Spellcasters and resting

[argonaut]

Right now a lot of the spellcaster game seems to be: unload MP pool at enemies; retreat to a safe location; rest to regain MP; repeat. This adds a fair amount of tedium to casters - it would be better if they only needed to disengage because they were actually in danger (like melee) and not because they couldn't do damage any more.

One proposal: Spellcasting skill does not increase total MP but decreases the MP cost of spells instead. Something like (MP - Spellcasting/4) would probably work well so that at 4 Spellcasting level 1 spells would be unlimited and at 20 Spellcasting level 5 spells would be unlimited. Higher level spells (7-9) would still reduce the MP pool (which would be smaller) so they wouldn't always be available.

[Shtopit]

I think that a way would be turning MP from tactical to strategic, with a massive MP pool that you only have a few chances to recharge. Maybe with runes...

[bel]

Right now a lot of the spellcaster game seems to be: unload MP pool at enemies; retreat to a safe location; rest to regain MP; repeat. This adds a fair amount of tedium to casters - it would be better if they only needed to disengage because they were actually in danger (like melee) and not because they couldn't do damage any more.

It's unclear to me how this is worse, fundamentally, from melee where you rest to regain HP.

The main difference is that you can use up your MP very quickly and in many different ways; but this is almost always your choice, unlike with HP. The second difference is that your HP matters as well as MP; so you have to keep your eye on both. This may make the play more complicated (though it also may give you more options; for instance: after you run out of MP, you use wands or other evokables, or just melee them), but I don't see how it's worse or more tedious.

One way in which it could be tedious is that with all your options and button pressing, spells are still weak. If this is true (I'm not sure that it is), that is a problem with game balance, not spell casting per se.

[watertreatmentRL]

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.

[Leszczynek]

As a side note I wonder why people mention Sil as a good gameplay example so often when the replay value of DCSS is much higher. Ultimately if you stay with one game much longer than with the other, doesn't it mean it's a better game?

[watertreatmentRL]

I am just saying that Sil isn't viewed as somehow incomplete for its lack of a wizard type character along the lines of what exists in crawl and other roguelikes. Sil and DCSS are both very good when viewed in the context of their origins, but they are both far from perfect, so there is an interesting point of comparison. I think for some people who are interested in the possibilities of crawl, there's something tantalizing about the progression from moria to angband to sil and the parallel you can draw with the progression of Linley's dungeon crawl to DCSS to ????

[Shard1697]

As a side note I wonder why people mention Sil as a good gameplay example so often when the replay value of DCSS is much higher. Ultimately if you stay with one game much longer than with the other, doesn't it mean it's a better game?

I don't think so, no. A game designed to meet the bare minimum amount of satisfaction for as long as possible via variety is not the same as a game designed to have great depth of play, the strongest emotional hook, the most fun mechanics, the most powerful feeling upon first playthrough(you could call this "wow" factor), etc. Binding of Isaac is a game I put a fairly large amount of time into(about 200 hours?), because you consistently see different things game to game in a way that is good at keeping players playing, but ultimately it's not a game I like very much. It was just something to do when I was bored, a coffee break game. Compare it to Hollow Knight, a recent game which I played more than most but still only clocked about 40 hours in... and is absolutely one of my favorite games of all time, period, with incredible atmosphere, highly engaging gameplay with a satisfying difficulty curve, and some of the best implementation of exploratory elements I've seen in a videogame. BoI is a 5 or 6 out of 10 for me, Hollow Knight an easy 9 or 10.

Having the "I guess want to keep playing" feeling for a long time is not the same thing as having the "I fucking love playing this" for a shorter time, in other words... especially when you account for games which take advantage of skinner box mechanics to hook players not with fun, but the compulsion many people(especially the same kind of people who become gambling whales) have for increasing numbers perpetually. (see: many MMOs, clicker games, some loot-box leveling heavy things.) I would argue that many of the best games are relatively short, tight, and polished-and the only people who play them a long time are the real diehards.

[nago]

*going to check hollow Knight

[mattlistener]

In all seriousness, why not have HP/MP reset to full when you have no threats? eg not poisoned/fainting/etc, no enemies in LOS, and no enemies on the level are on their way to where they remember seeing/hearing you.

In fairness, monsters that have any regen could do the same.

[VeryAngryFelid]

It's unclear to me how this is worse, fundamentally, from melee where you rest to regain HP.

