All the fun comes from item identification, but it's scary so i never do it

Recently i’ve been playing a lot of brogue, which is a roguelike quite similar to rogue but with an extra b. It does away with a lot of the extra stuff that the big roguelikes have added over the years, bringing the gameplay much more in line with rogue itself, and then adds a lot of niceties like pretty lighting, tooltips, and mouse control. It’s a really good game and you should go and play it.

There are many reasons why i like roguelikes. One of them is that they are turn based, so i can stop playing at any time without it causing any issues for the gameplay. Another is that the random levels mean that even though i’m terrible at video games i don’t need to get bored doing the same thing over and over again. But the number one cool thing is that the items are also randomised.

It works like this: when i go into the dungeon, i pick up a scroll, but all i know about the scroll is that it is entitled “flin nurt pusnidge”. I pick up another scroll, and it is entitled “flurxsnarg flem”. I pick up a third scroll, and it is also entitled “flin nurt pusnidge”. Meanwhile, i’ve picked up a turquoise potion, a violet potion, a pink potion, and a scarlet potion. What do i know about these items? Well, i have three scrolls in total with two distinct titles, which tells me that two of them will do the same thing, and the other will do something different. And i have four different colours of potions, so i know that they will do four different things. Such is the logic of roguelikes.

But what will they do? That’s the fun of it—the only way to know what a scroll will do is to read it, and the only way to know what a potion will do is to drink it or throw it. The examples i gave above are real examples from the game i have open right now, so allow me to systematically go through and see what happens:

I read the scroll entitled “flin nurt pusnidge” and a ring of whiteness shoots out from where i’m standing. The message log reads: “the scroll emits a piercing shriek that echoes through the dungeon! (It must have been a scroll of aggravate monsters.)”. Uh oh, something wicked this way comes. A shame i have two of them!

Let’s continue and read the scroll entitled “flurxsnarg flem”: “The fabric of space ripples, and monsters appear! (It must have been a scroll of summon monsters.)”. My character is surrounded by two monkeys and a jackal. Worst of all, the monkey immediately steals my violet potion! I chase after him and retrieve the potion in a sadly violent manner.

Next, i drink the turquoise potion: “You heal completely and your maximum health increases by 33%. (It must have been a potion of life.)”. That is a nice result! I’ve got no complaints about that.

I’m going to check my violet potion by throwing it: “The flask shatters and violet liquid splashes harmlessly on the ground.” It looks like this one has no effect when thrown, so i’ve wasted it by doing that.

What about the pink potion? I throw it across the room: “The flask shatters and a deadly purple cloud billows out! (It must have been a potion of caustic gas.)”. Well it’s lucky i didn’t drink that one! I quickly run away from the spreading cloud of gas, so that i can try out my final potion.

I decide to drink this one: “A comforting breeze envelopes you, and you no longer fear fire. (It must have been a potion of fire immunity.)”. There is no fire anywhere here, so it’s not particularly useful at the moment. But it’s nice to know what it is in the future, and at least it wasn’t a potion of incineration.

Hopefully this gives you an idea of how item identification works. You have to try out the scrolls or potions and, if the result is unique to one item, the game tells you what it is. In the case of the violet potion, throwing it didn’t do anything, so i still don’t know what it is.

I like that a lot. But the scenario above also explains what i like less about this system, which is that i was able to try out a bunch of scrolls and potions one after the other in a safe environment. There’s no risk there. And if there’s no risk, i feel like i might have well have been told what the potions did to begin with, because ultimately i’ve just lost a fire resistance potion and a violet potion that probably did something good.

For item identification to be really meaningful, i think that it needs to be something that is sort of necessary to do in risky situations. It’s like grinding: some people might take the time to do it, but it’s never really what a game designer wants you to be doing; games like brogue implement hunger metres and similar mechanisms to force you to keep moving. Why is hoarding scrolls and potions until it’s peaceful and then trying them all out considered to be an okay strategy that it’s not worth trying to discourage? Brogue has scrolls of identify which are fairly common, but i think that this is kind of a cop-out: it’d be better to get rid of this scroll and make the identification process better.

I admit, for a long time i didn’t even find a quiet place to sit and use my potions and scrolls; i would simply hoard them and never use them, scared that one of them would be something bad. That was because i had forgotten the golden rule of roguelikes: dying is fun. There’s nothing like accidentally drinking a potion of incineration and setting yourself on fire, rushing through the nearest door to try and find some water, and blowing yourself to smithereens as your burning body comes into contact with the explosive gas that was filling that room. Remember that dying is fun, but how can we make it feel a little less arbitrary?

