books with 1 spell

[duvessa]

so I was going to make a goofy shop vault with a shop that sells randart books that only have 1 spell each, and immediately realized "it's gonna be a real pain in the ass to examine each of those books to find out which spell they have", and indeed, it's already a pain in the ass to examine the 10 randart books that show up in every regular book shop.

and that got me thinking, what if, in place of randart books, there were books with just one spell? so they're just called "handbook of apportation", "handbook of fire storm", etc., and they'd generate in place of randart books (you could generate them in larger numbers to compensate for them only having one spell, naturally).
This has several advantages:
- First, obviously, it solves the shop problem.
- Randart books always have to get identified even if you already have all the spells in them. A single-spell book can be marked as useless if you already have the spell, just like other non-randart books.
- It's trivially easy to control the rarity of different single-spell books. Controlling the rarity of spells in randart books is much harder, unless you totally restructure the way randart books are generated, which would presumably shake up balance just as much as this change would.
- No more Sif/Trog altar vault spoileriness!

I do not think it would be a significant nerf to flat-out 1:1 replace randart books with single-spell books. Randart books are already nigh-irrelevant - they are rarer than regular books, have fewer spells, seldom have good combinations of spells, and are overpriced in shops. Might as well turn them into something that doesn't hurt the interface.

(For Sif Muna, just reduce the gift timeout by like 50%).

[Rast]

Multi-book spellbooks were essential back when they used inventory space.

They are still helpful when it comes to most fixed spellbooks -- you want the player to get a bunch of spells that use the same school, to justify skill investment.

But, as you point out, randart books seldom have good combinations of spells.

However, I think the fix is to improve randart spellbooks with this rule:
- Every spell in the book must have at least one school that it shares with two other spells in the same book.

[Sprucery]

It's fun to find mixed combinations of spells, like 4 level 3 spells in a book, or spells that have either Ice or Translocation etc.

The same flavour could still be achieved if you just generated the same set of spells in several books, one in each. Of course, gameplay over flavour, and in this case even flavour would not be lost imo.

Would it be worse than just 1:1 replacing randart books with one-spell books as suggested in the OP?

I don't mind if this would reduce the total amount of spells in book shops (if there are less regular books because of one-spell books). I already think that there are too many spellbooks in shops...

[duvessa]

However, I think the fix is to improve randart spellbooks with this rule:
- Every spell in the book must have at least one school that it shares with two other spells in the same book.

This is basically the same as giving theme randart books one discipline instead of two, and would just be impossible to satisfy for level randart books.

[Siegurt]

I suggest, rather than trying to rebalance sif and randart book generation rates, that we retain the exact same randart generation for artifact spellbooks, but generate them as a stack of single-spell items exactly as proposed in the OP, no rebalancing needed, you just get a stack of semi-related artifact spellbooks, instead of a single slightly more annoying (interface wise) one.

We do lose out on those cool randart spellbook names, but I think the loss is acceptable

[ion_frigate]

Bikeshedding thing: Handbooks and manuals are pretty close to the same thing IRL. I'd suggest a more 'magical' name like grimoire, tome, or volume.