[crossfire] Polymorph etc

[Mark Wedel]

  The main reason polymorph was disabled is that it was a money abuse.

  You get a pile of junk and polymorph it into something else that was worth 
more money.  Various changes were put in place, so cursed items remained cursed, 
etc.  But then it became that polymorph became pretty useless because you'd just 
get complete crap.

  Now, given past discussions about money and wealth, perhaps there isn't much a 
reason to be concerned about that items become marginally more valuable.

  As far as monsters - because there is no global list of monsters by level, it 
would just find all the monsters and choose one randomly.  I think there was 
also the problem, at least related to monsters, that you'd zap that tough 
monster that is suppose to protect that super good treasure into some wimp you 
easily kill.

  If polymorph is redone, I'd suggest these changes:

1) Make up treasure lists (at least for monsters) in what things turn into. 
Thus, you could have a polymorph_monster_low (level 1-5), medium (5-10), etc. 
In that way, you'd get something different, but it wouldn't be really easy.

  As an aside, polymorph never worked with multipart monsters (either to/from) - 
would probably make sense to fix that.

  However, some flag would need to be added to say this monster can't be 
polymorphed, so you can't polymorph the super tough custom monsters into 
something else (maybe check the level of the wand/rod, and it can only polymorph 
things of lower level?)

2) For players, I don't think we can/should mess with the skills, as it gets 
tricky to set those back properly.  It'd be fairly annoying to get a skill 
scroll of sorcery, but already having the skill, you toss it.  But then you get 
polymorphed, and lose that skill, since it was a starting skill?  Better to say 
that mentally, you have/know all the same stuff.

  I think you could change the race of a character - you could look at the 
archetype and stat bonuses and give the player new stat bonuses.

3) For objects, the old code would transform a weapon to a weapon, shield to 
shield, etc.  The problem again was that there was no list, so it would just 
find all the armors in the archetypes and choose one randomly (thus, artifact 
weapons were much more likely to show up than you'd see in a map).

  What I'd suggest is use the treasurelist for the general store when 
transforming these objects.  So that food may turn into a sword - it is 
polymorph after all.  Have some objects just go away (evaporate).  Some chance 
of a monster being created.

  Sure, the person may make some money off the deal, but this would probably be 
one of the less abusive ways.  Perhaps limit the number of objects the wand will 
do on any space, so you can't pile 400 things on one space hoping for that one 
object - if it only did say 5 objects/space, given the value of the wand itself, 
might not be a money maker.  Rods of polymorph should probably be strictly 
prohibited.