Remove Spellcasting skill

[Sandman25]

Remove Spellcasting skill, number of MP can be determined by average magic skill, spell hunger can be determined by product of average magic skill for the spell and intelligence.
Examples:
1) character has 27 Earth and no other magic skills - character has the same MP as current character with 27 Spellcasting.
2) 27 Earth and 11 Conjurations - character has the same number of MP as current character with 19 ((27+11)/2) Spellcasting.
When the character casts Orb of Destruction, spell hunger is decreased by Int * 11 (average magic skill for the spell)
When the character casts Shatter, spell hunger is decreased by Int * 27 (average magic skill for the spell)
When the character casts Iron Shot, spell hunger is decreased by Int * 19 (average magic skill for the spell).

Advantages of the approach:
1) Haste/Swiftness/Deflect Missiles/Summon Butterflies etc is not a no-brainer. If your FE has 27 Fire and 27 Conjuration, it has maxed MP. If it adds 6 Charms, its MP is decreased to an equivalent of current Spellcasting 20 ((27+27+6)/3). If additionally it adds 5 Air, its MP is decreased to Spellcasting equivalent 16 ((27+27+6+4)/4).
2) You would need to actually train corresponding magic skill, if you want to use a spell efficiently because its spell power AND spell hunger greatly depends on magic skill. There is no universal magic skill that helps to cast everything. For example, you will not be able to summon many butterflies while having 0 Summoning.
3) Late game characters will be more varied.
4) Evocations and Invocation can be more useful for determining MP.

[BlackSheep]

1) character has 27 Earth and no other magic skills - character has the same MP as current character with 27 Spellcasting.
2) 27 Earth and 11 Conjurations - character has the same number of MP as current character with 19 ((27+11)/2) Spellcasting.

This? This is dumb.

[Sandman25]

This is not dumber than having effective skill 6.75 in every magic school for a character with 27 spellcasting.

[BlackSheep]

It's way dumber if training a magic skill can make you worse at magic.

[jejorda2]

"Skills are good" makes more sense to me than "skills are bad." "Skills are a waste of time in your situation" is bad enough (like if your spellcasting is high enough that you can cast blink with 0 failure, translocations is a waste for that spell) but "training a skill makes you character have fewer MP" just sounds awful.

[evilmike]

Spellcasting skill works fine as it is and you're going to need to come up with a much more convincing argument if you want the entire skill removed. This idea has come up in the past, and there's never been major support for it.

[Swiss]

Not to get in the way of all the other things that are wrong with the proposal, but the part where it completely forgets about spell levels from Spellcasting and therefore offers no replacement for it is a good sign that this wasn't terribly well-reasoned to begin with.

[BlackSheep]

I like that spellcasting impacts so many secondary things while school skills are for fail rate and spell power. If your concern is that spellcasting has too big an effect on fail rate and power, why not lobby to tweak the formulas instead of cutting the skill entirely?

[Sandman25]

"Skills are good" makes more sense to me than "skills are bad." "Skills are a waste of time in your situation" is bad enough (like if your spellcasting is high enough that you can cast blink with 0 failure, translocations is a waste for that spell) but "training a skill makes you character have fewer MP" just sounds awful.

This is done intentionally in order to make it more difficult to learn new magic schools. If you want to use Fire and Air, learn both schools in advance, from the very beginning. If you are unlucky to have no Earth books in Vaults, ignore the school completely and so on. That would make runs more different from each other. With current situation every middle/late game character learns Swiftness/Repel Missiles/Summon Butterflies as soon as it finds the spells.

[Sandman25]

Spellcasting skill works fine as it is and you're going to need to come up with a much more convincing argument if you want the entire skill removed. This idea has come up in the past, and there's never been major support for it.

Ok, here is a less radical idea inspired by BlackSheep's post. How about removing Spellcasting bonus for spell power and spell success rate? My understanding is that Spellcasting 27 making every 1-3 level spell castable (and at good power!) is not a good thing. Was it present in original crawl?

[Amnesiac]

How about removing Spellcasting bonus

poor ogres

[Siegurt]

This is done intentionally in order to make it more difficult to learn new magic schools. If you want to use Fire and Air, learn both schools in advance, from the very beginning. If you are unlucky to have no Earth books in Vaults, ignore the school completely and so on. That would make runs more different from each other. With current situation every middle/late game character learns Swiftness/Repel Missiles/Summon Butterflies as soon as it finds the spells.

With the current situation, every character picks up and puts on armour, wields weapons, kills creatures and tries to avoid dying too, what's your point?

"Nothing should be universally useful to each and every character" is a dumb banner point in a game which is open and lets any sort of character gain any sort of ability. The only way to completely stamp out all things which might be useful for any type of character forever is to go to a closed design, where abilities and play styles are exclusive and locked down, which is kind of the opposite of this particular game's design philosophy.

My understanding is that Spellcasting 27 making every 1-3 level spell castable (and at good power!) is not a good thing. Was it present in original crawl?

Where did you get that understanding? And yes it was.