Most melee characters spend much less in-game time resting. Primary reason is that most characters have much more HP than MP and HP/MP losses are often comparable in absolute values (where XL 10 melee character loses 30 HP to kill a monster and keeps 40 HP, XL 10 caster spends 20 MP to kill a monster and keeps 0 MP). You still can explore at 40 HP while it is suicide to explore at 0 MP. I just checked first character in YAVP section and found

  Code:

(Formicid Earth Elementalist)   Turns: 4786, Time: 00:12:54

Health: 52/52      AC:  8    Str: 22    XL:     8   Next: 35%
Magic:  13/13      EV: 12    Int: 17    God:   
Regen    0.2/turn               
MPRegen  0.2/turn           
 * Level 3,7 Spellcasting
0 Fighting 

I would suggest to make HP regeneration restore MP when at full HP and make MP regeneration restore HP when at full MP. That would make life of both casters and melee characters more enjoyable while hybrids would still keep their flexibility.

[Hurkyl]

Right now a lot of the spellcaster game seems to be: unload MP pool at enemies; retreat to a safe location; rest to regain MP; repeat. This adds a fair amount of tedium to casters - it would be better if they only needed to disengage because they were actually in danger (like melee) and not because they couldn't do damage any more.

It's unclear to me how this is worse, fundamentally, from melee where you rest to regain HP.

One obvious aspect is that, as you develop as a melee character, the HP you spend to kill any particular type of monster will decrease. And you get through the encounter faster.

As you develop a blaster mage, the MP you spend to kill any particular type of monster varies little. Unless you want to spend extra MP to get through the encounter faster.

[quik]

I believe the root of the problem is a matter of balance between casters and melee. If you don't limit casters in some way, they're inherently more powerful than melee characters. The actual problem is, in my opinion, that the current limitation of the mana pool is too harsh and it achieves the opposite: making melee characters more powerful. Not only more powerful, but also more enjoyable to play. As a caster, you often need to retreat from situations that wouldn't be a threat if you had MP, which is tedious.

It's usually argued that hybridization is best in DCSS, but that's if you don't consider MiBe archetype characters. Perhaps this need for hybridization comes from the lack of viability that pure magic users have in the current state of the game. While hybridization is a good thing, as it makes the game more complex strategically, I believe having the three posibilities open, that is, pure melee, pure caster and hybrids, would be good for the game. Therefore, I'd rather have bigger mana pools and better MP regen, even at the cost that pure casters became more powerful than pure melee. The worst that could happen is that DECj might become the new MiBe, not a big deal.

[argonaut]

One obvious aspect is that, as you develop as a melee character, the HP you spend to kill any particular type of monster will decrease. And you get through the encounter faster.

As you develop a blaster mage, the MP you spend to kill any particular type of monster varies little. Unless you want to spend extra MP to get through the encounter faster.

This is exactly why I proposed a way to reduce the MP cost with experience. Also, with limited spell slots, at some point you'll amnesia throw flame (2MP) and end up using bolt of fire (6MP) to kill an inconvenient orc - which then requires more recovery time.

Alternately make each melee attack drain 1 MP and you get exhausted and can't attack when you get to 0. Share the pain!

[Speleothing]

I believe the root of the problem is a matter of balance between casters and melee. If you don't limit casters in some way, they're inherently more powerful than melee characters. The actual problem is, in my opinion, that the current limitation of the mana pool is too harsh and it achieves the opposite: making melee characters more powerful. Not only more powerful, but also more enjoyable to play. As a caster, you often need to retreat from situations that wouldn't be a threat if you had MP, which is tedious.

It's usually argued that hybridization is best in DCSS, but that's if you don't consider MiBe archetype characters. Perhaps this need for hybridization comes from the lack of viability that pure magic users have in the current state of the game. While hybridization is a good thing, as it makes the game more complex strategically, I believe having the three posibilities open, that is, pure melee, pure caster and hybrids, would be good for the game. Therefore, I'd rather have bigger mana pools and better MP regen, even at the cost that pure casters became more powerful than pure melee. The worst that could happen is that DECj might become the new MiBe, not a big deal.

Better MP regen, and !Magic that are as common as !Curing

[dolemite99]

I believe the root of the problem is a matter of balance between casters and melee. If you don't limit casters in some way, they're inherently more powerful than melee characters. The actual problem is, in my opinion, that the current limitation of the mana pool is too harsh and it achieves the opposite: making melee characters more powerful. Not only more powerful, but also more enjoyable to play. As a caster, you often need to retreat from situations that wouldn't be a threat if you had MP, which is tedious.

It's usually argued that hybridization is best in DCSS, but that's if you don't consider MiBe archetype characters. Perhaps this need for hybridization comes from the lack of viability that pure magic users have in the current state of the game. While hybridization is a good thing, as it makes the game more complex strategically, I believe having the three posibilities open, that is, pure melee, pure caster and hybrids, would be good for the game. Therefore, I'd rather have bigger mana pools and better MP regen, even at the cost that pure casters became more powerful than pure melee. The worst that could happen is that DECj might become the new MiBe, not a big deal.

