Originally Posted by
JellySlayer
Bridge building, at least, has a practical, useful function. It's just that the implementation is terrible. By comparison metallurgy and woodcrafting arguably perform their functions perfectly well, it's just that those functions are worthless under pretty much every conceivable circumstance.
Jelly, you're not understanding this. Bridgebuilding is a solution to a problem that shouldn't really even exist. And even if it was perfectly implemented, there is almost always an easier way to do what it does. Solutions that have been proposed make it less bad, but they don't actually make it good. You're still going to need to lug around tools and logs, even if they are lighter and the process is more streamlined. And no matter how streamlined it is, building a bridge is never going to be easier than zapping a wand of cold.
"But you don't always have a wand when you need to cross rivers" you say. So, what makes this skill relevant are these contrived situations where you are stuck on one side of a river, *that no one has ever build a bridge across beforehand* (Bridgebuilding is such a useless skill even NPC's don't use it). And you know what rivers add to the game? Absolutely nothing. They are just an arbitrary design decision. TB even acknowledged this to some extent by reducing their number in relatively recent releases.
If you really get down to it, there's no reason Yriggs couldn't just drop a wand of cold instead of the manual. Arbitrary design decision.
And why do we want to cross the river instead of swimming anyway? Because ADOM has a bizarre system for handling the interaction between water and inventory, where getting something damp destroys or rusts items preternaturally fast. It is so bad that a *waterproof blanket* is considered a coveted possession. Again, arbitrary design decision.
Moreover, we are in a situation where instead of adding something fun to the game, we are serious considering wasting time fine tuning bridge building. Seriously? Can there ever be a lower priority than that?
If bridge building wasn't a legacy feature, no sane person would ever submit an RFE to implement rivers of corrosive water and add this skill for crossing them. And in any other game, old, deprecated features would be culled over time, rather than obsessively clung to because they were there from the beginning.