watertreatmentRL wrote:bel wrote:It's unclear to me how this is worse, fundamentally, from melee where you rest to regain HP.
It would be best, of course, never to have to rest or pause in the progression of the game. If you look at really clean game designs, like you see with many commercial titles, you don't have this thing where you pause to regain your ability to survive a future encounter with monsters. So HP with regeneration is already not great. MP is basically another kind of HP for characters who are essentially helpless without the ability to cast spells. There's more to say about this situation, but the short version is it's as much worse to have crawl MP
and crawl HP as it is to have just crawl HP versus, say, Castlevania HP.
If you know what you're doing, conjurations are about as effective as ranged weapons, with somewhat better damage and much worse interface. Disengaging as necessary is not hard in normal crawl games, it just adds time and tedium to routine encounters. I see no reason that spells that operate like ranged weapons should take MP at all. They're limited in other more consequential ways.
Using magic to shoot things at monsters instead of one of five kinds of launchers in crawl is distinguished mainly by strategic considerations like what kind of armor you can wear while shooting things, what ancillary benefits the relevant skills may have, things like charms, conjure flame, and so on whose use are based on elemental magic skills, and of course availability of spellbooks. The tactical difference of needing to withdraw constantly or melee is cosmetic from a perspective of balance and bad for gameplay.
In my opinion, there's just not a good design rationale for the existence of a type of ranged attack that is limited in a way that doesn't make a difference in combat effectiveness with careful play. The rationale, I think, is in the realm of imagination. "I want to be a dwarf, I want to be a wizard, not an archer." The game has to have it all, wizards, warriors, rangers, you name it. If you look at Linley's Crawl, this is clearly what was going on. If you look at Sil, there's a magic-like system that's based on effects we would call "charms" in modern crawl. There's no feeling that Sil is lacking something for making ranged attacks things you throw or shoot with a bow.
There are several points here and it's not clear to me what the relation between each of them is, and it's not clear what the relation with my quoted statement is.
The first paragraph simply asserts that MP and HP together is worse than simply HP, without providing a reason. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not; but it's hard to argue with an assertion. The other assertion, that the mechanic of HP/MP regenerating over time is a bad one is reasonable, but has nothing to do with my point. I am not sure if people really like playing DD anyway.
The second paragraph asserts that the MP limit is never meaningful in practice, if you know what you're doing. I think it's not true, but again, it's impossible to argue with an assertion. This assertion contradicts the first paragraph: if MP limit is never meaningful in practice, then HP and MP together is no worse than only having HP.
The third paragraph talks about strategic differences between spellcasting and launchers, which do exist and are important. However, it asserts that the tactical aspects are not important (an assertion which I don't think is true), so I can't seriously comment. But see below.
The last paragraph talks about Sil, but I don't understand why. It's true that Sil doesn't have conjuration-type spells (or necromancy-type spells, or translocation-type spells for that matter). But Sil has both HP and MP, and regeneration of both over time. Songs in Sil are somewhat like Charms, but not really; you lose MP over time as you sustain the song. The stronger songs cost more voice per turn than the weaker songs. Sil made an explicit choice to have a cleaner and constrained magic system. I don't see what this has to do with Crawl's magic system, or the quoted part of my post.
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Some elaboration for the 2nd paragraph: conjurations are somewhat like launchers, but not really. Spells are more varied than launchers, and you have the option of choosing different cost spells based on need (say, a more MP-efficient cloud spell which does damage over time, or a "kill this monster now" crystal spear). Since I don't think that the tactical MP cost is meaningless, I do not think that removing the MP cost would necessarily be an improvement. It would just be a different system, with its advantages and disadvantages.