direct damage and crawl magic costs


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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 07:12

direct damage and crawl magic costs

Recently in this forum, I've seen developers claim that about half the spells in crawl don't fit the crawl magic model at a basic level, producing perverse optimal play issues or general tedium. For weeks there's been constant talk about "charms/charms reform."

On the other hand, direct damage spells, the kind that are more generally accepted as conforming to the crawl spell model, have their own issues. The vast majority of these spells directly reproduce attack patterns available from weapons, especially the ones that you tend to see most in a standard 3 rune game. These spells also do the same kinds of things that evocable items do. From an interface and user experience perspective they are much worse than weapons. The high mp costs and variability of damage forces the player to pay attention to what particular spell he uses against what particular monster or face wasted mp issues, even though a typical list of direct damage spells one chooses from in these situations contains many spells that do the same things with minor variations in attack pattern (usually just range) and damage. The appearance of choice here is largely an illusion and hands control to the player that he does not need and, if he saw a good alternative, wouldn't want.

What would an alternative look like? I suggest a division of direct damage spells into two types according to attack pattern: Standard and special. A standard attack pattern is substantially the same as either throwing a projectile (which may be penetrating or exploding) or hitting something with a melee weapon. A special would be pretty much anything else, e.g. conjure flame, fire storm, freezing cloud, line of sight effects, etc. A standard spell comes from a staff* wielded by the caster and targets like a ranged or melee weapon. It doesn't cost mp, but you don't control the specific spell being cast -- this is randomized in a way that takes range, spell school skill/spellpower, and armor considerations into account. Staves come in basic and enhancer versions, with elementalists and conjurers starting with the basic. The specials cost mp and have normal failrate mechanics as they currently do.

We know that a model for attacks like what I've proposed can be balanced, or at least balanced enough for crawl, because we already have have items/god abilities (decks) and weapons that work roughly the same way (and currently offer players a better alternative to direct damage magic). I suspect this model would also be fine for targeted hexes, but you'd want the weapon that does the "standard hex" effects to be a dagger instead of a staff.

The next step is to reduce player max mp by a lot, probably at least half, so that using the specials or other non-direct damage spells, god abilities, and so on actually has consistently meaningful costs. Once you've gotten there, ways forward on duration spell effects and costs will look more appealing.

edit: * re: staves, probably the default way this would have to work is by using the 'v' command, but of course tabbing would automate that. That way you don't run into the problem of attack speed. Alternatively and better, staves could just be made into some other kind of wizard-y weapon that doesn't sound like it should live in the existing "staves" weapon class and always has an attack speed of 1.0.
Last edited by goodcoolguy on Monday, 17th October 2016, 08:50, edited 2 times in total.
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 08:06

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

Hmm, so to summarise: "Conjurations which look like using physical weapons should just be equipment you 'swing' to cast (using Conjurations skill, not Evocations) with the same restrictions as current spellcasting except for the mp" -> "press 'f' to unleash a e.g. Magic Dart, melee swing to execute a e.g. Freeze" UI improvement. Could tie it so what exact conjuration you get depends on your skill levels/distribution or could demand 'base weapon types' like "hand axe -> war axe -> broad axe". Being weapons also brings to question 'attack speed'.

Which brings us to "why is ammo management a thing for existing ranged weapons?" These new 'conjuration weapons' impose the restriction of squishy armour in exchange for their ranged benefit. Is ammo management our restriction for ranged weapons which have no armour restraints besides "don't use shields"?
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 08:28

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

RIght, I said just magic schools and other factors relevant to casting spells because you'd probably want to have a fixed attack rate. As much as possible, the idea is just to make a literal replacement for standard attack pattern direct damage spells that works like a physical weapon from a UX perspective (no constant selection of spells, standard tab spamming without going through configuration issues, etc.) and to remove the design burden of using mp as both ammo for a certain class of characters and a limiter on special abilities.

