Looking forward to an epic flamewar from this RFE...

I personally don't think this is a bad idea in principle. Lots of games have inventories that work this way and it isn't a problem, and plenty of other games do it ADOM's way and that's fine. If anything, I'd just go with tweaking the burden system--I don't think you need both size and weight for items to worry about. I think this could be the kind of RFE that would need an awful lot of fine-tuning though, because it would be pretty easy to have it that some common items end up being totally useless (rocks, say).

In a game with a lot of loot like ADOM, I like the current system. In Crawl, you don't have this problem because 80% of armor/weapons are identical and there's no reason to pick it up, and special items are few and rare. In TOME, you have a ton of gear generation similar to ADOM, and they just use the caveat that you have a special magical chest that holds everything (actually, I like TOME's system the best of any roguelike, but IDing is pretty critical to ADOM).

So anyway, I don't really like the idea of limiting backpack by some number of items or by volume. Things I might be able to get behind (one or some or all):
- Not scaling carry weight with strength linearly
- Nerfing Strength of Atlas
- A more severe weight/item limit, but an early-game quest for a never-ending backpack which has a use restriction like you can only use it with no enemies visible or something

I'm not sure that the gains are worth fiddling with something that already more-or-less works well and could end up getting broken or resulting in something worse if it gets tinkered with. As has already been acknowledged, changing one thing in a game's eco-system causes ripple effects, you end up having to change a whole bunch of other things to accommodate it. I'm not saying it could not be done though so I won't vote against.

Personally I think inventory management is one of the hardest things to make fun, and oftentimes is tacked on for realisms' sake. JRPG's don't worry themselves so much with realism and often have infinite inventories and any item drops are vacuumed up after an encounter so you don't have to loot. Not realistic at all, but you end up foregoing the worry of trying to make a potentially frustrating or boring impediment to gameplay into a fun mini-game, by just cutting it out entirely. (Does adom-deluxe have a game-mode with infinite inventory? It could be interesting to see how such a game mode feels).

The only weaknesses I'd correct in the current system involve better interface and quality-of-life features like a decent filter/search function and more logical item stacking.

This is horrible, horrible idea. I would be more in favour of removing weight restrictions from backpack altogether and restrict inventory items only.

This is a totally rational idea, my gut feeling is just that either weight or volume is enough, I think with both things get a little too complicated.

I do think you are on the right track with the idea that inventory size needs to be more restricted, though. I think there is a lot of redundancy that could be reduced that would also help with that (very minor differences in item quality, that sort of thing).

Ixi, if you want to discuss these kinds of stuff, private message me. I've already got a build where items have graphical (albeit crude ASCII) representations in inventory to account for volume (it's like a much less attractive diablo inventory system). I could use someone to bounce ideas off of.

EDIT: Like auric said, I'm not actually downvoting this, I'm just sort of uncertain about whether it would work. Please do keep the ideas coming, though.

Good idea, maybe introduce some kind of "bulk" -measure to items (castle of the winds -style) or just simply nerf carrying related stuff, like STR and Strenght of Atlas. The carrying items could be actually made better in this situation, because some people want to hoard, no matter what.

Imo it's just rediculous to look at the victory posts etc, people carrying hundreds of scrolls, potions, missiles - to no use what so ever or 0,1% chance of use (polymorph, dipping etc.). This only adds tedium to inventory management and slows general gameplay and makes the gameplay a worse experience alltogether.

I can understand why people don't like these kind of ideas, but i personally like these (i want the game to be harder, way harder and "more realistic" (in a certain way, of course magic etc. allowed)).

It doesn't scale linearly:(. Improving St from 35 to 40 is 1500 stones bonus, while moving from 5 to 10 is 200. Scaling the weight limit linearly would actually be a huge improvement.

Overall, no limit on item numbers/volume is a fundamental feature. So I am going to prepare my flamethrower for the upcoming discussion.

I just think there is a fine line between 'increasing the gameplay dimensions by forcing you to think about what to leave and what to take' and 'annoying the f*** out of you, stressing you out for 10 minutes whilst you constantly pick up and drop things as you change your mind ten times'.

It just depends on backpack / item sizes. Having tons of golds and rings must be fine. Having year's supply of stomafillia should work as well. Carrying around 20 books should work but is likely to fill all backpack up. But I don't see how one could carry 3 moloch armors, 22 plate/scale mails with different affixes and 2-3 types of every weapon available in game. And f course about 1k arrows, 1k scrolls, 1k potions...