Speaking of arbitrariness, i’m really not convinced by the distinction between scrolls and potions. I suppose that some things seem to make more sense coming from a scroll or a potion, but what doesn’t make sense to me is that scrolls are single use. I don’t get why magic mapping is a scroll but detect magic is a potion, or discord is a scroll but confusion is a potion, or why teleportation is a scroll, but levitation is a potion. If i were designing a roguelike (who knows? Maybe i am) i would have only one kind of item, and it would be potions because they can be thrown as well as quaffed.

What kind of potions should we have? Some should have totally devastating effects, because those are fun to use. However, it’s not fun to have to use a potion and then immediately die. If a potion has a bad effect, there should be a variety of ways to deal with it. Potions that are somewhat neutral and that can be used in different contexts in clever ways are the best kind.

Thinking about this reminded me of the monty hall problem, where we must find a prize behind one of three doors by picking at random. After picking a door, one of the two remaining doors is opened revealing that there is no prize, and we are given the chance to change our choice to the one remaining door. Now imagine that we know that a potion is going to have one of three effects: for example it could be a potion of strength, a potion of levitation, or a potion of incineration. We throw the potion and nothing happens. This tells us that it cannot be a potion of incineration, because throwing this potion would have caused a fire. Alternatively, we could have chosen to try out the potion by drinking it, knowing that there is a sixty percent chance that it is going to have a positive effect, and only a thirty percent chance that it will set us on fire. But by drinking it, we are guaranteed to end up knowing what the potion will be.

So now we have a choice: do we choose to throw the potion, potentially losing out on a strength buff? Or do we choose to drink the potion, knowing that it could cause us damage?

This system appears to encourage more strategic decisions over just quaffing all potions and hoping for the best. However, it comes with a significant drawback: a lot more potions will be able to be identified purely by process of elimination, because once we have identified the potions of strength and of levitation, we know that the remaining potion will be a potion of incineration. Although all identification systems have this problem, when the number of possibilities is higher, it takes a longer time to reach that last option. If all potions can only be one of three things, a third of the potions can be automatically identified.

We can of course bring this number down by increasing the number of possibilities for what the potion could be. The question is, what is the happy medium between knowing what any potion is without having to try it, and having to try every potion except for the very last one? I suppose the only way to know is to build a game.

All identification systems seem to rely on the assumption that having once learnt what a potion does, the character will be able to successfully identify it every time in the future as well. This obviously has the practical benefit that over time the player can more confidently drink potions without having to perform a risk-benefit calculus before every sip, but it also doesn’t necessarily feel realistic. Or maybe i just have terrible memory in real life.

Would a system where the player couldn’t distinguish potions after drinking them even be fun? Let’s imagine that instead of every potion having a unique colour, as tends to be the case in roguelikes, we have our groups of three potions all being the same colour. It could be that we are told up front: purple potions are either potions of strength, of levitation, or of incineration. In that case, we ultimately have a sort of automatically identified system for a series of items which could randomly do one of three things. That seems too risky; if i needed to make an escape by levitation across some water, checking my inventory and realising that my only hope is pinned on hoping that my potion is a potion of levitation, it feels like bad luck, but still fair if it turns out to be a potion of strength or incineration. But if i know that it has one of those three effects and then i suddenly combust, i think i would feel a little cheated. It’s like taking the risk of drinking from one of two bottles, one containing water and the other sulphuric acid: there i am weighing up the benefits of drinking water against the drawbacks of drinking acid; but if the contents of my bottle could be either water or acid every time i take a drink, i would quickly stop taking drinks.

The other way i can see that working is if we are showing probability bars, and the more that you use one kind of potion, the more likely you are to correctly recognise it. At first, a potion has a third chance of being each of the three options, but each time it turns out that the potion is, say, a strength potion, the probability that the player knows that it really is a strength potion increases. It would then be a forty percent chance that it is a strength potion and a sixty percent chance that it is not, and for the other two potions, a twenty percent chance that it is a strength potion, and a forty percent chance that it is either one of them.

Writing this down, i’m not entirely sure (a) whether this would actually work; (b) whether the interface would be simple and understandable enough; and (c) how, after drinking a potion one time, it would actually differ in practice from the monty hall approach described above. It feels that this is likely to be a dead end. So it seems like that monty hall approach might have the most chance of actually being fun. The exact number of potions to group together is still waiting for the jury’s verdict, but i would guess somewhere between three and six.

To conclude, there is a very fine line between a system where identification is totally obscure and simply discourages people from taking risks, and a system where you may as well have revealed what the item is to begin with. We want to try and create the possibility of as many exciting and surprising and funny situations as possible, while still letting the player feel like they are thinking about things for themselves. And that’s really hard!