Barkeep
Posts: 3890
Joined: Wednesday, 14th August 2013, 23:25
Location: USA
Remove hunger costs from casting
1.) Casting spells does not incur any hunger cost.
2.) Even "minor" miscasts should do things to your character more consistently. Not extreme things, but, you know, something.
3.) Even with miscast protection (from gods), miscasts should potentially cause quite a bit more glow than they currently do.
The idea is that you do not need to worry about hunger, but the spell success rate is made somewhat more meaningful. It shouldn't insta-kill you (the way some really unlucky miscasts of poorly prepared, high level spells can). But stuff like draining 3d4 mana or so could be quite worrisome. I've always felt that miscasts were largely irrelevant, so long as you weren't trying to cast very high-level spells at ridiculous failure rates. If the miscasts are actually going to become interesting, it probably shouldn't be the case that divine miscast protection completely negates the issue. The amount of glow from miscasts while under divine protection could be scaled up.
A few concerns. It is possible that making miscasts into an actual thing that happens to characters more than once in a blue moon will mean that casting spells in armor is too strongly penalized, whereas I think the balance here is fairly good in current Crawl, for the most part. Also, swapping in wizardry might be too strongly incentivized (and it is already annoying, as it is). So, the following adjustments might be a good idea:
4.) Armor skill has a more significant impact on improving your spell casting success.
Obviously we shouldn't go back to how it was back in the 0.4/0.5 days, but letting armor negate the spell casting penalties more than is currently the case could, with miscasts mattering more, keep heavy armor casting at roughly the same level of appeal as it is currently.
5.) Wizardry items need an "adjustment" period before they start improving your spell casting, a la gourmand.
"Your wizardry items are not yet attuned to your magic." "Your wizardry items are attuned to your magic and are now improving your spell success."
6.) Amount of glow is not well indicated. It should be better indicated.
Regardless of the other changes this is probably just a good idea. How much glow-inducing stuff you can do before you start actually glowing is a bit spoilery, and since it can permanently (or semi-permanently) affect your character, it should probably get a more nuanced display. You don't need to numerize it, but something like glow, glow+, glow++ of gray/yellow/red colors (giving 9 gradations), perhaps with a final dark red glow! (10th), would be sufficient.