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Interestingly, you can replace 1 and 2 with "Having strategic items in your inventory places you at a disadvantage because you can carry fewer tactical items," and apply this to books. It's not quite as true because books have a very slight tactical value (memorizing/forgetting spells on t...

I finally got around to playing with the new skill system. Here's my feedback: 1. Auto mode does a bad job of leveling skills proportional to their use (which seems to be the main goal of the mode). This is mostly due to the differences in how skills are triggered and used - attack spells will usual...

You just described how extra lives are crutch for bad (or lazy) play...yet you are surprised that so many people think they are a crutch for bad play? Lazy/risky play isn't necessarily bad play, especially when you're playing a felid. The ability to take more risks means you can make faster progres...

I'm really surprised to find that so many people hate Felids' multiple lives, and think that they're uninteresting or a crutch for bad players. Having multiple lives changes everything. I don't play felids like a character with a single life that gets an extra chances if I screw up. I play them know...

Forked from the cross-school spellcasting discussion here: https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=444. A quick summary is that most late game casters tend to look very similar because there are a set of useful utility spells that are always worth getting. The problem extends to midg...

I'm going to make a separate topic about removing the charms school, since I feel like there's a lot of discussion to be had exclusive to that, and there's a lot of potential in the idea.

It's true, spell slot systems don't solve all of the problems I've mentioned. A 2 slot penalty for deflect missiles isn't going to prevent anyone from taking it. Making spells more dependent on power helps, but it's also possible that people will just grind the relevant school if a set of spells is ...

(in response to galefury's post) Having slot cost depend on a value that changes over time (and is unrelated to spells learned) seems like a bad idea, since spell slots consumed would also change over time. It'd be very bad if someone gives themselves 8 free slots for haste (allowing for penalty), o...

1. A thought I've had - not sure if its worth making a new topic over, and I'm too lazy to go and check the source code. Average Fighting skill gain is proportional to damage done, right? I've suspected that it's not, because my two-handed wielding characters have tended to be low on Fighting skill,...

Cybermg: I like the analysis, but I've seen similar discussions before: nothing will happen if we don't actually try to go for a solution. So let's do that. In my opinion, the restriction of spell slots is simplest, and I'll think about this. I want a system where: (a) the order in which you learn ...

There are a few directions here that I think people have agreed are not great for the game. I don't support these things either: -Making the spell schools more similar to each other, so that a single school (or two) provides all of the tools that a caster will need. -Penalizing cross school casting ...

I think this problem can be solved. Make it impossible to learn spells from a school if you have a difference of (10-Spell Level) between it and its opposing school and remove crosstrain penalties a bit. I imagine this would force people to alternate polarized elements and give you the usual tradeo...

There's no reason that targeted rage has to work on yourself. You can have a flavorful reason for this: "Your growing rage prevents you from finishing the spell"

Looking back at this topic after the while since I've posted it, I've seen that some of these issues have been addressed by making spell effectiveness more dependent on spell power, or simply by straight up nerfing the worst offenders. Summon butterflies is probably the best example, and mephitic cl...

I've always wondered why the queen bee is such a pushover. To even get that far, you need to be able to deal with probably 5-6 bees at once. The queen bee is equal to what, about 2 bees? There's never going to be a time when the queen bee provides extra challenge. I'm not sure if making the queen be...

whoops, I keep accidentally clicking "Thanks" instead of quote. Not that I don't think yours is a good post though... There would have to be steps taken so that a demonspawn with horns doesn't double ponderize his gloves, put on a new pair of gloves, double ponderize his boots, and then pu...

Downside - It removes some of the choice between having to wear ponderous items and good randarts. The optimal strategy would be to concentrate your ponderousness on as few items as possible (you could wear singly ponderized items in the meantime while waiting out the delay). By the endgame, nearly ...

To expand my chunk merging suggestion a little more with some cases I didn't consider: -Using simulacrum. I could see the spell presenting you with a selection of chunks to animate from your inventory (enter selects previously animated chunk type). This wouldn't be much more work than wielding a chu...

What about making cloud size proportional to spell power? It need not max out at the current 9 squares. You could change it to range from say, targeted square+2 (randomly selected neighbors) to targeted square + 5. A downside to this I can see is that it'd be hard to tell what monsters are hit by cl...

Making the potions unstable still might not balance things, as there tend to be a lot of corpses in the areas where the spell tends to be useful. What about making the conversion success rate for fulsome distillation proportional to spell power? Overall you would net fewer potions (this could be adj...

I never liked the view of evil as 'opposite of good' , i.e. the same as TSO but likes the opposite things. A 'devil' kind of a god should be manipulative, and dealing with the devil should be dangerous but offer great power. I might be straying a bit here, but I like the idea of sacrificing oneself...

I think partial effects and repeated casting both address different problems, and they aren't necessarily exclusive. Partial effects remove the current binaryness of hexes, and I suppose paves the way to buffing hexes against resistant enemies, since characters might now be able to land at least par...

There are some things I don't like about ponderous by piety. * For an early Chei worshipper, how many ponderous items to wear is an interesting choice. You might not want to go full blown if you're still just struggling to stay alive. * Deciding between artifacts or chei boosts and when exactly to p...

Stealth is already a powerful skill, to the point where nearly every character except for trolls or heavy armor users should dabble in it. The effect is very long term and subtle, but being able to pick your battles the way stealth lets you makes a huge difference.

Similar to zasvid's point, here's a scenario that I think shows why making HP harder to train doesn't fix the grinding problem Imagine that you left things as they are, except that you halved the training speed of fighting. How would this affect the play of casters? Certainly, they would focus a bit...

