Blades Runner
Posts: 546
Joined: Friday, 2nd October 2015, 14:42
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.
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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