As for physical ammo, having tried ranged with both standard and always-mulch ammo behavior, I see no reason for ammo to even exist, but that's another thread.
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 09:20

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

Minor point - introducing a new weapon type just for UX improvement sounds really weird. I think you can get pretty much the same effect by replacing basic damage spells by a Magic Dart/Magic Bolt that is uncapped.

Personally I think automagic is already fine for the interface if it's changed to an in-game setting rather than in the rc. Preferably a single key to toggle automagic on/off.

Generally agree about standardizing direct damage magic. I would probably err on the side of caution regarding which spells are considered "standard" and "special" though.
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 09:28

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

DracheReborn wrote: just for UX improvement


UX is everything.
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 12:35

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

goodcoolguy wrote:As for physical ammo, having tried ranged with both standard and always-mulch ammo behavior, I see no reason for ammo to even exist, but that's another thread.

Give me several hours to get to my free time so I can make that thread. I do believe it warrants discussion and it's relevant for this proposal.

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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 12:46

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

goodcoolguy wrote:no constant selection of spells, standard tab spamming without going through configuration issues, etc.


I want constant selection of spells. If you don't, you can play a pure melee. I am very sad we don't have elemental ammo (it was fun for me to choose which ammo to use), please don't break casters in the same way.
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 12:56

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
goodcoolguy wrote:no constant selection of spells

I want constant selection of spells.

You mean quivering of spells, not the repetitive keystrokes.

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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 13:23

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

This doesn't address everything the OP mentioned, but I feel like a little buff to the level 1 and 2 blasty spells would go a long way to achieve the same effect of eliminating early-mid game MP regen tedium. It's usually a crapshoot if they'll hit, or do damage, and if not, sorry you're out of MP, go run around a pillar for 30 seconds and roll the dice again just to kill a trivial opponent.

Some random ideas, not all are good and none are the right fix for all spells:

Give low level spells a tiny amount of armor-piercing damage (even just 1 point might make a difference)
Make them mana-less
Increase accuracy (magic dart's gimmick of "not as tedious as other spells" isn't really a positive)
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 13:31

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
goodcoolguy wrote:no constant selection of spells, standard tab spamming without going through configuration issues, etc.


I want constant selection of spells. If you don't, you can play a pure melee. I am very sad we don't have elemental ammo (it was fun for me to choose which ammo to use), please don't break casters in the same way.


I remember having elemental ammo. I hated it. It overloaded your inventory. It was a pain in the ass switching ammo types, especially since doing so almost never had an impact on the outcome of a fight, yet it had no cost (terrible) so it was "optimal" to do it.

Deciding, for example, whether to use throw flame or flame tongue is even worse because you're not even making a choice about damage flavor. You're making a choice about damage per mp or range, the particulars of which aren't even easy to come by without outside information. But it's even worse than that because if you have that information, there's not even a real choice: There's a best answer or it doesn't matter and this is totally knowable, cut and dry.

There is no reason for these to be different spells, at all. More than that, given the existence of things like decks, makhleb abilities, and the big one, ranged weapons, there's no reason for these even to be spells in the conventional sense. It works fine for the cost of using a generic ranged attack to be the turn it takes to use it.
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 13:40

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

Psieye wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:
goodcoolguy wrote:no constant selection of spells

I want constant selection of spells.

You mean quivering of spells, not the repetitive keystrokes.


I can use ` for that without any problems now.
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 13:53

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

goodcoolguy wrote:I remember having elemental ammo. I hated it. It overloaded your inventory. It was a pain in the ass switching ammo types, especially since doing so almost never had an impact on the outcome of a fight, yet it had no cost (terrible) so it was "optimal" to do it.


Why? If you believed "almost never had an impact on the outcome of a fight", why did you keep switching? Just use whatever.
Deciding, for example, whether to use throw flame or flame tongue is even worse because you're not even making a choice about damage flavor. You're making a choice about damage per mp or range


When you attack an early Ogre with throw flame, you run out of MP and deal less damage than with flame tongue. When you attack the Ogre with flame tongue, it has enough time to get adjacent. I can only repeat my idea: if you don't want to make decision, don't play characters who require you to make decisions.

