The Tavern

With the ability to forget spells via spellbooks gone and with wands now stacking, is it time yet to make spellbooks work more or less the same way as runes?
I.e. they are permanently added into a separate inventory and don't take space in the main inventory?

I guess this will effect trog worshipers somewhat, but only if they actually chose to pick the book up instead of burning it on the spot.

Or maybe add a "copy spells from spellbook" action that destroys the physical book but makes all spells in it permanently memorize-able for this char?

The way it works now there is zero reasons to carry a spellbook with you anyway, you practically never memorize spells in a situation when you don't have a safe access to your stash. Thus it ends up mostly adding nothing but unnecessary inventory management with you carrying all found spellbook to the stash and going to that stash every time you want to learn a new spell.

I think the best way would be to add new button for copying spells from a given book to new spell "inventory" so player will press a button (probably "," will work fine meaning the action is triggered when the book is picked up), will see a screen (similar to M) with all spells from the book including failure rate, level, magic schools, power and then can copy several or all spells to spell "inventory". Copying all spells should be easy but still it should be possible to copy just a few spells when player knows they will never use some spells to avoid having too many spells in spell memorization screen.

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I think the best way would be to add new button for copying spells from a given book to new spell "inventory" so player will press a button (probably "," will work fine meaning the action is triggered when the book is picked up), will see a screen (similar to M) with all spells from the book including failure rate, level, magic schools, power and then can copy several or all spells to spell "inventory". Copying all spells should be easy but still it should be possible to copy just a few spells when player knows they will never use some spells to avoid having too many spells in spell memorization screen.

Yea, if we don't want to remove the actual spellbook from the game once it has been "processed" I guess the most straightforward way to go would be just adding options to:
- copy an individual spell into your spellbook (from the same individual spell description page where you can (M)emorize it from)
- copy ALL spells you can memorize right now (that are not in your spellbook yet)

And make this spellbook of your's a pseodo-item you always carry by default.

Trog lets you burn spellbooks.

Can either:

A) remove this ability altogether.
B) only allow the player to do it before picking up a spellbook
-this promotes tedius behavior of luring monsters over the books
C) make spellbooks a stackable inventory item for Be as an exception to the general behavior of spellbooks.

crawlnoob wrote:Trog lets you burn spellbooks.

Can either:

A) remove this ability altogether.
B) only allow the player to do it before picking up a spellbook
-this promotes tedius behavior of luring monsters over the books
C) make spellbooks a stackable inventory item for Be as an exception to the general behavior of spellbooks.

If we simply allow to copy spells into a single large "personal" spellbook (as above) Trog players will be unaffected as individual books will still be items. There would just be no need to carry them around after you have copied the spells.

See this thread. Essentially, there is support for "goldifying" spellbooks, but the work is not complete (and there was some behind the scenes stuff which I don't know and don't care about).

I'm guessing that if someone makes a working implementation to handle all the issues raised, it has a good chance of being accepted.

crawlnoob wrote:Trog lets you burn spellbooks.

Can either:

A) remove this ability altogether.
B) only allow the player to do it before picking up a spellbook
-this promotes tedius behavior of luring monsters over the books
C) make spellbooks a stackable inventory item for Be as an exception to the general behavior of spellbooks.

Trog should auto-burn spellbooks when they come into LOS.

But that would remove their use as a weapon. Not that that is really very useful after the very early game.

Majang wrote:But that would remove their use as a weapon. Not that that is really very useful after the very early game.

I don't think that's a big loss. I might even consider it a positive, personally. The mechanic is really clunky (it's a lot of inventory management and key presses), uninteresting from a gameplay standpoint (it's a conjure flame that takes longer to cast but can target enemies), weird from a flavor standpoint (book burning for piety is fantastic flavor, throwing books at enemies before burning them so that the flames hurt the enemy is kind of nonsensical), and unnecessary (Trog's design would be just as coherent, and Trog would still be one of the most powerful gods in the game without it).

The spells should imo be all automatically copied to the M menu, with the ability for the player to highlight the more interesting ones by marking them, and to hide the others.

About book throwing, I think that the mechanic wasn't supposed to be used with throwing That's why it's so clunky.

Burning books is one of trogs more powerful tactical options, if you aren't using your books for the conjure flame, you are missing out. (Conjure flame being a fantastic spell whatever the origin)

Trog could take the loss of burning spellbooks, power-wise, but it is one of the few tactically interesting things he does, so i would personally prefer to see it retained, but then having books be physical objects doesn't bug me at all.

Having trog burn books on sight would kind of suck, some people do like to switch away from trog and memorize spells after the switch to another god. (Do we need to make leaving trog worse than his wrath?)

Burning book does cost piety (you would have higher piety if you burned it as soon as it comes into view) and it is the weakest ability in most fights (bia, free berserk and mr++ handle everything in 3 rune game).
Books must burn instantly because:
1) they make first games of a new player more annoying (abandoning Trog before first win is a very bad idea so there is no point in spell check)
2) Ru is arguably weaker god and still has a permanent cost for abandoning it at non-zero piety. With Trog you can find books after abandoning it so the cost still will be smaller.

Siegurt wrote: (Do we need to make leaving trog worse than his wrath?)

Yes. I consider Oka's wrath more deadly as it does not become almost trivial with +blink item.

