see invisible is dry

[jeremygurr]

I find the current "see-invisible" mechanic a bit weak. You can't see something. You put on a ring of see invisible. You take care of it. You swap off the see invisible ring. Over and over. No real decision being made. No significant trade off.

This is like many other things that vanilla crawl would just remove (cTele, clarity amulets). I think most of the time these things can be fixed.

So what can we do here? I think this should be similar to other resistances. No resistances should permanently make a player immune, they should just reduce the effect. Ideally, this would not be an absolute switch: either you can see it easily, or you can't see it at all. Instead it should be more like stealth. With higher degrees of see-invisibility, you have a better chance of revealing what's out there. Maybe it can be generalized into more of a "perceptive" or "sensitive" or "awareness" attribute. The more "aware" a player is, the more likely they are to detect invisible monsters. Ideally this property would be multi-purpose, and wouldn't just apply to invisible monsters. Not sure what else to do with it yet though.

[Sandman25DCSS]

Maybe it could also help with identifying actual spell set used by monsters. For example, wizard monster can have 5 different spell sets, the ring might remove some of them randomly for any given wizard.

[Sandman25DCSS]

Other random ideas:

1. See invisible is evocable and has duration. When it expires, monster is invisible again
2. See invisible causes contamination while there are invisible monsters in view so player should take it off if the monster is still alive and you are close to getting yellow contamination. Speaking about that, it would be nice to see numbers here like for Draining.
3. See invisible decreases all damage dealt by player by 50%. So sometimes it can make sense to remove the ring if you know where the monster is and suffer accuracy penalty instead of damage one

[jeremygurr]

Those are some good ideas. I'll have to think about this. On the one hand, making it evocable is fairly simple to do and understand, and provides a way to attach an additional cost. On the other, players will still swap it in when needed, and then back out, like ring of flight. Passives are nice because they can avoid the extra step, but they still will be swapped as needed.

I feel like another issue is bugging me here that prevents me from properly solving the original.

Maybe players shouldn't be able to change equipment mid battle. Except for weapons. They can only change armour, jewelry, etc. when things are peaceful.

[Sandman25DCSS]

Maybe players shouldn't be able to change equipment mid battle. Except for weapons. They can only change armour, jewelry, etc. when things are peaceful.

Please don't change it. If you played early versions of DCSS, you may know what item destruction is. It meant that player had to escape after meeting a monster with fire or cold attack to drop scrolls or potions on the ground. I wouldn't like the same happen in CA, activating quick mode to escape for equipping a ring of protection from fire would be awful.

[jeremygurr]

Fair point. Yes I do remember item destruction.