The Tavern

It's not clear to me why Vehumet gifts spells using the "M" screen. No other god has this kind of fiddly mechanics; Okawaru/Kiku/Trog/Sif etc. simply gift an item and are done with it. I think (not sure, I haven't read the code) one can technically always decay piety so that one doesn't receive spells faster than one can learn (though I mostly don't do this, because it's tedious and often unnecessary). I see no point at all for this mechanism, except perhaps gifting spellbooks looks too similar to Sif? It doesn't matter if it looks too similar to Sif; the spells are different enough and there are plenty of other differences between Sif and Veh.

Therefore, let Vehumet gift artifact spellbooks with a single spell (or 3 in case of the last one).

Or rather goldify the spellbooks, after the removal of spell amnesia through book destruction there's no reason to keep them as inventory objects, they just clutter the inventory and cause backtrack.

Ok that would mean the loss of Trog ignite spellbook, but that isn't so significant to keep a bad mechanic in the game, from my point of view. Or let the spellbook to stay a physical inventory item just for troglodytes if that is really a necessity

2-month old possible veh spell offer system update on s-z.org:

http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... 4604029cc0

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you have situations where it's a good idea to put on then remove Faith simply to game your piety level, you probably need to address something.

Bumping this thread. Now that spell library exists, there's even less reason for Vehumet to gift spells using the "M" screen.

New players are especially susceptible to the trap of pumping spellpower, while worshipping Vehemut.

What about this:
Vehumet gifts you two spells instead of one, but you have to choose which one to take.
They appear as reclaim gift abilities, so you can check which books you have available.
The timer to receive next gift does not start until you have reclaimed previous one.
Optionally the algorithm can be tuned to favor spells that player hasn't found yet in a picked up book.
Final gift will work like before.

Reasoning: This keeps the current receive spellswithout books mechanic, and forces player to make meaningful choices time to time.
Sometimes the choice is easy, if other spell is in a book and other one isn't. But especially early on it will happen quite often that both spells won't be in a book, or other spell is in an expensive book in a shop.
As additional bonus players won't be tempted to overtrain spellcasting or fiddle with amulet of faith.

That's too complicated. And what if I don't want to take either spell on offer? It's rather strange to make a god gift worse than nothing. Even Ru allows one to reject all sacrifices.

As for the reasoning that the current mechanism actually forces a meaningful choice: that's almost never true. Almost all of the time, when Vehumet offers a spell, you know immediately whether you want to take it or not. If, in the rare case, there is actually a conflict in your mind, you can (tediously) decay your piety to manipulate the time for which the spell is available.

It's best to simply get rid of a mechanic that doesn't work, is fiddly and is completely different from the way other god gifts work. Another way to get to the same conclusion is to imagine that Vehumet actually gifted artifact spellbooks with one spell, and someone opened a thread in GDD proposing the current behaviour. What are the chances of such a thing happening? Not much, imo.

Good point, there should be 3 options
A) Memorize spell X
B) Memorize spell Y
C) Reject gifts