The volume restriction I'd like to see - one that allows to carry all really important stuff required to stay alive with you without knowing about volume at all. And once insane grinding starts - no more space in your pockets.

I will say this: It is a good idea but only if it entails considerable changes to several other mechanisms in the game.
As a result it would require a major overhaul of the engine in several areas.

Now, you cite item destruction as the main reason for carrying lots of items - the chance to destroy a specific item is indeed diluted when there are many more items to choose from.
I disagree with this approach. I don't carry many items due to item destruction rate, I prefer to mitigate that with blankets and rings of ice/fire.
Instead I carry them because they *might* be useful.
That's the whole problem with items. There are sooo many combinations, prefixes, suffixes, unidentified potions, scrolls, books, wands, amulets, rings...
The entire item system would have to be thoroughly overhauled to accommodate item carrying restrictions that you propose.
You'd need to increase the drop ratio or scrolls of ID to give players sufficient means to sift treasure from junk.
Without that, players would start stashing unided items that weigh them down and return later to identify the heap and maybe find something nice/useful/potentially useful there.
Results? Lots of backtracking, slowing down of gameplay, hoarding of items in dungeons for later use and scumming for scrolls of id.
Deep, dead-end dungeons would have to be done twice or three times since you continuously gather items only to have to drop them every now and then to return later because you ran out of scrolls of id.
Holy water would suddenly become insufficient because half of the time you'd be using it to uncurse items you wanted to equip-id or bless another stack of 9 scrolls of id.

You get where all this is going?
Implementing what you have suggested would enforce the need to implement a lot of minor and some major tweaks to the game.
Virtually limitless carrying capacity, irrespective of item size/shape allowed adom to develop a very complex system of items that vary only a tad little bit between each other.
Because there are so many items around, you inevitably fill your inventory and so it has to be expandable in the most streamlined way possible - by carrying capacity that solely depends of weight, not volume.
In the end you'd have to slice item diversity by 75% (can't imagine people agreeing to this) or force players to be bogged down with item management for the rest of the game.
A very poor feature if you ask me.

Voting no.

I agree. It would be decent to buff early-game carrying capacity and significantly nerf late-game carrying capacity.

Strength of Atlas needs a really huge nerf, because this spell is stupidly powerful. Suddenly your 10 points of Mana are as good 30 points of Strength, come on top of your Strength and last hundreds of turns for miniscule PP cost.

But a restriction on the number of items - no from me.

I'm not saying that it's a simple change. Probably the complex one ever suggested. And I totally understand this.

However wouldn't game be better with size limit and proper changes to item destruction, item generation and item identification mechanics. I think this is possible even without reducing variety.

I don't think it's possible and I don't think size limit is a good thing either since we have some really huge items out there and fitting all that to work would be a nightmare.

I would vote yes to nerf strength of atlas

Would vote yes to nerfing or completely removing strength of atlas and possibly also to reducing carrying capacity based on St. Voted no to this change because I would just find forced excessive and complicated inventory management incredibly annoying.

While I don't hate the principle, I don't think this would be a good idea for ADOM, given the HUGE amount of loot generated... trying to micromange it all and dropping it and sorting through items on the ground would be a frustrating waste of time.

We need a town portal spell. We need a way to warp back to town so that items can be sold instead of piling up.

Conversely, you could just allow the pc to send their items back at any time instead of warping themselves. They could be deposited in a stash that was accessible from any town. Here you are trading access to the item (you can't get to it until you leave the dungeon) for the convenience of lightening your backpack without just dropping excess stuff everywhere.

There's no reason not to implement something like this. There's no reason not to have a waypoint system in general. The issues being addressed with this RFE really shows how archaic the game design is currently.

I don't care how much people want to say that it's cool so many items have obscure uses, the outcome is that you are lugging around an inventory of *hundreds* of items by endgame. That's not sane by anyone's reckoning.

It would be better if you described how exactly new system would work. Because marking areas which need change and calling the thing complex does not explain anything.

To my mind there are two questions to consider:

1) How much more fun would the game be with this change?
Not much, if at all.

2) How much work would it take to get this implemented.
Huge amounts.

I get that it would make more sense if bulk was accounted for as well as weight. But this is a computer game, and an old one with very complex code. This isn't going to make ADOM much more enjoyable, it isn't going to make the interface much easier to use, and it isn't going to attract a new audience. It's just not a sensible undertaking; you could write half a new game by the time you get all this hammered out and coded.

Definitive NO to nerfing SoA. Leave my favorite spell alone.