Casting Success Scale

[dolphin]

Right now, everyone who has played casters for a while knows that Great = Not Great in terms of casting success, and has complained about it, even if only muttering under their breath.

I think that there are currently too many descriptions of the "uncastable" end of the spectrum (Terrible vs Cruddy vs Bad vs Very Poor vs Poor), and not enough at the "castable" end (Very Good vs Great vs Excellent). Here's a spreadsheet of the current state of things with my suggested groups in color. What I need now is Adjectives. They should both clearly describe the relative success (examples: Poor vs Terrible, Perfect vs Excellent) and accurately reflect the actual success (examples: Excellent, Useless).

Here's the spreadsheet:Casting Success Scale
Also see Casting Success Adjectives on the dev wiki.

[galehar]

I've already merged terrible, cruddy, bad, very poor into bad. The rest is fine in my opinion. You have to understand that the adjectives describe the probability, not the usefulness of the spell. The latter depends on a lot of factors, and it's up to the player to decide what probability is enough to make a spell useful. For some spells, a fair chance is enough (levitation for example). For others, anything lower than excellent is dangerous.

[dolphin]

@minmay: The thing about the bars would be that distinguishing them would be difficult visually (do you really want to count hashes?). Range (you can see that easily) or Power (obscure anyways, but generally more is better) is somewhat less important than Miscast Chance.

The reason the devs don't give actual numbers is that known internal mechanics tends to lead to Pokemon-like studying of the system for optimization. I don't know that it would be a problem in this particular case, but it would be inconsistent with the rest of the interface.

[KoboldLord]

I've already merged terrible, cruddy, bad, very poor into bad. The rest is fine in my opinion. You have to understand that the adjectives describe the probability, not the usefulness of the spell. The latter depends on a lot of factors, and it's up to the player to decide what probability is enough to make a spell useful. For some spells, a fair chance is enough (levitation for example). For others, anything lower than excellent is dangerous.

I've killed a low-level character with a fire miscast before, back in the day when fire elementalists were a good newbie background. One miscast dropped the character from maximum hit points to zero. 'Good' should not be used to describe a spell that has a 20% chance of killing you.

I don't think there's any justification for marking a marginal spell with any positive adjective. Sometimes you can afford to spam Levitation until it works, but you also sometimes want to cast it to retreat over water away from a swarm of monsters. The latter case is exactly when it's vitally important to have a correct read on your spell success chance, so the adjectives should be geared to that sort of situation.

[njvack]

Alternatively, if obscuring the actual numbers is a goal (it seems to be), use a bar similar to the one used for spell power. #####..... is 50% success, .......... is 0% success, ########## is 100% success. Using a non-flat scale (e.g. #####..... is 75% success, #########. is 99% success) would be more useful for spoiled players, but completely incomprehensible to unspoiled players, like spell power currently is.

+1 from me. Even now, I need to look up "is very good better than great?"

Slightly off-topic here, but yeah -- what's behind the rather obscure (log-scaled?) spell power display?

[galehar]

I've killed a low-level character with a fire miscast before, back in the day when fire elementalists were a good newbie background. One miscast dropped the character from maximum hit points to zero. 'Good' should not be used to describe a spell that has a 20% chance of killing you.

Again, the adjectives are about spell success. It doesn't describe a spell, it describes your chance of success. So even if it killed you, it had a pretty good chance of not killing you. The qualitative description of a probability is arbitrary anyway. It always depend on what's at stake and the context.

Slightly off-topic here, but yeah -- what's behind the rather obscure (log-scaled?) spell power display?

I think the effect of spell power is logarithmic, so what you're seeing is what's relevant. It's mostly linear with the effect the spell power has.

[KoboldLord]

Again, the adjectives are about spell success. It doesn't describe a spell, it describes your chance of success. So even if it killed you, it had a pretty good chance of not killing you. The qualitative description of a probability is arbitrary anyway. It always depend on what's at stake and the context.

80% is not a good chance of success. In no situation is 80% a good chance of success. The spell success descriptions as they are now are little more than a running gag at the expense of new players who are expecting them to be using the dictionary definitions of the words, rather than being a code telling the player how much more training they need to do to make the spell usable.

[absolutego]

i'm number 2 on the "very good" vs. "great" club. i don't have to look it up anymore, but it took a very long while.

i'd prefer numbers, but i understand why they're not wanted and i won't campaign for it. but! since the problem with failing to cast a spell is not the waste of a turn or some mp, but the risks associated with a miscast, it'd be appropriate to reformulate spell success as chance of a miscast. it may help new players understand that they can expect something nasty. it still says nothing about the severity of the miscast (for which you have to be spoiled), but i think it'd better than what we have now. e.g.:
(chance of a miscast) (the numbers on the left are spell success)
50%-: huge
50-70%: very large
70-80%: large
80-90%: average
90-95%: small
95-99%: very small
100%: none

it'd also give you the opportunity to refine the scale. frankly, i think i'd be cool with a single adjective for anything below 60 or even 67% success.

you may also go for words that indicate a "danger" scale (terrible, somewhat risky etc.), which may be more in flavor and actually does more to indicate how bad miscasts can be, but it's hard to put them in order. i'm not a native speaker so i'll save myself the embarrassment.

(i'm also on the "terrible miscasts" club. i was not amused the first time i miscast a level 4/5 summoning spell at excellent and got a hostile, permanent balrug.)

[dolphin]

I like explicitly naming the casting success scale in terms of miscast chance. While 'chance of miscast' isn't exactly immersive use of language, it has the huge benefit of being clear and objective about the 'casting success' while still allowing the player to decide if a 'large' miscast chance is acceptable (Levitation) or unacceptable (Teleport Self). How one defines "casting success" is debatable, and depends on the spell. How one defines "chance of a miscast" is not debatable, and doesn't depend on anything else. I'm all for this.

