Chances of getting -Pois from spider corpses are 90%, which is pretty high. You also have First Aid (buffed after 1.1.1) and prayers. And the options of keeping your distance and attacking poisoning monsters with missiles or wands... or simply fleeing and returning when you can better handle the situation, which is a very important skill in this game ;)

Having an early-game way to deal with poison is good idea.

But I'm strongly opposed for Guth'Alak to sell anything for gold pieces. Breaks impression.
And this is of course not a bug.

I can handle spiders easily but how you handle spider in your stomach when he did not granted poison resistance yet ?
Thanks for hint about FA skill It seems like it's fairly good solution... honestly I did not know about it :)
Funny that I've beaten game few times and already had 2 ultra victories without even knowing that First Aid is not passive skill...

I got to say, there is some sense in this.

Poison is not really balanced over the course of the game. For instance, if you careful, you can survive sickness with fragile characters (by backtracking to towns or so) while poison gives you limited time and is often an unavoidable death. I'll list some things that come to mind.

1. Prayers will heal the char but not remove the poisoning. You either have two prayers or you die.
2. First Aid is garbage on low levels.
3. Poison does not dilute over time and is not affected by First Aid invocations. You get, say, 3 points of damage every 5 turns. You are stuck with, the PC does not build temporary resistance. A lot of games have poison to stop working at 1 HP (although this overlaps with Sickness), I don't see anything wrong with it in ADOM.
4. Poison damage from early monsters is in strong contradiction with early HP. A single spider can dish out several max HP worth of damage through several prayers.
5. Poison stacks -- get into a tight spot and you can wave goodbye to the char. It would be nice to have extra stacks to work with lowered efficiency.
6. Pit vipers are completely out of balance in the early game. You get fall damage, then get surrounded leaving you with no escape root whatsoever.

I wouldn't say we need to significantly decrease difficulty. But some things can be done IMHO.

I think a potion of cure poison or two could be added to the "adventurer's supplies" shop in Terinyo.

What shop, you say? The one I think it would be good to add, as commented here: http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread...244#post104244

We should create separete RFE's about that.

I am little against adventurer's shop but I think Guth'Alak (druid are herb / plant specialists) for exchange of some services (quest) or druid related items he could give 1 random herb from list below:

- alarunia antidote
- pepper pettal
- curaria mancox

That will give Guth'Alak more important role in game and will increase slightly survivability in very early game...

BTW Kraf Niest is a DOCTOR so why he cant have small drugstore and sell random potions for 1000 gp one ?

7. Dark elven priestess/princess can summon suddeny s**load of tarantullas/ large spiders which can surround pc in seconds and beacouse of point 4,5 that yo've mentioned PC have no chance to escape from permadeath if he have no teleportation / fireball wand or any way to get rid of poison...

I think there should be a lot more of long lasting (thousands of turns) statuses. For example broken / disabled limbs preventing the use of one arm, reducing carrying capacity and melee combat, wounded legs reducing speed and causing fumbling, burns reducing appearance like scars etc.

Now poison and disease (and others like deafness, the very very rare mute) are just tens of turns, mute is longer but so rare you kind of never see it. Blindness at least can last longer.

Would make the game more interesting and challenging.

- please leave
if you want to make adom so much harder and masochistic then create your own thread and see how many votes you will get ... your post adds nothing to topic and discussion...

Nah, i'll stick around and see how many NO-votes your "suggestions" get.

I don't really have a good feeling on this one. I agree with _Ln_ that pit vipers are quite problematic very early in the game, and are one of the few ways that can result in an unavoidable death. Poison in general, I find less of an issue. Treatment with First Aid is pretty good, especially if you boost the skill early. It's enough to survive some not-too-nasty poison effects, or give you enough time to run to Jharod if you're close.

I think JellySlayer has the right take on it -- poison is an issue, but not much of an issue. If there's a *guaranteed* from of poison resistance available early on, that turns poison into just an annoyance -- something that has to be managed before you get back on track. If the player is having a bad day, poison should be able to kill you, or why even have it?

Oh come on if player will have a really bad day many things can kill him early like acid trap, stone block, fireball trap, door trap etc, vortex the list is endless and its very often unavoidable death for low level player...
But why surviving in adom early should be so much luck based ?
Every time when you start game you must have crossed fingers beacouse RNG can kill you so easily without giving a slight chance to prepare...
Eventually you pray to gods to survive instead of thinking and solve the problem logically...

If you guys think adding very overpriced shop with weak basic potions or making insane things for guth'alak for 1 random curative herb (which unindentified can cure you or not) will cause that game will be too easy then you must really enjoy dying in adom without reason...

That things that i suggested in 4160 can make beggining a little bit easier but still with that sources PC can die easily

In the middle and end game you should already have hundreds or thousands of alarunia herbs / ultra healing potions / scrools / spells of cure and slow poison and if you will gain poison resistance you will not need them at all...
Reason that I suggested making those herbs obtainable early on is to reduce (only very slightly) count of stupid deaths in adom.

I a not here to post suggestions that will make adom super easy and friendly... I think many here think that way.

There are very few unavoidable deaths in ADOM. If traps did not occur in levels, let's say, below DL:3, then there would be basically none aside from really pathological examples. Traps don't do that much damage, so surviving them is pretty easy once you gain a level or two.

Only if you play elves or do UD runs with weak characters all the time. With careful play, you should be able to get a significant majority of characters through the early game.

The "unbalanced" things complained about in the RFE and thread are what makes the early game exciting for me (and the late game boring, sorry to say.)

I like the game being unfair, because it makes plausible and increases the sense of achievement of surviving tough spots..

I was almost going to add an extra sentence to my post, saying that poison killed my many times in my early ADOM career (as in 15+ years ago), as did hunger, traps, etc. But then I learned how to handle them, and how to avoid things I wasn't ready for (and when to retreat!) Now it's rare for me to be killed by those things, thus I don't feel they're a problem, hence my negative reaction to this RFE overall.

I don't mind the idea of an overpriced shop though. That I could live with.