, the particulars of which aren't even easy to come by without outside information.

That's a different issue. Yet I find it weird that instead of asking devs to provide this info in the game, you are asking to remove all decisions.

But it's even worse than that because if you have that information, there's not even a real choice: There's a best answer or it doesn't matter and this is totally knowable, cut and dry.


This is not my experience. When I am playing a FE, I have different options: learn conjurations of another element, learn pure conjurations, train melee, join a god like Yred, Kiku or Beogh etc. And yes, I like the choice.

There is no reason for these to be different spells, at all.


You haven't proved it. I believe it makes sense to have different spells and different elements from both gameplay and flavor reasons.

More than that, given the existence of things like decks, makhleb abilities, and the big one, ranged weapons, there's no reason for these even to be spells in the conventional sense. It works fine for the cost of using a generic ranged attack to be the turn it takes to use it.


Decks have been removed for non-Nemelex in trunk as far as I know. Also you are actually suggesting to change spells to be like decks (i.e. casting unknown spells), currently they are very different. Probably I dislike decks as much as you dislike spells.
Makhleb is a single god and there are 20+ other gods.
Ranged weapons don't have penetration brand often and the tradeoff between damage and range (see earth magic) is fun.
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 16:33

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

goodcoolguy, when the time comes I'll make a new thread to discuss this idea properly. But there are pre-requisite discussions that need to happen upfront.

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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 17:34

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

Maybe its just me but i dont find conjurations based caster all that tedious. Hotkey a direct damage spell to tilde, cast battlesphere and spam until half mana, run to stair, repeat. Its a few more button presses but the concept is the same as pure melee: lure everything to stair, spam damage until you can no longer safely do so, run, repeat. And when you get, say, ice cloud, or spellforged servitor, or god forbid any lvl 9 spell, fights become far less keypress intensive than a fighter will ever experience.

Some spells, like sticky flame or fireball, make it even more convenient to kill things than using a weapon. arrow key arrow key tilde, arrow key arrow key tilde is easier than tab x 12 reposition reposition tab x 13. Also, spells kill things in fewer tyrns, meaning less cognitive load from pausing a tenth of a second each turn and doing a mental check of what just came into view, status effects, your hp/mp level, etc.

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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 18:29

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

to be fair you drop whammies such as this
goodcoolguy wrote:you don't control the specific spell being cast -- this is randomized in a way that takes range, spell school skill/spellpower, and armor considerations into account

when really few things in Crawl optimize anything for you in the way you imply (allied spellcasters optimize their spells somewhat, Zin chooses the book you recite, acquirement looks at stuff like skills, and Jiyva optimizes your stats but that's annoying) and the interesting thing about randomized powers is that you can either find ways to control their randomness (Disaster Area) or adapt to the random outcome. This isn't as obvious or nitpicky as you make it sound.

Not knowing what option is better afflicts weapons at least as much as spells, IMO, as attested by the eternal "which weapon is better" question... so the issue comes down to wasted MP? But you move quite beyond proposing to merely remove MP costs, and somehow even wish to preserve MP costs for stuff like firestorm

Re: choosing spells: tactical choice may be largely an illusion much of the time (although e.g. trading in reliability (fireball) for greater average damage (bolt of fire) isn't such a no-brainer, is it), but you get to see the consequences of your strategic development unfurl, e.g. your best damage spells are short-range, you don't have any EV-bypassing spells, you steamroll the rC- and beware the rC+, stuff like that.

And I don't get why beam-targeted = standard, and smite-targeted = special. You can even smite-target with ff if you have PProj on.

Also, are you essentially suggesting letting/forcing the player to hotkey a spell in their wield-slot, giving 5-aut penalties for swapping spells? It's not exactly crystal clear.

Casting from inventory slots sounds good, however.

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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 19:18

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

This is predicated on two assumptions:
1. That the choice of which attack spell to cast is meaningless (it's not)
2. That all players don't like to make this choice over and over again (Some do, some don't)

If 1. were true, then it would make sense that player preference is pre-empted, if 2. were true, it might make sense to winnow meaningful choices down to a single option in the name of improving the UI, but only if it didn't make the game fundamentally worse.

