The Tavern

Book amnesia is the worst communicated mechanic in the game. As far as I know, it's only mentioned in the description of spell books, but if you don't know about book amnesia, you have no reason to actually look at the description of spell books, so most people go...forever? without knowing about it.

minmay also hates it, for other reasons, but I don't know what they are. This is his cue to post.

Book amnesia is also not terribly important because there are so many amnesia scrolls around. Of course, that could easily be changed: imagine Crawl with only 50% as many amnesia scrolls, or 25%, or 0%.

dpeg wrote:imagine Crawl with only 50% as many amnesia scrolls, or 25%, or 0%.

I'm already liking it!

FR remove book amnesia and supply 50% more amnesia scrolls.

Arrhythmia wrote:
PleasingFungus wrote:this is getting off-topic, but: if it were better communicated, would you still object to it? or is it just the awful UI that's the problem?

Just the awful UI.

Anybody tried using it in-game to some advantage? You have to look at what books you have, what spells are in what books, what books you can afford to destroy. Map it all out. This is necessary if you want to turn the maximum possible number of unwanted books into amnesia scrolls. And you need to plan this out ahead of time, because once you destroy a book, there's no going back. So get a pencil out. It's an uninspired minigame, shallow yet complicated.

Compare! Much better is the old suggestion to make amnesia free, and when a spell gets memorized, have that spell removed from that book. To boot, that would be consistent with the behavior of other reading materials found in the dungeon. Spell books comprise the only remaining text that doesn't disappear after use! (Random Uselessness used to sometimes re-assemble itself but RIP.)

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:
Arrhythmia wrote:
PleasingFungus wrote:this is getting off-topic, but: if it were better communicated, would you still object to it? or is it just the awful UI that's the problem?

Just the awful UI.

Anybody tried using it in-game to some advantage? You have to look at what books you have, what spells are in what books, what books you can afford to destroy. Map it all out. This is necessary if you want to turn the maximum possible number of unwanted books into amnesia scrolls. And you need to plan this out ahead of time, because once you destroy a book, there's no going back. So get a pencil out. It's an uninspired minigame, shallow yet complicated.

Compare! Much better is the old suggestion to make amnesia free, and when a spell gets memorized, have that spell removed from that book. To boot, that would be consistent with the behavior of other reading materials found in the dungeon. Spell books comprise the only remaining text that doesn't disappear after use! (Random Uselessness used to sometimes re-assemble itself but RIP.)

To be clear, my non-committal position on book amnesia is just out of apathy for it. It'd be fine to remove it.

The only time I'd ever use book amnesia was to forget corona on a DrEn to leave a more annoying ghost.

dpeg wrote:Book amnesia is also not terribly important because there are so many amnesia scrolls around. Of course, that could easily be changed: imagine Crawl with only 50% as many amnesia scrolls, or 25%, or 0%.

i think reducing the number of amnesia sources is a pretty bad idea; without sif amnesia, i've certainly ended up in situations where i very strongly desired amnesia but only had book amnesia available. this is especially common with veh, i think.

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:Anybody tried using it in-game to some advantage? You have to look at what books you have, what spells are in what books, what books you can afford to destroy. Map it all out. This is necessary if you want to turn the maximum possible number of unwanted books into amnesia scrolls. And you need to plan this out ahead of time, because once you destroy a book, there's no going back. So get a pencil out. It's an uninspired minigame, shallow yet complicated.

Compare! Much better is the old suggestion to make amnesia free, and when a spell gets memorized, have that spell removed from that book. To boot, that would be consistent with the behavior of other reading materials found in the dungeon. Spell books comprise the only remaining text that doesn't disappear after use! (Random Uselessness used to sometimes re-assemble itself but RIP.)

most of this is fair; the 'shallow yet complicated' sentence doesn't actually mean anything, but i wouldn't argue with the objection that 'optimal play' for book amnesia is unfun.

not super enthusiastic about free amnesia. i don't think book amnesia would need a replacement if it were removed, beyond maybe somewhat more ?amnesia, and i think deciding what to use spell slots on is probably going to be a much less interesting commitment if you don't have to worry about freeing them up after. the consequence of not being able to re-memorize spells you amnesia'd (without another book) seems like it'd be almost completely irrelevant.

I usually use amnesia zero times over the course of a game, and don't feel that I'm particularly missing out. You just don't need that many spell levels worth of spells; you only need so many redundant spells from your specialization and it is rarely worth heavily investing in spell skills outside your specialization until very late in the game, at which point you've naturally accumulated more spell slots to work with. There are a few extant hyper-specialized niche spells that are only useful for a small section of the game, but removing both these spells and book amnesia is a more appealing solution to me than trying to force the use of book amnesia as a feature that affects the game.

this is a tangent, but which hyper-specialized niche spells are you thinking of?

You could add a forget spell ability that when used will display all spells you current have memorized and the book for. Warns the player which book he is about to destroy and circle the question through every book the player currently is carrying that have the spell he wants to forget.

PleasingFungus wrote:this is a tangent, but which hyper-specialized niche spells are you thinking of?

Ignite Poison is probably the most discussed example in previous threads on that very topic, but if we went spell-by-spell we could probably quite a few spells and maybe even entire book backgrounds that don't have a useful reason to exist. Dispel Undead is another example that's come up a bunch of times. If it seems like a good idea to prepare a spell and then amnesia it at a point you've planned in advance, then probably the spell balance is wonky and in need of review.

KoboldLord wrote:
PleasingFungus wrote:this is a tangent, but which hyper-specialized niche spells are you thinking of?

Ignite Poison is probably the most discussed example in previous threads on that very topic, but if we went spell-by-spell we could probably quite a few spells and maybe even entire book backgrounds that don't have a useful reason to exist. Dispel Undead is another example that's come up a bunch of times. If it seems like a good idea to prepare a spell and then amnesia it at a point you've planned in advance, then probably the spell balance is wonky and in need of review.

Ignite poison doesn't do that anymore; it only hurts monsters if they've already been poisoned.

imo make another thread wrt overspecialized spells/backgrounds; i'm very curious about this.

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/6622a18fe0be here's a branch that removes book amnesia. will probably push it in a few days if no one objects.

: Untitled.png (12.18 KiB) Viewed 3601 times

Arrhythmia wrote:Ignite poison doesn't do that anymore; it only hurts monsters if they've already been poisoned.

KoboldLord didn't mention it hurting poison-body monsters though? I think they just mean that "Fire/Poison/Tmut spell which speeds up poison damage" is a hyper-specialized niche spell that is only useful for a certain portion of the game(I would agree).

PleasingFungus wrote:imo make another thread wrt overspecialized spells/backgrounds; i'm very curious about this.

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/6622a18fe0be here's a branch that removes book amnesia. will probably push it in a few days if no one objects.

I don't see the need to make scrolls of amnesia even more common to compensate. Sif Muna still has that "forget spell" ability, doesn't she? Haven't played her since the Sif reform, but if it's still there, I see no reason to make the ability even less relevant. Amnesia scrolls are already common, and realistically, except for newbies who want to experiment with every spell in the game, most characters won't need to forget more than a couple of spells anyway, for which they already get enough amnesia. Scrolls of amnesia generation chance should stay as it is now, or even further reduced so that more than 1 in 1000 characters might have to consider limited supply of amnesia scrolls as a real concern.

Otherwise, removing book amnesia, and then the idea in the other thread where you can instantly access every spell from every book you read in the Memorization screen would be a nice way to streamline spell learning with pretty much no significant downsides.

The Tavern

Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated

Re: Book Amnesia is terribly communicated