[crate]

27 spellcasting is also an absolutely enormous xp investment (especially since spellcasting has a lower average aptitude than most skills). It ought to do something good. Making spellcasting skill bad is not a way to improve crawl.

The problem with low level charms is that the spells themselves are poorly designed and changing how skills work is not going to change that.

[XuaXua]

Been there, proposed that, got shot down.

[Sandman25]

Been there, proposed that, got shot down.

I really like the latest comment:

  Code:

Really I don't think spellcasting is a major problem, it just gets out of hand at the upper player levels since this is when a player diversifies. I think the mere removal or lowering of spellpower boost would put it in line with other skills. — greepish 2012-01-13 13:43

Too bad it wasn't implemented.

[Sandman25]

Spellcasting skill is, if anything, currently underpowered.

Yes, that's why it should be removed
Almost every spellcasters must train it so its power does not matter. The only exception is Charms which does not need spellcasting because every spell is usually used just once per fight so spell hunger/power/failure rate is not a big deal and MP from XL is enough

[TeshiAlair]

Why not nerf MR slightly, but to compensate make spellcasting give a little MR?

[Amnesiac]

I'm ok with spellcasting as it is now

[Matanui3]

How do you LOSE MP upon gaining experience? That is ridiculous.

[Hurkyl]

Think less in terms of "a wizard furthering his research into magic" and more in terms of "a specialized magic user leaving his specialization and becoming more generalized". There is precedent in fantasy settings for specialists to have greater power -- e.g. a D&D wizard barring the conjuration school to be able to cast more evocations per day.

That said, I think it really goes against the spirit of crawls advancement system, being a step towards rigid character classes rather than build-your-own.

[carbonbasedlifeform]

Spellcasting skill is, if anything, currently underpowered.

Yes, that's why it should be removed
Almost every spellcasters must train it so its power does not matter.

Lava Orc -3 spellcasting app - currently best fire elementalist score in cdo. Next best fire elemetalist is Deep Elf +3 spellcasting app . If you look at these morgues you will find out that spellcasting is last thing to care right after magic schools and invo/evo. Its rather obselete than underpowered.

[Sandman25]

Right, with latest changes to Staff of Energy DE don't need to train spellcasting above 20 or so, they already have max possible MPs at that point and spell failure/power is barely improved by training Spellcasting.

[dpeg]

One point I've not yet seen (I apologise if I missed it): even assuming that dedicated spellcasters will look very similar regarding the skill when they win, that does not take into account that *learning* the skill may have produced choices. It is not so obvious, I think, when and how much to invest in spellcasting, given that you're juggling slots, maxMP and hunger.

[Sandman25]

One point I've not yet seen (I apologise if I missed it): even assuming that dedicated spellcasters will look very similar regarding the skill when they win, that does not take into account that *learning* the skill may have produced choices. It is not so obvious, I think, when and how much to invest in spellcasting, given that you're juggling slots, maxMP and hunger.

Yes, this is a valid point. Yet even in this case spellcasting makes the game harder for those who don't know what spellcasting actually does (that includes all non-spoiled players). I saw some players train Charms to decrease spell hunger for Haste and I cannot blame them for that, it was very logical.

[pratamawirya]

One point I've not yet seen (I apologise if I missed it): even assuming that dedicated spellcasters will look very similar regarding the skill when they win, that does not take into account that *learning* the skill may have produced choices. It is not so obvious, I think, when and how much to invest in spellcasting, given that you're juggling slots, maxMP and hunger.

Yes, this is a valid point. Yet even in this case spellcasting makes the game harder for those who don't know what spellcasting actually does (that includes all non-spoiled players). I saw some players train Charms to decrease spell hunger for Haste and I cannot blame them for that, it was very logical.

I'm not sure that the definition of "non-spoiled players" also includes those who don't read the manual at all....

From the manual:

Magic skills
========================================

Spellcasting is the basic skill for magic use. It affects your reserves of
magical energy (Magic) in the same way that Fighting affects your hit
points: every time you increase the Spellcasting skill you gain some magic
points and spell levels. This skill greatly influences the amount by which
casting causes hunger. Spellcasting also helps with the power and success
rate of your spells, but to a lesser extent than the more specialised
magical skills.

[galehar]

I'm not sure that the definition of "non-spoiled players" also includes those who don't read the manual at all....

What about reading the in-game description of the skill? Does that count?

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Spellcasting

Training Spellcasting makes it easier to learn and cast spells, along with increasing your magical reserves. Gaining a level in Spellcasting gives you more "spell slots" to spend on new spells. Spellcasting skill and your intelligence are the only factors countering spell hunger.

[Sandman25]

Yes, it counts. Many players (myself included) are used to tooltips for everything and don't like reading manuals. That's our own problem I guess.

[Amnesiac]

I don't see any problem in learning what spellcasting does even without reading anything. If fact I won my first game(and it was 15-rune win) without reading any manuals, bots or wiki. Isn't it quite obvious what it does, when you start training spellcasting? You see that it doesn't help so much with spells power and failure chance, but it reduces hunger considerably and you get spell levels.

[Lafaros]

Yes, it counts. Many players (myself included) are used to tooltips for everything and don't like reading manuals. That's our own problem I guess.

