> You can't read a potion or quaff a scroll, so allocating two separate keys to those actions is redundant. I'm a longtime NetHack player who switched to Crawl

> You can't read a potion or quaff a scroll, so allocating two separate keys to those actions is redundant. I'm a longtime NetHack player who switched to Crawl, and I've been thinking a lot about the differences between the two games. One neat NetHack feature is that objects often do have unexpected uses (as well as uses in combination with one another), and at least in a few cases you can make these uses by applying an unusual action to an object. The first example that comes to mind is that when polymorphed into a different monster, you may be able to eat things that your human form couldn't, sometimes with especially desirable (or undesirable) effects. NetHack players probably appreciate on the whole that the game doesn't actively suggest this possibility to them and that they have to think of it or try it to see what will happen. Another example is that there are a couple of things that can be used as weapons to good effect that are not obviously weapons, so the ability to wield arbitrary objects is important there. On the other hand, NetHack uses these possibilities as a source of humor and challenge to the player (partly to create a slightly more open-world feeling, typified by the saying that "the dev team thinks of everything", and partly to increase the amount of knowledge that a player can master and bring to bear on the game). Crawl has a very different philosophy and the actions available to the player are, compared to NetHack, more straightforward and obvious in their implications.