We could take things a step further by having self-learning AI. If a bear survives drinking poison, it'll avoid future bottles of poison. If a goblin waving a wand around survives it breaking in its hand, it tries zapping the next one it comes across.

I won't go into too much detail since I haven't been involved in development for some time now, but on armour and weapons balancing, that's a long standing problem we've been struggling with, with multiple ideas tossed around. If you're that well acquainted with the code, I recommend you take a look around the development forum.

On that note, I'm moving this thread.

You know what would be hilarious?

If the black market only spawned in black tiles.

You find it, enter, buy and leave, then it's gone to another unexplored tile.

It already does cap, if you or a monster get knocked into a wall there's a chance it'll incur damage.

Hum, I had an idea now that we've got crafting in-game. It'll be more of a stop-gap measure (it still doesn't address balancing) but it might be worth considering, to give plate mail a use if nothing else.

Building on Izzy's two material armours, how about a way to combine two "standard" armours for a hybrid one? One is used as the base, while the other is essentially scrapped for materials. For example, with a leather armour and a troll hide armour, one could end up with either:

1. A leather padded troll hide armour

In which the leather armour is scrapped, and adds a fraction of its weight and defense to the troll hide armour, becoming better than both, or:

2. A troll hide padded leather armour

In which the troll hide armour is scrapped and adds to the leather armour, which, while offering worse defense than the first option, also doesn't come with the stiffness of the troll hide armour and is still better than the original leather armour.

In similar vein we could end up with the likes of:

Steel plated leather armour
Adamantine-linked mithril chainmail
Ruby studded dragon-hide gauntlets

So on and so forth. Artifacts will naturally be exempt, which might tempt some players to forgo some named items in favour of such heavier equipment, preventing everyone ending up with the same end-game items.

Thoughts?

Weeell, there's a lot of different stone materials in IVAN right? Could do something with that. Or have the petrification affect everything in sight, so you could end up facing golem kobolds or something. I mean, I did find it hilarious that as a zombie you could change the material of your head, this might be a legitimate way of getting that more out there.

Nude pickles?! How shameless! Are you trying to turn this into a porn game?!

I shall give you my blessings for this endeavour.

Randomly remembered the spam monster idea, wondered which forum that was at and did a search.

[2009-11-22 23:53:32] <Somagu> I think a better idea would be a small chance for a "scroll of wishing" to be a unique scroll that summons a 4x4 tile spam unique
[2009-11-22 23:53:41] <Chao-Chao> XD
[2009-11-22 23:53:42] <Somagu> which shoots out bolts of lightning and spams your text bar
[2009-11-22 23:53:48] <Somagu> and when you kill it it drops a bunch of cans of spam
[2009-11-22 23:53:49] <Chao-Chao> dude
[2009-11-22 23:53:53] <Chao-Chao> spamming your text bar
[2009-11-22 23:53:55] <Chao-Chao> that's brilliant
[2009-11-22 23:54:17] <Chao-Chao> how will you rape spam though
[2009-11-22 23:54:34] <Somagu> good question

For context, search this forum.

Also, a more serious idea, based on the fact lanterns make surprisingly good shields.

Caged Star

A primal relic, very rare. Made of mythril, but since it only holds energy it's very light despite how big it is. Makes an excellent light source and shield. However, if it happens to break it will go supernova.

So this is very rare. Valpurium flaming sword rare. Every turn, it takes damage from within, which contributes to its eventual breaking. Don't go turning it into balsa or anything though, or it'll go off in your hands. When it breaks, first there'll be a crackle of energy (lightning explosion), followed by the cage itself bursting apart (striking explosion), then the supernova, a series of explosions from smallest to largest.

This has already been suggested.