You don't even have to touch the manual. When you press "m" to view your skills, you can press ? and then a skill's assigned letter to get a simple description. This takes basically five seconds. If someone is unsure of what a skill is and isn't even willing to press three keys (m, ?, whatever) to find out, then I'm not sure the game should be designed for that person.

[dpeg]

I think this case is closed but Sandman brought up two points which were discussed in the past. I don't have an answer at this time either, but it may still be worth bringing them up:

1. There are very many parameters for spell success and power.
Apart from the the magic school skills there are Spellcasting skill, Int, boosters (plus armour penalties, form penalties and god effects). As Spellcasting has three minor but very well defined roles already -- spell slots, Magic pool, spell hunger -- it might improve the game if it would only affect one of success and power, and then perhaps with larger impact. However, I have no clue -- there are just too many parameters

2. Overly cheap generalisation.
Frequently, there are complaints that spell sets tend to look too uniform. Typically, Haste and useful, cheap spells are accused. I agree slightly, but I am sure there are many who don't see a need for change in this regard. In any case, if we want to do something, the proper way seems to be to deal with the spells themselves. However, that's not so easy: spells are open to everyone, and a low level spell that makes some background work nicely can be picked up and cast around the clock by anybody.
So there were discussions how to make school generalisation somewhat more expensive. Sandman's proposal is way off the mark -- it is completely unfeasible that increasing skills carries a drawback. One idea that I liked was making spells more costly in spell slots if you generalise. This would make Spellcasting stronger and could reasonably be backed up flavour-wise. It's not so easy to come up with formulas (for example, you'll want that it doesn't matter in which order you learn spells) and that's where the discussed died off last time.

[Amnesiac]

I think spellcasting is good as it is, though. Why not just leave it alone... I have played a thousand(I'm making it up, I don't know the number) of DE's and for them spellcasting is just on par with other spell schools, but for other species it is probably much worse, so I at least don't think that it should be nerfed in any way.

[BlackSheep]

Spoiler: show

it might improve the game if it would only affect one of success and power, and then perhaps with larger impact. However, I have no clue -- there are just too many parameters

2. Overly cheap generalisation.
Frequently, there are complaints that spell sets tend to look too uniform. Typically, Haste and useful, cheap spells are accused. I agree slightly, but I am sure there are many who don't see a need for change in this regard. In any case, if we want to do something, the proper way seems to be to deal with the spells themselves. However, that's not so easy: spells are open to everyone, and a low level spell that makes some background work nicely can be picked up and cast around the clock by anybody.
So there were discussions how to make school generalisation somewhat more expensive. Sandman's proposal is way off the mark -- it is completely unfeasible that increasing skills carries a drawback. One idea that I liked was making spells more costly in spell slots if you generalise. This would make Spellcasting stronger and could reasonably be backed up flavour-wise. It's not so easy to come up with formulas (for example, you'll want that it doesn't matter in which order you learn spells) and that's where the discussed died off last time.

EDIT:
Ugh, I hit submit accidentally and then my edit never went through. I wanted to say that if Spellcasting were to lose its effect on one of fail rate and spell power I would drop success rate. Too many low-level spells don't care about spell power. Removing Spellcasting from the failure formula would require at least token investment in the relevant school skills.

[Siegurt]

The problem spells appear to me to occur in low level skills which need little to no investment to get castable for example swiftness works just as well for a 27 air/charms air elemental specialist as it does for a 0 charms/0 air magic earth elementalist with 27 spellcasting

Basically spells who have little to no reliance on spell power for *effectiveness* cause the sort of situation in question. A counterexample are spells like stoneskin, Ocozubu's Armour, and Sublimation of blood, with no Earth, Ice, and Necromancy, respectively, those spells are not nearly as effective.

I think if Haste's speed bonus, Swiftness's movement increase, and repel and deflect missile's repelling chance were all reliant on having spell power for the relevant schools, it'd be much more of a choice about whether to devote exp to those schools rather than it being a simple case of "you are a decent spellcaster therefore all these spells are excellent for you and you should pick them up every time you have them available"

That being said, however a lot of those spells are picked up every time because without them a caster will have a VERY tough time with certain kinds of fights, you need some tools in your toolbox to make a fragile DE be able to deal with say, an elephant or death yak herd in lair:8. For example with swiftness, pretty much any kind of DE caster can take out a death yak pack, without it you *might* be able to take it out, but you're a lot more likely to die.

Some alternates to the "common" tools exist (slow or leda's liquifaction for example makes a poor man's swiftness) but aren't used because they're less effective, more expensive, more complicated to use correctly, or are simply very uncommon. It'd be worth looking at which alternatives exists for a given "tool" and looking at how they compare against the "common" tool, and what kind of modifications would need to be made to make the choice of one vs another less obvious and more about your overall training strategy and what's available to you.

[Galefury]

I used to be all over this, but now I think it's probably fine. Certainly not a major issue, and it would be hard to convey to players why some spell suddenly costs more slots.

An easy way to deal with this issue is making these universally useful spells rarer. Have them show up in fewer books, or make the books they are in show up less often.