Better MP regen, and !Magic that are as common as !Curing

+1 vote for increasing the frequency of !Magic. Alternatively, increase the likelihood of having a Staff of Energy appear in the game. Alternatively Part II (Trademark), slightly increase the RNG early Dungeon floor placements of hunting slings, shortbows, hand crossbows and their accompanying ammo. Those are three possible ideas to make it less likely that mobs will get adjacent to our poor low AC mages.

[Phaedo]

In all seriousness, why not have HP/MP reset to full when you have no threats? eg not poisoned/fainting/etc, no enemies in LOS, and no enemies on the level are on their way to where they remember seeing/hearing you.

In fairness, monsters that have any regen could do the same.

Well, the obvious problem is that "threat" may include something you can't see. e.g. you've just killed an orc knight, but resting on O:2 is still pretty dangerous because he's shouted another ten currently wandering orcs.

The wait mechanic does have a risk/reward component, it's just not always obvious what the risk is.

[watertreatmentRL]

I think we should be more willing to question "information leaks" as a rationale. Whether a monster that is tracking you is visible on the screen or not, you still know where it is. If it has started wandering, that is usually evident after a few turns. After that the difference between how resting works now and giving the player a "Sounds like you lost them..." message followed by increased regeneration or something is a question in the theory of random walks. It's hard to believe that there's a carefully designed balance waiting there to be disturbed. On the other hand, ambrosia speed regeneration when you have nothing in line of sight and nothing tracking you would eliminate resting from most of the game, even if you still want to make hell, abyss, and orbrun require normal rest.

The no monster tracking and no monster in LOS state is quite stable, safe, and easily detected by the experienced player. 500 iterations of random walk for various monsters on level while you rest makes only a marginal difference in the stability part of that, but potential for mechanical improvement is vast: No 5 spam, no pause, no context switch.

[tasonir]

If you want to test what a caster with functionally infinite mana is like, just play a caster with sif muna. While sif isn't a terribly powerful god, with some decent invocations (you probably only need around 10) channel energy will give you about 20-30 mana per use, and you don't really have much of anything else to dump your piety on, assuming you aren't desperate for books (which is a terrible idea anyways).

Use it when you're at half mana and you'll pretty much never hit 0. It was pretty rare to need to use it twice for an engagement, but you can if you really want to just keep casting over and over. My test character: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Tason ... 220301.txt

[bel]

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.

--------------------------------

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.

[watertreatmentRL]

My argument above turns on an aesthetic judgement: Pausing to replenish a game-time dependent resource can be disruptive and in crawl it is done in a way that is disruptive. You call that an "assertion" and decline to engage with it, while talking about logic and argumentation. I believe people will have different judgements and different commitments that have roots in their experience with the game. Sometimes these will be irreconcilable, regardless of debating points and so on.

Whether you accept my aesthetic judgement or not, the fact is that crawl HP mechanics introduce pauses in the action of the game that are not present in other games and that crawl MP does as well. You suggest in the quoted passage that crawl MP is no worse than crawl HP. I don't disagree, but I believe the conclusion of that line of thinking is that each are bad separately and in combination they are doubly bad. The difference, I think, is that you are prepared to accept crawl HP as it is without question, so logically the reader should also accept crawl MP. I don't disagree with your logic, I disagree with the aesthetic judgement implied in your discussion.

I believe I have explained my reason for mentioning Sil and I don't think there is a lot to say about the differences between conjurations tactics and ranged weapons tactics.

[Deso]

I agree its qute diruspiting to gameplay to rest ao often as casters. Specially early.

Here are some ideas:
1 have weaker spells free of mana cost (or spell costs reducing mana cost based on spell power)
2 have reduced mana costs
3 havings spells with cooldown timer based on skill instead of mana cists (so your delay reduces as you master the relevant skill)

[bel]

My argument above turns on an aesthetic judgement: Pausing to replenish a game-time dependent resource can be disruptive and in crawl it is done in a way that is disruptive. You call that an "assertion" and decline to engage with it, while talking about logic and argumentation. I believe people will have different judgements and different commitments that have roots in their experience with the game. Sometimes these will be irreconcilable, regardless of debating points and so on.

