Cocytus Succeeder
Posts: 2297
Joined: Saturday, 14th April 2012, 21:35
Purpose of the Charms school
------ Chapter 1: Recap ------
In principle, we like buffs in crawl. They are cool for changing otherwise-dire combat prospects. There are a few sources of buffs in crawl, ordered roughly in order of how 'spam-resistant' they are:
- Racials/Mutations
- Consumables
- Equipment
- Religion
- Spells
A buff needs to meet 2 criteria to 'float' in this community:
1) The buff needs to make meaningful impact.
2) The buff must not encourage tedious habits under optimum play.
Efforts have been made to reduce incentive for tedious equipment hotswapping. Consumables and god powers have limiters to prevent spamming. What of Spells? The strategic cost is EXP (and min/maxing Int) - both to get appropriate skills and sufficient spell slots. After that, they are functionally always available.
We are happy with Conjurations because doing direct damage is a very active step in ending combat. Summons are slightly less direct, but still feels substansive towards solving problems. Hexes are similarly indirect but bring powerful effects which don't always work (MR). A lot of Necromancy requires extra resources/conditions to achieve "powerful effects that can't be spammed". In general we are happy with how these schools function. Most need an enemy to be cast and those that make allies can't be abused with stairdancing (where most 'out-of-combat' preparations are done).
Transmutations (specifically, shapeshifting) apply buff packages that each apply a lot of upsides and downsides. None of those upsides bring "you gain ranged attacks" on their own. You can also only be one shape at a time. As such, even though you technically could spam them or cast them out-of-combat, there is minimal incentive to.
So we get to Charms. In the old days, they were effectively 'trade spell slots for small buffs requiring keystrokes to renew'. What habits did that nudge us towards?
- "Spam a variety of individual Charms, then walk - keep resting and casting them as need be." -> tedium
- "Spend turns in combat doing nothing but switch on a single word in your status bar that meaningfully affect your follow-up decisions." -> lack of impact
The strategic cost to Charms is mostly "pay and forget" (until you need ?Amnesia). Thereafter, gameplay only sees the tactical key-mashing that yields tedium. Devs have been removing the worst offenders and are trying to knead in meaningful downsides to the ones left.
Players who don't take things to the logical extremes of optimum play keep suggesting new Charms ideas with downsides hurriedly slapped on as an afterthought. Downsides like "drains your MP" or "a little contam" which translates to "play even more tediously to optimise". I've also seen "really short duration" but without any other restriction that just means "spend even more turns in combat pressing buttons that don't directly killdudes -> more tedium".
Perhaps the question for now buffs is not "what's the downsides" but "why can't this be a consumable or a god power?"
Who knows, once we 'solve' Charms we might find issues with the other schools to chew on. But for now, Charms is the problem at the forefront. Specifically, we know what we don't like about it but we're not sure what direction to take it instead.
------ Chapter 2: Charms Niche ------
What should we do about the Charms school? Let's look at successful buffs from Spells:
- Discourages/forbids out-of-combat casting
- Highly situational, because meaningful downsides or requirements
Do we have design space that doesn't step on the toes of other schools? These design spaces are nominally taken:
- Needs enemies: Hexes
- Needs corpses: Necromancy
- Big bundle of upside and downside: Transmutations
- Deals damage: Conjurations
With the removal of the Haste spell, it seems there are no single school Charms beyond the Skald's starting book. It exists to be a thread linking buffs in various other schools and to make the spell harder for single-school specialists. Perhaps that's not a problem: "put EXP in this if you want buffs, but they all require setup or have downside". If we mandate every new Charms to be a hybrid, this forces us to think of the pre-existing meaningful restrictions the other schools have established.
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TL;DR Bad Charms ideas are tedious when optimised. Want to make buffs big and unspammable. Suggest new Charms ideas be consumables or god powers instead. Otherwise mandate they be hybrid school spells with thematic restrictions.
- For this message the author Psieye has received thanks: 3
- dpeg, Floodkiller, Shard1697