Spell Library Upgrade: Filter


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

Slime Squisher

Posts: 392

Joined: Sunday, 11th September 2016, 17:21

Post Monday, 23rd April 2018, 14:49

Spell Library Upgrade: Filter

As spell libraries grow larger, managing them takes more time. The Hide/Show pages help a fair amount with this, but even so, the burden adds up after a while, especially if players change their minds about which types of spells they're interested in as their circumstances change. So, I suggest adding a "Filter" page, which would resemble the skills management UI. On the left column would be spell levels 1-9, and on the right column would be spell schools (optionally hiding, by default, unknown levels/schools).

Gray "+" would not filter, e.g. current behavior and the default setting.

White "*" would require at least one selection, hiding spells that don't match at least one white "*" in its column. For example, a fresh conjurer who required Hexes or Translocations and level 2 or level 4 would see only Force Lance and Fulminant Prism. This would be most useful to characters focusing on one or two schools.

Dark gray "-" would hide the selected levels/schools from appearing in the other 4 pages. This would be most useful to players with religious restrictions on spell usage or a bias against certain magic schools (due to bad aptitudes, aversion to summon-related XP loss, etc.) and should take precedence over white "*" selections.

Of course, both filtering options would also be useful for one-off searches of temporary interest, e.g., to rig Spellforged Servitor to only have access to high-level conjurations, or to only consider options that fit within current learning capacity or have no hunger cost.

When viewing pages that are hiding spells, a note can indicate how many spells are hidden by filters.

I think players would quickly be able to learn to make effective use of such filters and save quite a bit of time across all future played games.

Dungeon Master

Posts: 388

Joined: Monday, 18th August 2014, 20:04

Post Monday, 23rd April 2018, 14:51

Re: Spell Library Upgrade: Filter

We discussed something like this option and decided it wouldn't add much on top of a good search feature (which exists; see my post in the other thread). Search can be used for spell school names as well as spell names. We could still be persuaded otherwise, but try out the search feature for a while and see if it does what you want.

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