Okay, I don't know why anyone would downvote this idea. It makes sense, it's not intrusive, and it would be helpful. Also, why would you down vote without at least explaining why?

Probably because there is no good reason why.

Look, we've got to get away from this irrational fear of giving the player information that would de-mystify the game. Smithing isn't somehow more fun because you don't know the failure chance. It doesn't even make sense that the pc would have no idea what their chance of success would be if they were competent at smithing.

You know why the game doesn't explicitly display success chances like this? *Because the way they are determined may not make any sense at all*. Not showing them just means everyone will give the mechanics the benefit of the doubt. It's an easy out, and if people never know how they work, flaws will never be detected, and they will never need to be balanced.

It's the opposite of good design.

EDIT: And what's really hilarious is that metallurgy is so useless that literally just about any features you added to it would make it better than it is. But even in that situation, we are so afraid of change, we don't want anything done. I guess the mindset is that what makes ADOM the game we love is skills that do nothing.

Don't see why one would vote againts as well. Metalurgy is currently completely useless. It needs not just a buff it needs an actual function in game.
I didn't saw any proposals for metalurgy function here then current. +New players find it useful for sure.

I voted against, simply because I think that it would honestly be better just to remove metallurgy from the game entirely. Even with the changes presented here... I'd still never use the skill. I'm sure there are changes that could be made that would make it moderately useful, but does the game really need two skills to do smithing? Have the smithing skill (or something like appraisal) tell you what metals things are made of it you really want to keep that effect in the game.

I voted in favor though I agree with JellySlayer that without a vast improvement and some miraculous balancing, the skill would remain useless and thus should be removed.
Many skills in the game feel like they were added just for the sake of diversity, without an actual useful function considering the rest of the gaming mechanics.
I'd put metallurgy in the same bag with bridge building, woodcraft, appraisal and haggling.

On the other hand I now believe that no skills will ever be removed from the game, no matter their uselessness as perceived by the players.
I feel like stuff like this is deliberately kept in the game to increase apparent complexity.
It lures new players into thinking those skills serve an actual function and they commit precious points to them, only to grow in experience and realize how useless they really are.
Kind of backwards logic.

I'd rather the useless skill were useful, but there is some argument to be made for *some* things being useless in a game that's about learning the systems.
One of the reasons some really bad Magic cards exist is because players recognize fairly quickly that those cards are bad, and learning something about deckbuilding and not including those cards.

"Appraisal" and "Bridge Building" concern me more because Appraisal really seems useful (I can at least understand why I might not care about woodcraft or haggling), and "Bridge Building" is a quest reward, so it seems like it REALLY should be useful.

Bridge building, IMHO, is fixable. This has been discussed in other threads, so I don't really want to get into it again, but I think with a couple of fairly straightforward changes, it could at least be passably functional. Woodcraft is definitely in the same category as metallurgy--it's arguably worse, IMHO--and should probably be removed/rolled into existing skills.

With minor tweaks, I think Haggling and Appraisal could be decent enough. For Appraisal, I'd have it just identify items directly--not a lot, maybe 10-20% of items at 100 skill, but even that I think would be enough that people would consider it pretty useful. Haggling... just make it that failures don't always result in a price increase, especially one that's much bigger than you're likely to be able to haggle down.

There's also Law, which has some problems as well, though that skill is probably much more useful for new players than experienced players tend to give it credit for, IMHO.

Woodcraft is fixable, Blasp dropped an awesome comment on possible improvements for it...
Metalurgy is definetly harder to improve.

I don't disagree with that.

I think the problem, though, is that the current approach to design is never to remove anything from the game.

Look at the topic about bridge building. People just won't stand for having useless skills purged.

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.

Bridge building has nice, unique and interesting function. Just due to implementation it doesn't have much use in game (ThE CReAtOr, will it ever be fixed or it will be doomed eternally to be the worst way to cross water?).

Metallurgy doesn't. Kinda agree with JellySlayer & Blasp, this skill would still stay mostly useless even if this change is implemented and having two skills for smithing doesn't make much sense. I'm still for it. It's better than nothing.

P.S. Unfortunately I doubt metallurgy will be removed or will be made at least slightly more useful :(

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.

EDIT: Sorry, double post.

I have no problem with rivers. I like having environmental challenges that can't just be overcome by brute force, and, if anything, wish there were more things like that. A river is a more interesting challenge than most lesser vaults.

Constructed bridges have one major advantage over ice bridges, namely that they're indestructible. For a river you only have to cross once or twice, it's not a big deal, but if there's a river, say, in the early CoC, then you might have to cross it a dozen times with a full inventory. Much more annoying with an ice bridge. Granted there's other ways to cross rivers, but each method has its own disadvantages.

But that's not why bridgebuilding is in the game. It's in as a kitchen sink feature, as a type of addition that people will look at and say "Hey, this game has everything, you can even build bridges." I suspect that at no point did TB actually think that building bridges would be fun per se, just that people would be impressed by its inclusion.

It's the same story for corrosive water, it's the game telling you "Look how realistic I am! Water RUSTS things! Look!" The problem is that if water effects were more subtle (and less annoying), people might disregard them, and that 'feature', and all the time that was put into implementing it, would be overlooked. So, instead, the game overcompensates and beats you over the head with hyperrealism. Again, this wasn't included to be fun, it was implemented to get the player's attention and supposedly impress them with the amount of detail in the game.

And bridge building isn't brute force? You are cutting trees and hauling logs around. That doesn't require much finesse.

By "brute force" I mean "fighting".

Water is... kind of underpowered compared to real life. Yeah, it's not going to rust things as fast as in ADOM, but you don't have to worry about items floating away or sinking, or your potions getting contaminated, or your food getting ruined, or your leather getting moldy or getting hypothermia... or drowning pretty much immediately because you're trying to swim in platemail armor while holding a tower shield and a 60 kg lead mace.

Those would be, very obviously, terrible features. What's your argument here? That it could be even worse? We're supposed to just be glad that we get really annoying inventory destruction?

I don't get the "hyperrealism" thing; water isn't even at the level of realism--nor are most of the inventory damage mechanisms, really. Inventory damage in general is a weak effect, and water is certainly the type of inventory damage that the player has the most control over and can deal with most easily (and, for that matter, water damage only effects a few classes of items so it's not ruinous even if it does hit you).

This is drifting pretty far off topic. We can discuss this in PM or another thread if you want.

We can use Metallurgy for my long-life dream:
The ability to use "unaligned" ingots to improve items.

0 Metallurgy - can't figure how to do it (as the game works right now).
X Metallurgy - can mix two materials to improve an item: higher chance for "close" metals (iron -- mithril, mithril -- adamantium...), lower chance for "different" metals (iron -- eternium)
Low-metal ingot - high-metal item -- lower chance; high-metal ingot - low-metal item -- higher chance.

Everyone's happy, orcs get a minor buff.

That's quite unobvious use for matallurgy it. In real life it would be smithing again. But this would work better then OP.

This is *exactly* on topic. What I am discussing gets to the very heart of the issue. This topic is focused on metallurgy, but I am generalizing the discussion to deal with *why* skills like metallurgy are such an issue. The point is that one arbitrary design decision leads to anther, which in turn eventually leads to pointless kitchen sink skills like metallurgy/bridgebuilding.