Whether you accept my aesthetic judgement or not, the fact is that crawl HP mechanics introduce pauses in the action of the game that are not present in other games and that crawl MP does as well. You suggest in the quoted passage that crawl MP is no worse than crawl HP. I don't disagree, but I believe the conclusion of that line of thinking is that each are bad separately and in combination they are doubly bad. The difference, I think, is that you are prepared to accept crawl HP as it is without question, so logically the reader should also accept crawl MP. I don't disagree with your logic, I disagree with the aesthetic judgement implied in your discussion.

I believe I have explained my reason for mentioning Sil and I don't think there is a lot to say about the differences between conjurations tactics and ranged weapons tactics.

Tomato, Tomahto. You say "aesthetic judgement", I say "assertion". They mean the same thing: a statement made without argument, about which it is hard to argue (as in the proverb: "there can be no argument about matters of taste").

This does not mean that the statement is wrong or unimportant. I did not "decline to engage" with it; I actually made a patch a couple of years ago for a less sucky version of DD, because I think the mechanism of non-regenerating HP can be interesting. My point is that it has nothing to do with my quoted statement. Indeed, it agrees with my quoted statement, that fundamentally MP regeneration is bad or good for the same reason that HP regeneration is bad or good.

For the rest of the paragraph, the assertion that MP limit is never meaningful if you know what you're doing, is indeed an assertion, not an aesthetic judgement. You may like to play a crawl where MP limit is never meaningful in practice (which means one can simply remove MP costs), that is an aesthetic judgement.

[watertreatmentRL]

I don't know how to take your protestations here because you seem to claim you're making a logical point and I say I agree with the logic.

Here's how I see the perspective you seem to be driving at: If we all laid our priors out and had a meeting of the minds, we would all come to the same perspective, because fundamentally human experience is reducible to a set of propositions and pieces of evidence. That is the purpose of argumentation, which is how we arrive at truth. I reject that. I believe that experience and aesthetic judgement are fundamentally intractable and cannot, in general, be reconciled by comparing evidence and sussing out matters of logic. As you say, there is no accounting for taste.

I also believe that there is a bias in the rhetoric of this Mr. Spock, View from Nowhere stance: The reliance on propositions that are easily smuggled in because of the vividness and reality of the status quo as compared to something more hypothetical or imaginative that would represent a real change. There is a bias toward accepting what already exists, which as I said I think is at the bottom of your original comment. This is the soul of incrementalism. You can always say "That's just an assertion made without argument" and fall back on what seems to be solid and real because of what exists already. In this way you cut out any less conservative way to think about things, anything that relies on personal judgement or vision.

My opinion that MP is not meaningful in practice requires some qualification. What I mean is that with the most careful tactics, you don't get into situations where lack of MP is a serious threat outside of situations where you literally cannot get away, which is basically just the entrance vault on d:1. I think this a pretty widely held opinion. I think it's also a widely held aesthetic judgement that playing that way is very boring and unpleasant.

[Siegurt]

I don't know how to take your protestations here because you seem to claim you're making a logical point and I say I agree with the logic.

Here's how I see the perspective you seem to be driving at: If we all laid our priors out and had a meeting of the minds, we would all come to the same perspective, because fundamentally human experience is reducible to a set of propositions and pieces of evidence. That is the purpose of argumentation, which is how we arrive at truth. I reject that. I believe that experience and aesthetic judgement are fundamentally intractable and cannot, in general, be reconciled by comparing evidence and sussing out matters of logic. As you say, there is no accounting for taste.

I also believe that there is a bias in the rhetoric of this Mr. Spock, View from Nowhere stance: The reliance on propositions that are easily smuggled in because of the vividness and reality of the status quo as compared to something more hypothetical or imaginative that would represent a real change. There is a bias toward accepting what already exists, which as I said I think is at the bottom of your original comment. This is the soul of incrementalism. You can always say "That's just an assertion made without argument" and fall back on what seems to be solid and real because of what exists already. In this way you cut out any less conservative way to think about things, anything that relies on personal judgement or vision.

That makes the presumption that there is no common ground, and that your opinion was formed without basis.

Typically (not always) we form opinions based not only on direct evidence, but also on indirect perceptions, we adopt positions consistent (we believe) with other previously held beliefs, or premises.

It is sometimes possible to come to an agreement when you have a shared premise in common, and when there is no shared premise, it is often helpful to know what these disagreed-upon premises are, as it increases your ability to communicate productively, and arrive at compromise.

To that end asking "why do you/do you not believe that mp is not a relevant tactical resource", for example, can help the disagreeing parties achieve an understanding for the rationale behind a particular belief, and get the two parties closer to a proposition that will satisfy then both.

[watertreatmentRL]

I agree, but it is important to recognize the limits of that approach and that insisting on it will limit where discussion can go. It's also important to remember that those limits may serve an interest that is not explicitly stated.