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Burning book does cost piety (you would have higher piety if you burned it as soon as it comes into view) and it is the weakest ability in most fights (bia, free berserk and mr++ handle everything in 3 rune game).
Books must burn instantly because:
1) they make first games of a new player more annoying (abandoning Trog before first win is a very bad idea so there is no point in spell check)
2) Ru is arguably weaker god and still has a permanent cost for abandoning it at non-zero piety. With Trog you can find books after abandoning it so the cost still will be smaller.

You've mixed up the words "must" and "could"

Nothing about either of these points makes instant book burning obligatory (They aren't even arguments that the game would be better with it.)

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
Siegurt wrote: (Do we need to make leaving trog worse than his wrath?)

Yes. I consider Oka's wrath more deadly as it does not become almost trivial with +blink item.

So you think Trog should have the most deadly wrath? (or at least that it should be more deadly?)

I mean that's a fine opinion to have, but "Trog's wrath is too weak" is not the same as "Not only should you suffer wrath, but you should also get another totally independent penalty unrelated to wrath"

I think it should be impossible to abandon gods but in this thread I am supporting to burn books instantly when they come into view. It is completely fine from both flavor and balance points of view IMHO

Automatic item destruction doesn't strike me as good. It's more like "tedium=optimal" since a player that aims for the TSO swap could have to avoid certain vaults.

Trog could keep book burning as it is, just deactivating autopickup for books. This would exclude thrown book burning.
Otherwise, the throwing aspect can be enhanced. The first time you try to collect a book with autopickup, you are informed that you will not learn its spells, and that Trog will turn it into incendiary ammo. Make spell books unreadable for Troglodytes, so you don't get to choose which spells you preserve.
Or just remove book burning. I think that goldifying books would be such an improvement, that it's worth the little price. If it's done in trunk, an alternative to book burning can be thought out in the following months

Book burning is basically conjure flame that can work on a tile with a monster; it's quite useful but berserkers are also so powerful that I'm always hard pressed to find situations where I need them outside of some niche cases.

Book burning fits Trog flavor quite well though, so it'd be nice if that was preserved somehow.

Shtopit wrote:Automatic item destruction doesn't strike me as good. It's more like "tedium=optimal" since a player that aims for the TSO swap could have to avoid certain vaults.

If players choose to ignore loot from vaults (losing their chance to use a great unrandart or just a few of scrolls of blinking) for the purpose of having easier time in extended, that's good and meaningful decision-making IMHO

The problem isn't ignoring loot from vaults, it's having to look out for vaults and avoid entering them to avoid spontaneous combustion.

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
Shtopit wrote:Automatic item destruction doesn't strike me as good. It's more like "tedium=optimal" since a player that aims for the TSO swap could have to avoid certain vaults.

If players choose to ignore loot from vaults (losing their chance to use a great unrandart or just a few of scrolls of blinking) for the purpose of having easier time in extended, that's good and meaningful decision-making IMHO

There exist some vaults that always generate books, i would find it highly tedious and spoilery that you could predictably preserve some books with foreknowledge and careful manual exploration.

I am pretty firmly against reintroducing uncontrolled item destruction in any form, it was and remains, a terrible mechanic.

Yeah, I left it out on purpose because I figured the bottom line would be at least allowing the player the decision of when to burn the book, even if they couldnt pick it up with Trog. As for book vaults, you could just not do elf 3 and you are guaranteed what is it, at least five books or something? slime usually has at least one or two as well. thats not even random vaults, that is a way to game the system every single time.

Removing book burning is easiest and best.

crawlnoob wrote:Yeah, I left it out on purpose because I figured the bottom line would be at least allowing the player the decision of when to burn the book, even if they couldnt pick it up with Trog. As for book vaults, you could just not do elf 3 and you are guaranteed what is it, at least five books or something? slime usually has at least one or two as well. thats not even random vaults, that is a way to game the system every single time.

So making a strategic decision is bad?

Agreed that the book minvaults are a bit problematic. But only a little.

I think you misunderstood what I said. I didnt include the option that removed the ability for a strategic decision from the player (trog autoburning books on sight) because I didnt think it was even an option worth discussing.

Delaying something like this because Trog has one ability twith minimal game impact that is affected by it is rather silly.

The change is something that is completely in line with Crawls design goals of eliminating tedium and should happen.

Trog can get some other fluff ability any time.

CPTANT wrote:Trog can get some other fluff ability any time.

Proposal: make magic staves one-time throwable area-of-effect weapons, like exploding tomahawks, just stronger, and with a radius of three tiles.

A thematically sound alternative to book burning is, indeed, staff-burning.

Shtopit wrote:A thematically sound alternative to book burning is, indeed, staff-burning.

My innner 10 year old thinks "staff burning" sounds vaguely dirty and makes some sort of embarrassing STD joke in your general direction.

I'm generally against removing game features in the interest of streamlining, but in a case such as this I feel that the gain by removing additional inventory tedium by making spell memorization easier justifies bulldozing the trog book burning ability. Perhaps the ability can simply be changed into a different ability which does not have the current entanglement with spell books. As to what the skill could become, there are lots of possibilities. Off the top of my head, perhaps something with some flavor in the spirit of anti-magic, create a field of anti-magic similar to silence for a few turns which doesn't prevent spellcasting but greatly increases the chances for miscasts (with fun effects.) I think that reintroducing item destruction would be a step backwards.

The Tavern

Should Spell-books take up inventory slots still?

Should Spell-books take up inventory slots still?

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