Manuals and buff potions

[njvack]

Thinking about manuals, and... a strategic item that lets you train skills is not super interesting for reasons detailed in other peoples' posts. So my thought was: Make manuals tactical consumables that give you a skill boost for a short time. Two problems: 1) It'd lead to people carrying weapons they could use unskilled + a skill consumable, and 2) They'd be too similar to potions of might, agility, and brilliance.

But! Those potions are complex and opaque. What do they actually do really? So, what if:

* Remove manuals
* Change !Might, !Agility, and !Brilliance to !Offense, !Defense, and !Arcana, each potion working by providing a strong, temporary boost to skills:
* !Offense boosts Fighting, UC, and all weapon skills
* !Defense boosts Armour, Shields, Dodging, Stealth
* !Arcana boosts all magic skills and probably Evocations and maybe Invocations
* Fighting, Spellcasting, and Evo could give +MaxHP or +MaxMP or not, depending if the potions should act more like Heroism or more like !Rage.

The boost should be large — +10 is a nice round number but there are lots of ways you could tweak, including changing the bonus for different skills. Players can see what happens so the mechanics don't need to be super simple. It seems broadly sane to let this push skills over 27 but maybe that would cause problems. Oka and Ash don't let you do this now.

Benefits: No more manuals, new potions are mechanically clear, you still get a way to manipulate skills.

Downsides: You might still carry a weapon that would be more useful under the influence of the potion, though you could already do that with brilliance and spells and I suspect there are cases where it makes sense to do that with weapons and !might right now.

[tealizard]

I think you're right to observe that these potions are substantially similar to the existing stat potions.

My criticism would be that crawl character building is already very fluid, fluid to such an extent that players can and imo often do steer toward a particular comfort zone and can reach broadly similar characters at the end of any three rune game, and this would add to that. Already, the player is encouraged to get a large number of skills (roughly a particular core set plus a selection of one of a couple classes of mostly interchangeable skills that is determined at character creation -- here I mostly mean weapon classes and elemental schools) to moderate levels, say low to mid teens for most. Large bonuses from common consumables pushes the player in that direction even harder.

[duvessa]

Temporary spell success boosts are bad. They make it optimal to memorize spells that you can't cast without the temporary success boost, but can cast with the boost.

My concern with a skill boost versions of potion of might is that unarmed combat is better than really awful weapons at high skill. So an early game character (which has a really awful weapon like a mace) will want to switch to unarmed after quaffing !Offense. This is probably not intuitive to many players. You can see this happening already with people who continue using their awful weapon in tree form, not realizing that it has a huge unarmed bonus.

[njvack]

I'm not arguing that potions that boost spell success are good, just that we have one now that works in a mechanically opaque way.

On the "switching to unarmed is better with bad weapons" front: Yeah, that makes sense. It looks like now, might doesn't make weird choices optimal, or at least not very much so. And there's no sense in replacing one weird mechanic with another...

[Rast]

Temporary spell success boosts are bad. They make it optimal to memorize spells that you can't cast without the temporary success boost, but can cast with the boost.

Your guy casts fireball normally, but in a tough fight he can quaff down brilliance to throw out some fire storms. Limited by the number of brilliance you find, and your willingness to tie up 9 memorization slots.

I'm not sure why that is bad.

Now, the case where you are removing armor to cast deflect missiles, that one is awful.