Monster and item descriptions

How would you feel about adding descriptions for monsters and items?

For example, you would see a monster descrpition either while looking at and examining it, or if you use a stethoscope on it. Item descriptions could be accessed through inventory, so that pressing the item letter would open a description.

For monster descriptions, I imagine something like the "fiction" for floating eye or hedgehog on the wiki.

I would gladly try to write some of these, but any non-script programming is way beyond my reach.

Maybe you could gain access to these descriptions via a monster encyclopedia?

And to get access to the entry in the monster encyclopedia, you have to kill that monster first.

That kinda defeats the purpose of an encyclopedia, unless the encyclopedia entries remain constant over all games?

Could do, a bit like the hi-scores.

I do kinda like the idea of a constant encyclopedia that gets updated as you play, but the idea I was going for was like an actual book with entries on monsters, so you could learn about them early and prepare.
Of course you'd have to find (or purchase) one such encyclopedia, and then there could be multiple different types of varying content.

e.g. "Common or Garden Wildlife" could be a book with entries on bunnies, large hedgehogs and carnivorous plants, whereas "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" would take forever to read and only have information on eddys.

Having the books presented in such a way is also a good reason for having the monster's lore there.
Of course there should also be some monsters which do not have entries in any such encyclopedia (i.e. uniques or people) but could have mentions or hints to them.

I rather like this idea. Having said that, how are you going to present the information? The text box isn't really suitable.

Maybe if we could see how the stethoscope code works we could use its unique little box to display some longer text.

That.

Also, learning the lore from different books sounds nice, even though it could be annoying to lose all your monster knowledge after each death.

Heheheh, and that's what your memory is for!

We could also make it that learning about unknown monsters could be an outcome of sci-talks, and update the encyclopedia that way, as a supplement.

This gets me thinking about another thing: keeping a graphical, tabular record of things that have killed the player, as a supplement to the high score table.

This all reminds me of Moria, which I like.

In Moria the way it works is: you can query your knowledge of "humanoids" but the "necromancer" doesn't show up because you haven't encountered him.

After you see your first necromancer, you can then recall some basic details about him.. how quickly he moves, etc. But nothing about his fighting ability.

After you first battle - he casts a spell on you or hits you, then you gain knowledge of that specific attack and how much damage it can do.

So it's all very gradual. If you kill them before they can attack you then you never really learn what they're capable of. And then yeah it also tells you how many necromancers have ever killed you in the past and vice versa.