Siegurt wrote:The description of a ring of slaying is:
[...]
I'm not sure how you would apply that to spells unless you deliberately misread it.
Fair enough. I am sure when I was a newbie I checked and was left unsure. Perhaps my issue was that when it says "ranged weapon" I thoguht that it wasn't including things like hexes but it may include things like stone arrow too. It may help to include "but not spells" or something similar.
Spells in general are effected by spellpower, but not all spells have a to-hit component (some always hit, for example magic dart and fireball) and of course there's a lot of spells that aren't attacks at all.
Of course. But for example in the "Spellcasting" section in the manual (section H) there's a nice explanation of "hunger", how it works and how to check the value for your spells, but it says nothing about "power". At best it says in the introduction that increasing the skill corresponding to a spell's school "will improve the casting chance and, in many cases, the effect as well". At the end there's a whole paragraph on the casting chance and how to improve it, but nothing about the effects.
So perhaps like for casting chance and hunger, there should be a paragraph explaining that a spell can have various levels of "power". That this can be check in the spell screen (like hunger). That it increases with skill and Int. And that it may affect things like: duration, damage, aim, or chances to overcome magic resistance. It doesn't have to explain the exact meaning for each spell: figuring out which applies to each spell is not too hard.
It would probably be good if attack spells that could miss had an accuracy bar that changed with training to go with the power/range/hunger/noise meters that already exist for attack spells. The problem is that what spellpower does for each spell is dependent on the spell itself, so you can't easily represent the effects of spellpower in a general way. This goes for your question about transmutation too, while the failure rate is always effected (and is obvious) a lot of transmutation spells don't have *any* effect for additional spellpower, but some do.
I am not proposing changes to the mechanics or to the user interface: just changes to the help pages and/or the manual.
Some things don't have a way to resist them, and some do, but don't have a good description that clues you in, for example the hornet's description reads [...] which clues you in that the hornet's paralysis is from poison, and maybe rP would be helpful against it.
It is not clear, however, from either the description of orc priests, or from the description of the smiting ability itself, that it's resistible at all.
And is the draining effect of some early monster defended against using rNeg or MR? There's many such cases.
Imho the best option would be to put an item in the spell's or ability's description that explains how it can be resisted, the same way that now monster's description explains any fire/cold/etc. damage that they may cause.
In reference to your "roll for half area damage" no, there's no such roll, nor is it implied anywhere in the documentation that there would be. (I realize that's a thing in D&D, but crawl isn't D&D nor is it intended to be reflective of those mechanics at all) Obviously the documentation can't list all the mechanics which *don't* exist in crawl, that would be silly.
Thanks for the explanation on the mechanics. Much appreciated.
My point here though was about the description page. For example there could be a mention in the "fireball" and "cloud" spells that the damage is unavoidable (although it can be lessened with rFire, etc.), the same way it says for "Magic dart" that it always hit. Similarly (imho) it should say for other conjuration spells that it may or may not hit and this depends on "power".
I mean, currently the "Fireball" description doesn't even say how big is the explotion (i.e. 3x3). This is all it says: "Hurls an explosive ball of fire".
An additional point I noticed: in the manual's section on "Attributes and Stats" (section C.) it doesn't say that Int affects a spell's power (but I think it does, right?).