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Spell miscasts

PostPosted: Wednesday, 10th January 2018, 15:43
by Hellmonk
So while I was grabbing the abyss rune because a 9% failure malign gateway miscast banished me, it occurred to me that the miscast system is kind of a mess. You've got this big list of wildly varying effects that's different for every spell school, some of which are extremely bad and some of which can even be beneficial. The whole system is a pretty big spoiler for new players and it's inelegant as well. I would suggest one of the following, in order of preference:

  • Remove miscast effects as a penalty for failing a spell; the penalty is that you're out a turn and some mp. Yes, this makes out of combat miscasts even less relevant. Spell failure not mattering out of combat is a separate problem and would need an independent fix.
  • Remove miscast effects. Scale the amount of contam for failing a spell with the failure chance or severity. In other words, turn all spell miscast effects into "you get an appropriate amount of contam".
  • Give each school a single "severe" miscast effect. Display that effect and the chance that you actually get it from a miscast in the spell description.

Miscast effects are used in the hell effect code and some other places as well, but those can be reformed separately.

Re: Spell miscasts

PostPosted: Wednesday, 10th January 2018, 15:48
by bel
The last idea isn't good. One doesn't want a "severe" fire miscast from a conjure flame at XL 5, no matter how low the chance of such a miscast may be (because you could be killed in one shot). A better idea could be to have a single (or a few explicit) miscast effects and scale the damage by XL.

Re: Spell miscasts

PostPosted: Wednesday, 10th January 2018, 15:56
by VeryAngryFelid
I thanked OP for first idea.
I don't like contamination idea because we have Ghouls and Zin who don't care about contamination.
Also I would treat red spells as uncastable. It does not feel right when people cast Tornado or Dragon call with 40% failure chance. Benefits of the spells outweigh potential penalty unless it is instantly losing N*10% HP where N is level of the spell.
Basically lose 3*{spell level}*{miscast level} %HP where miscast level is from 1 to 3 and level is from 1 to 9.