The Tavern

(inspired by the remove fighting skill thread)

I don't think the Fighting skill should be removed, since I don't think there's a way to remove it without messing up the game's math in a way that would be more trouble than it's worth. However, I also don't like how it's currently implemented, since at virtually any given point in the game the question how much XP to allocate to Fighting (a) has an objectively correct answer, yet (b) is completely uninteresting while (c) requiring information about the game's math inaccessible to the unspoiled player. Ditto for Spellcasting I guess.

To resolve the problem, I suggest the following:

• The player can never allocate XP to Fighting and Spellcasting.
• However, the skills still exist and are displayed (albeit in a different color I guess?) with the other skills.
• All non-magic skills crosstrain with Fighting.
• Similarly, all magic skills (including Evocations and Invocations) crosstrain with Spellcasting.
• Skill XP costs are increased across the board to compensate.

In addition to avoiding the problem above, I think this proposal has some advantages that make it independently attractive. Viz.,

• First, it captures the intuitive idea that Fighting and Spellcasting represent your general competence as a warrior or magic-user, which you increase as a side-effect of mastering specific ways of being a warrior or magic-user.
• Second, it may add interesting pressure to diversify, since the only way to max Fighting or Spellcasting would be to max the equivalent of 2.5 other skills. (This is especially true for Evocations and Invocations, which would then make it easier for non-casters to break into magic skills later in the game.)
• Lastly, it means that no XP is ever totally wasted. Even if you find an exceptional randart great mace and never use a shield again, the XP you sunk into Shields still lets you hit a bit harder and gives you a bit more health.

note: obviously this would impact pure casters more than other builds, since it would make it a lot less efficient for them to spend XP purely in order to get health. However, whether this would constitute an overall nerf, or even make pure casters more fragile on balance, is a more complicated question. Instead of Fighting, pure casters could train Dodging or Shields to help stay alive. Though this would obviously give them less HP than they'd get under the current system, this reduction would be at least somewhat compensated by additional EV or SH.

Hm, that's not a bad idea, I would put stealth in the "fighting" category, giving primary spellcasters another choice of something to train to gain hps for non weapon skills.

I think there's a few exceptions that would have to be handled, like draconians/felid/octopodes that can't train the armour skill, or ^Ru characters that sac skills. Trog would obviously have to not get upset with you for training evocations, even though it raised your spellcasting (Even though that would be a sneaky way for a troggie to get the ability to cast some spells in preparation for abandoning Trog.)

I'm sure there's other stuff that'd need to be handled too, but it's not a terrible idea.

Pure casters are already a suboptimal build, and between dodging and a weapon skill they should be able to have decent fighting. If they train a bit of shields and armor, that'd give them a pretty respectable fighting score, although obviously not as high as you can force it to be with the current manual training.

Overall, I like it. If the 40% crosstraining is making it too hard (or too easy) to get fighting/spellcasting up, it'd be easy to adjust via aptitudes.

Uninteresting is subjective, some people like decision making. You know you can use autotraining which does almost exactly what you suggest, right?

it's a complicated way of saying "drop everyone's fighting/spellcasting aptitudes by 2 and call it a day", all it does is make it require more exp to achieve the same level of fighting/spellcasting, but now characters have a substantial power level boost because if they invest 12 polearms and find Arga's that 12 polearms just becomes 8 free fighting

[citation needed]
It gets rid of a major newbie trap, though. Just dropping aptitudes wouldn't do that.

The argument for this is generally that picking up a weapon skill is cheap and allows you to conserve mana, preventing running out of mana and making a smoother run overall. Certainly you want to get your magic online first.

I think a lot of people have different definitions of "pure" caster, since I would consider someone who trains a bit of a weapon just to use on chaff while all scary things are still nuked with spells a pure caster.

see also: the numerous arguments I have gotten into over what defines a hybrid(many people seem to think only skald and warper type characters are 'hybrids' and stuff like hexers or necromancers/summoners who fight alongside their allies are not).
it's all a result of crawl not having a hard distinction between casting and non-casting characters outside of trog, so the lines between pure caster/hybrid/pure martial are usually pretty blurry

It seems to me that this would either mean a significant boost to low-magic char hp or a significant penalty to high-magic char hp, neither of which seems like a good outcome without a lot of other rebalancing.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

I think pure casters are the strongest option for some combos, certainly pre-Lair. It does however require the player to know in advance all the threats they are likely to face and to know how to deal with them. That requires a good deal of experience and careful play.

I think the cognitive load, and extra button-pressing, is so substantial that most people don't enjoy playing that way, which is why it is rarely seen.

As an eample I would offer up TeAE, although there are others. Due to the aptitudes and the spells available, just going straight down the path of Conj/Air is much stronger than say training some short-blades for a dagger of venom, or something. There are almost no enemies that can't be killed with a combination of static discharge/zap until Lair, and almost nothing in Lair that doesn't get murdered by lightning bolt. Eventually, either additional spells, or other types of damage, need to be added, for enemies like shock-serpents. That other damage doesn't necessarily need to be a weapon.

Fair enough. Still, some concrete numbers might help (all this is from the wiki and this spreadsheet). Let's say you're 14th level and spending XP to increase your defenses. (In both cases you're wearing leather with Dex 18).

--) current system: you train Fighting 12 and Dodging 8. This gives you 30.5 HP and 7 EV.
--) proposed system: you train Dodging 12, getting Fighting 8 for free via crosstraining. This gives you 20.5 HP and 10 EV.

I'm not saying this is a great trade, but I also don't know whether it's that significant a penalty all things considered. I also don't know whether on the proposed system going all in with Dodging would be the best use of the XP you'd otherwise have spent on Fighting--if not, the comparison above might not be the best comparison. (For one thing, this comparison assumes you're spending no XP whatsoever on stealth or weapon skills.) Again, though, the main thing is that I don't think it's at all obvious whether the proposal would really require much rebalancing.

okay, one more note: effectively, my proposal means that the player is always forced to allocate 30% (really, 2/7) of the total XP they spend on non-magic and magic skills to Fighting and Spellcasting, respectively. To the extent that it is ever a good idea to allocate more or less than that, this puts the player at a disadvantage.

I guess most people think it's usually a good idea for pure casters in particular to allocate a lot more of their total non-magic skill XP to Fighting; if so, they're put at a bigger disadvantage than other builds. The point I was reaching for in the above post was that this disadvantage might not be as big as it looks.

Don't worry about how many people think that. It isn't true, at least not until very late in the game.