Memorizing spell duration based on chance to memorize

[tasonir]

Instead of having spells take 3 (or was it 4?) turns to memorize, have the time required to memorize be based on your %chance to cast it.

A spell with 5% or less memorizes in one turn, 6-10 in 2, 11-20 in 3, 21-50 in 4, 51-75 in 5, 76-89 in 6. Spells always memorize (unless interrupted by combat, etc), you never have to repeat the command and hope to get lucky. A cap on max failure rate around 90% fail is probably a good idea. Attempting to memorize a spell with 98% failure rate simply returns an error message ("You are not yet potent enough to memorize that spell.")

Exact turn delays at what %'s can be adjusted of course; you might want to scale it up more harshly so that memorizing a 80% fail spell takes 15 turns, etc.

Messages given when confirming that you want to read a book will be slightly changed, ie:

This spell is rather tricky to learn.

becomes

"This spell will take some time to learn."

[crate]

Spells take one turn per spell level to memorize.

I think your suggestion is not really changing that but instead removing the chance to fail to memorize a spell?

[Arkhan]

Spells take one turn per spell level to memorize.

I think your suggestion is not really changing that but instead removing the chance to fail to memorize a spell?

Is this ever relevant? Are people memorizing spells in the middle of combat? Do people regularly starve to death memorizing a level 2 spell three or so times?

I get that the high level books have that cute trick where they pretend to hurt you if you fail but anyone with a brain waits for like 5% anyway.

edit:
I really don't get why there's a fail chance to memorize.

The only thing I can think of is a preview of your fail chance to cast it, so you can make an educated evaluation of what spells to use. Cool. Straight preview the fail chance then. -.-

[Deimos]

I think your idea has merit (its stupid that I have to sit there and press the memorize button ten times if I want to memorize a skill with low chance; either stop me from doing it or press the button for me automatically!), but the values are off. 6 turns is... not long, especially if we are considering its out of combat.

I'm not sure what values I'd use or if I'd even use this as a fix, but I do think the current memorizing system is flawed.

[Jeremiah]

The only time it might matter is if you are trying to learn Cure Poison while poisoned, hoping you can memorise the spell before the poison kills you.

[Jabberwocky]

Memorization is inturupted if you get hurt from poison in latest stable release. Don't know if this is also true in trunk.

[tasonir]

Spells take one turn per spell level to memorize.

I think your suggestion is not really changing that but instead removing the chance to fail to memorize a spell?

A bit more. The time to memorize would vary depending on your capability at casting. Instead of everyone memorizing a level 3 spell in 3 turns, bad casters might take 5, but great casters could do it in one turn.

Perhaps it's not a high priority change, but I think it would be nice to reward smarter characters with the marginal benefit. And yes, it does also remove the chance to fail to memorize spells.

[snow]

There are so many things in Crawl that are from NetHack, that make sense in NetHack, but just don't work in Crawl. One of these is failing to memorize spells. It honestly should be a 100% success or 100% fail thing... and take quite a few turns regardless.

[XuaXua]

Takes away some of the significance of the Blurred Vision mutation.




lol

[njvack]

The {highlevel} books lashing out at you on failed memorizations is kinda neat, though.

[ebarrett]

make any book lash out if you fail to memorize (proportionally to spell level and failure chance, of course, but nastier than miscasting at the same chances), and dramatically increase severity of failing to learn from the hard books. there, memorization failure chance made relevant.

[The Mantis]

Instead of having spells take 3 (or was it 4?) turns to memorize, have the time required to memorize be based on your %chance to cast it.

Redacted.

This spell is rather tricky to learn.

becomes

"This spell will take some time to learn."

Sounds good. As said, it's Spell Level turns. Making Intelligence a factor sounds alright.