are Healing/BB and Frost spell/wand/Herbalism/Gardening, while the spellcasting classes that benefit the most from the Druid quest get healing at creation. If you need to get the healing skill, you might not see a wand of cold for a while.

Also, the classes and races aren't even supposed to be equally balanced (I think TB has commented on that before) so I assume the same applies to skills/spell use. The real problem is that ice spells (wands) are relatively easy to find even for non-spellcasters whereas developing the skill is much more costly and BB doesn't have that many uses. So it's not about BB being unbalanced compared to swimming/spells, but about it being underused. But I'm not sure if that's a problem.

To sum up the proposed alternatives:

1. Make the skill less costly to develop (original suggestion a zero cost)
1.1 possibly by combining it with woodcraft
(A problem with that: for a new player it would make it more difficult to figure out you can actually build bridges)
2. Make the skill easier to apply (can create bridge parts where the trees are)
(But you'd still need a skill check when you try to build the bridge)
3. Make it more useful since otherwise people will just use wands of cold etc.
(you could also make WoC a rare item)
4. Make cold spells less effective for crossing water

Roguelikes are usually all about figuring out difficult things. Also, it could be, you know, mentioned in the manual.

But I think the summary is all right, and some combination of several of the options is perhaps the best solution.