The Tavern

Hello everyone,,
Let me paint you a picture with words:

I am a human fighter, using M&F, worshipping Okawaru. Okawaru, kind god that he is, gifts me Spellbinder at some point, which I happily use. Tragically though, this situation plays out far too commonly:

1. I hit a spellcaster, and they get a miscast
2. It's a summon! A smoke demon fights by my side
3. I hit them again and they get another miscast
4. It's a magical explosion, which hits my demon, and is attributed to me
5. Now I'm under Okawaru penance and I have a hostile demon fighting me.

I have no idea what a solution to this problem would look like, but it is infuriating and I would appreciate it if we could all come together as a team to solve it.

In general, the game warns you when you do something that would harm your ally. Maybe attacking with spellbinder while you have an ally should produce a warning (at least the first time - then if you ignore it, the warning will cease to appear)?

IMO attacking allies should neither anger them nor cause penance. Hurting your ally is already penalized by you hurting your allies... and there are so many weird edge cases like this one where you should probably get warned or explosions should be disabled or your ally should escape damage or something.

Like, in this case... you don't want a message every time your attack might possibly cause a magical explosion that could hurt an ally (because that'll be pretty common) but Crawl has the precedent that it'll warn you when you might hurt an ally and cause penance, so it's hard to know what the "correct" behavior is here.

The status quo means you also need to think about how spells work in a deeper way than is normally important -- if you have ice beasts and cast Refrigeration, does it hurt them at all or are they completely immune to it? What about other cold spells?