You know, you can actually get fighting up without grinding with spammals (such as, you know, by using fighting when it makes sense, rather than spamming spells just cuz you can). The fact some people grind out fighting with spammals (and then complain about it) is a problem with them moreso than w...

With all of that said, I'm not so sure I really want things to change. Training fighting to the obligatory low teens is actually a fairly interesting mini-game that involves a lot of interesting decisions and risks. Giving casters the low teens number automatically feels too much like giving them a ...

Here's my analysis of fighting after putting a lot of thought into the matter. -The skill is "too good" relative to other skills. Some proof of this is that if people were given arbitrary control over their skill points distribution, the optimal strategy would be to put a decent amount of ...

To give a few more details on this, I imagine that the color coded counts of each chunk type would appear next the chunk stack entry in your inventory: f - 5 chunks of flesh ( 1 / 2 / 2 ) Then, on inspecting the item, you can see the exact identities of the chunks: f - 5 chunks of flesh A piece of m...

There actually would be some downsides to the suggested decrease in mana pool method. Say you are a pure caster buffing up before taking on something really hard, like a pan/hell lord. You'll probably be channeling/crystal balling your mana back up to max before the fight. Somebody like cerebov doe...

Oh, you meant that the player would not have the option of casting them and letting them time out, as normal? That wasn't clear from the link, so I didn't know about that wrinkle in the idea. Okay, in that case, how do you train the relevant spell skills? If activating a charm is an irrevocable tra...

Inspired by the discussion near the end of the "What in crawl isn't fun" thread. The ideas follow in increasing order of radicalness. For me, one of the most annoying aspects of the food system is chunk management. Even though they eventually rot away, you've still got multiple chunks from...

(@acvar) You're claiming that the lack of players regularly starving is evidence of the food system's worthlessness. Players aren't starving because they obey the constraints imposed by the food system. We train spellcasting to reduce hunger rates, boost int at level up, wear int items, and moderate...

Seconding the dislike for Monstrous. I have no doubt that it lends itself to a valid playstyle that can be just as powerful as the others. It's just that most people have a general idea of the character they'd like to play when they pick their starting build (even when picking DS), and monstrous is ...

Tell you what. You two can get back to me on how successful you are clearing orc packs, ogres, and/or uniques on D3 after you waste your limited supply of consumable darts on routine D1 monsters, and have to bootstrap whatever weapon skill you settle on from scratch. If optimal play with 0-aptitude...

How do you propose warpers survive until they do find their first weapon, then? They have no offensive abilities in their starting spellbook, and darts mulch. Forcing them to reload until a weapon generates in their starting room is bad design. They'll lose their weapon skill with their weapon, whi...

I found an error in the spreadsheet. In row 85 where the Weapon Type Minimum Delay is computed, you should be rounding down from half, instead of rounding up (demon whips with 11 base delay get 5 delay at the speed cap, for example). Replacing the INT with CEILING should work edit: And Berserk in tr...

A humanoid picking up a wand of polymorph other is much worse than a jelly scooping up a small pile of maginally useful consumables. I'd much rather have the former happen, as I could just teleport away or otherwise kill it quickly since I'm likely to be much, much stronger than it by the time I'm ...

Regarding stashes, I've taken to just leaving extra stuff in neat piles arbitrarily placed in the dungeon. It's sort of bullshit though that a 1/1000 unlucky jelly spawn can destroy everything, so maybe disallowing additional jelly spawns in the main dungeon (spawns when you first enter a level are ...

What about a 'Cane' as a one handed weak staff weapon for mages? I like the mental image of an old spellcaster out of mana bashing rodents with his cane. This, plus adding lots of staff specific egos to the school would make staves a whole lot more interesting and appealing as a weapon class. Start...

Speaking of ammo enchantment, I've always thought that it's pretty opaque that you need to wield ammo to do it, when it's not available as a default option under the (w) menu.

Not exactly like scroll of paper, since they aren't inherently useless, and not exactly unfun, but why do cFly amulets exist? There's the extremely hypothetical situation where you accidentally drank a potion of levitation and for some reason want to escape downstairs instead of up, or immediately w...

I think it'd make sense that paralyze just stops movement and melee. It's true that this effect is biased against melee characters (although a frail magic character that can't move is a sitting duck), but maybe heavy armors can have an additional MR bonus based on their weight to help offset this. ...

I think that if players/monsters should get Paralyzed, they should get Unstunned once they get hit. Very Similar to Ensorcelled Hibernation. This will turn the spell into a means of preventing Players/Monsters from running away, while still allowing the player to react. (I mean you took away the Po...

I find the first dungeon level always extremely boring. I think it should be removed, making the game a little more difficult from the beginning (with a little boost in item found in the first floor, or whatever). Agreed on the boredom. I think the main culprit here is that there are almost no mean...

It's worth noting that at least your combat skills train against summoned monsters, so your character's potentially getting something out of it.

The spell casting calculations are already complicated enough. So why not add in more to the Confusion! Maybe after hitting Skill level 10 in a spell school it adds on an automatic Double to spell power/success and Halfs the Power/Success in the other school. It should also Decrease the Players Apt...

You'd also have to increase the options of all schools so they don't have 90% redundant crap. Would you really prepare more than those three earth spells, even if you were unable to prepare spells from any other school at all? Damage is pretty much all earth does, and if you want to do something el...

This is an observation about the different schools in general, and about schools with opposing elements. For most mid to end game casters, it's almost a no-brainer to pick up the same core of utility spells if you find them, including swiftness, repel missiles, sublimation, regeneration, abjuration,...

For me, mid to late game inventory management can be pretty annoying. I tend to keep my inventory relatively full (just because I can), and it's annoying to have to constantly pick up and drop items so that autoexplore isn't directed to them. I don't like having to filter through every useless wand ...

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