Something else you said earlier:
goodcoolguy wrote:UX is everything.


Explains part of the rationale here, "Make everything as easy as possible to use, design the game from there" is a valid game design philosophy, "design a really excellent game, implement UI as best as possible given the constraints of your game design" is also valid, they fundamentally alter the type of game you are designing.

I would call games designed-from-UI as "casuals", as ultimately, "tap a single button" is the ultimate in easy UI, and if game design must fall subservient to UI, you ultimately winnow game choices down to a single option, because that's what's best for the UI. You end up with a game with no intricacy, no tactics, and no learning curve, which is fine, if you want to design a casual game, that's perfectly reasonable. However, I, personally, don't like *playing* casual games, that's why I seek out roguelikes, because they are intricate, because there's lots of fiddly bits that I can mess around with, and because there's delicate and subtle interaction between lots of different elements.

You might argue that I'm a limited data set, that my preferences are in the minority, but I think that crawl, and roguelikes as a whole, appeal *to that minority*

I suspect you'll find that this is an uphill battle that you can only win by making your own game (whether it be a fork of crawl or something else entirely)
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 19:28

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

An excellent game that's no fun to play is not an excellent game. Fiddly bits are only good if it's fun fiddling with them.

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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 19:34

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

Hurkyl wrote:An excellent game that's no fun to play is not an excellent game. Fiddly bits are only good if it's fun fiddling with them.

I would define "fun to play" as part of "an excellent game" however I would not define "fun" == "uncomplicated"
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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 20:42

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

Siegurt wrote: I would not define "fun" == "uncomplicated"

Neither would I. But more to the point, neither would I define "fun" == "complicated", nor "complicated" == "complex".

I feel like we're not really talking about the original prompt "UX is everything", though. I'm not sure how you got "good UX" == "single button", or even "good UI" == "single button".

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Post Monday, 17th October 2016, 21:22

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

Hurkyl wrote:
Siegurt wrote:I'm not sure how

Possibly because this thread got 'derailed' really fast so people aren't in the mood to think things through carefully. I still see something that merits discussion from OP but that talk won't be happening in this thread. I'll salvage it later.
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Post Tuesday, 18th October 2016, 02:42

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

A typical midgame set of standard spells might be something like {flame tongue, throw flame, fireball, bolt of fire, sticky flame} -- remember now, the fire spell that actually has real tactics to it is conjure flame, which would remain a normal crawl spell, albeit with a proportionally higher mp cost. I just can't relate to the suggestion that which of those five spells you would use in a given turn of a midgame encounter involves a real choice. A lot of the time it doesn't matter, almost all of the rest of the time the choice is obvious.

Unfortunately, people become highly, highly invested in believing the choices they have made are important, especially when they've made them thousands of times over many hours, and will tend to dismiss the possibility that those choices were determined by fairly simple considerations after the fact. Arguments that come from a position that there is an illusion of choice usually cannot be won without presenting a concrete alternative that can actually be tried. People simply won't entertain them otherwise.
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Post Tuesday, 18th October 2016, 03:09

Re: direct damage and crawl magic costs

goodcoolguy wrote:A typical midgame set of standard spells might be something like {flame tongue, throw flame, fireball, bolt of fire, sticky flame} -- remember now, the fire spell that actually has real tactics to it is conjure flame, which would remain a normal crawl spell, albeit with a proportionally higher mp cost. I just can't relate to the suggestion that which of those five spells you would use in a given turn of a midgame encounter involves a real choice. A lot of the time it doesn't matter, almost all of the rest of the time the choice is obvious.


It is not a typical midgame set, it is closer to content of starting book. You can say the same about set of {falchion, long sword, scimitar, double sword, great sword}: it's pretty obvious or does not matter which weapon to use. Melee characters and casters have different problems: melee can be stuck with starting weapon if unlucky, casters need to find a way to deal with resistant monsters and when at 0 MP.
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