[galehar]

I don't think describing spell failure instead of success would change anything. Also, most spell failure are harmless, so it wouldn't describe the risk of a bad miscast effect. And even if you're never going to want cast anything below 50%, it's still useful to have some detail to know how much you still need to train before being able to learn a spell.

[TGW]

What was the point of the committed change if "bad" and "poor" are both still used?

"Terrible" was perfectly clear. "Bad" and "poor" are synonyms.

[galehar]

What was the point of the committed change if "bad" and "poor" are both still used?

"Terrible" was perfectly clear. "Bad" and "poor" are synonyms.

The point was to remove some useless details and simplify. I didn't realise there was any ambiguity. I'm not a native speaker, but it seems to me that bad is obviously worse than poor.

[jpeg]

What was the point of the committed change if "bad" and "poor" are both still used?

"Terrible" was perfectly clear. "Bad" and "poor" are synonyms.

The point was to remove some useless details and simplify. I didn't realise there was any ambiguity. I'm not a native speaker, but it seems to me that bad is obviously worse than poor.

Renaming "bad" to "terrible, and "poor" to "bad" would be an option, though to me (non-native speaker) poor also sounds "better" than bad.

[absolutego]

same here, but "terrible" and "bad" are much clearer.

just to be clear, i proposed the change for the following:

- miscasts are the reason why you should be cautious before casting spells at certain success rates. this introduces the concept of miscasts in the spell info screen. new players may not fully understand this until they suffer from it, but then they'll have a better estimate of what to expect, as a "small" chance of a miscast is more descriptive than a "very good" spell success rate (unless you can map either to numbers already).

- it solves the long-standing problem that a spell with a success rate of "good" has nothing "good" about it. this could be solved using "high" instead (or maybe less optimistic words, but i have trouble coming up with them).

- it allows you to redefine the scale. you can push it up say 10%, and/or introduce another level in the high range, to grain it finer. you can also do this using the current scale, but it'd confuse veteran players.

(i'm not pushing it though. just an idea.)

And even if you're never going to want cast anything below 50%, it's still useful to have some detail to know how much you still need to train before being able to learn a spell.

that's true.

[dpeg]

If it makes sense (i.e. does not occur too often), we could use a single ! if miscasts of level 1 and 2 are possible, and !! if miscasts of level 3 are possible.

[TGW]

What was the point of the committed change if "bad" and "poor" are both still used?

"Terrible" was perfectly clear. "Bad" and "poor" are synonyms.

The point was to remove some useless details and simplify. I didn't realise there was any ambiguity. I'm not a native speaker, but it seems to me that bad is obviously worse than poor.

As stated in the FR, even the game can't consistently tell the difference. The aptitude scale uses them in the opposite sense. I also polled a random ##crawl dude and he got the order wrong as well.

[rabidweasel]

If it makes sense (i.e. does not occur too often), we could use a single ! if miscasts of level 1 and 2 are possible, and !! if miscasts of level 3 are possible.

Although perhaps not immediately intuitive (though the current system is anything but) this would be a really useful bit of info to give to the player and is a more realistic indicator of (lack of) ability to safely cast spells.

[SinsI]

What if risk and success were separate?
So you can have both "low risk+low success chance spells" and "high risk and high success".
If you managed to open a gate to hell and send lava down at your enemies, it doesn't mean that you wouldn't burn yourself in the process.

[Kate]

I renamed "Bad" to "Very Poor" to fix the ambiguity and inconsistency with the aptitude scale (so it's now Useless, Terrible, Very Poor, Poor, ...).

[dolphin]

I don't think describing spell failure instead of success would change anything. Also, most spell failure are harmless, so it wouldn't describe the risk of a bad miscast effect. And even if you're never going to want cast anything below 50%, it's still useful to have some detail to know how much you still need to train before being able to learn a spell.

Ok, I see how having a scale below 50% is useful. However, both intuitively and experimentally, a player should know that higher-level spells have worse miscast effects. Doing big magic badly is gonna hurt. At least to me, Summon Greater Demon seems like a more dangerous spell to do badly than Summon Imp. Ditto for Phase Shift and Blink (I'm no longer a new player, though, so my opinion what is intuitive to a new player may be rubbish).

After thinking about it, it wasn't the miscast chance that I liked. You were right, that's no better than chance of success. It finally dawned on me that what I really liked about absoluteego's proposal was the terminology; describing the magnitude of the chance, instead of the final effect of the chance (as the current nomenclature does). "Good" is subjective, depending on the context that it is in. "Large" much more objective, and much less dependent on context. As long as I, the player, know that high-level spells correlate with dangerous miscasts, then I can make an informed decision about a spell with an 'average' or 'very large' chance of success (or miscast). Besides all that, you're already using this nomenclature for piety costs, why not use it for spell/ability success?

[galehar]

Putting the risk of a miscast effect on the interface sounds like a good idea. Until you've seen the formula...

[dolphin]

Oh, I didn't realize that miscasts were coding monstrosities. I wasn't trying to lay a heavy load on your back or anything.

FYI: If you'd told me that reason first, I (most likely) would have shut up sooner.

[SinsI]

If miscasts are coding monstrosities, it in itself is a perfectly valid reason to rewrite it - same reasons as for planned Fight rewrite.

[roguelikedev]

He didn't specify that the code was messy or bad. There are a lot of possible effects from a miscast, and a lot of things affecting the outcome. If C++ supported first class functions then yes, it would be worthwhile to expose the likely result, but for the amount of logical overhead required to do it in C++ you could build unit tests for the miscast system instead (which I don't think a player will ever request.)