Buff Sif a little

[PleasingFungus]

Crawl already has a nasty habit of throwing too many abilities at the player - potions, scrolls, wands, spells, god abilities, mutation abilities, species abilities, evocable equipment, elemental evocables, moving, firing, and probably some others that I'm not thinking of off the top of my head. Passive modifiers add variety to the game by changing the context in which abilities are used; active abilities add variety by, well, giving you more choice for which abilities to use. But crawl already has an enormous variety of abilities available to any player past the early-game, leading to the trueism that players die because they forgot one of a hundred abilities in the corner of their inventory - fog, curare, etc etc etc.

All that long lead-up is to say that there is in fact a cost to adding more abilities! You said earlier that you prefer adding active abilities to passive modifiers (and this post is as much a response to that as anything), but I think you should weight the costs on player sanity a little higher than you do.

(this is why poison spit & breathe fire are the worst random muts, as an aside.)

[rchandra]

Is it so much to consider a memorable, iconic ability for Sif Muna that fits within her design?

Sif's channelling ability is strong enough to fit this. Unlike a staff, it can be very fast to use in combat, and doesn't cost your weapon hand.

[damiac]

This is a little out there, but what about a 'request spell' ability, unlocked at 6*, and it costs enough piety to drop you to 4*.

When using it, the skills menu pops up and you pick a school(or 2 or 3 maybe). You get a spell from that school that you don't already have access to, in the form of a book. The book could just have the 1 spell, or maybe it just gives you a randart book with several spells that match.

Ideally, you'd be able to choose a specific spell, but I can't imagine a smooth interface for that. But if Sif could guarantee you spells you want, it'd make for an interesting god. The high piety cost means you're probably only asking for a few specific spells, since (I think) the big piety hit would slow down your regular book gifts.

[duvessa]

Considering that Vehumet and Kiku used to guarantee spells you want, and were very deliberately and specifically changed to not guarantee spells you want, I doubt that's the direction Crawl's devteam wants to go.

[Octopode-monk-of-XOM]

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[and into]

Comparing Sif's channeling to a dude with very high evocations and CBoE clearing a ziggurat is kind of like saying that Okawaru's heroism becomes less valuable when your physical skills are above level 22 (and when your weapon skill is higher than skill needed for min delay minus 5). Sif channeling comes online at *, like Oka's heroism, so you can get it as early as D4 or D5, and while channeling scales better with invocations than heroism does, both require little/no invo skill to actually be useful. That's a major benefit at a time when it is very helpful. Even late game you don't need to dump a ton of experience to get excellent MP restore on demand. Really the ability only begins losing out to CBoE after very, very large amounts of experience have been accumulated by your character.

In short, basing god design around how characters end up when (nearly) clearing three ziggurats is not very sound.

__________

Anyway, I agree with what PF says about lots of abilities, but I kind of like the dynamic of channeling during fights, taking a turn to regain some (reliable but randomized) amount of MP while also taking care to position myself to cast spells. I get that out of combat channeling is bad though. I think some kind of auto-channel hardwired into the game could improve that while keeping the active portion of channeling. Could be flavored as "meditation"—when resting (i.e., no enemies are around and you have not been moving or taking any action for X turns), you begin "meditating" and get back MP as if you were channeling, based on current invocations, but without the hunger cost. This would be a buff to Sif (since no hunger) but mostly it would be a huge interface improvement. Alternatively just make it passive, probably along the lines Hurkyl suggests; I do feel something is lost there, but on the other hand, it would differentiate Sif's MP gain from items.

I don't think it is necessary, but having Sif refund some of the MP (chance and amount scaling with piety) from when you miscast a spell would be neat and flavorful buff, which would help miscast protection feel more useful (and also would make high piety more useful, even after you've gotten all the spells you want). (To clarify, miscast protection is useful, but people tend to underrate/underestimate it, some MP refund could help people enjoy Sif more.)

My only other real gripe concerning Sif is with piety gain, simply because, depending on where the altar spawned, I often find that around the time I worship Sif is also the time I want to start training some dodging/fighting/weapon skill, depending on exactly where the altar spawned. I guess you could say that this is a "conduct" but what bothers me is that it ends up being inconsistent with the advantages Sif offers. Barring a late game switch or something, you (realistically) only worship Sif when you have chosen a book background, and you are unlikely to have found another useful book lying around, and you are also going to get miscast protection + channeling early on, and part of the benefit there is to let you get by with worse spell success than you otherwise would. But then you come across the altar when (e.g.) fireball is at 30% red, and in order to get piety for channel + protection in the first place, you have to continue training your spell schools. So the spell failure ends up at 14% yellow naturally, just from your skills, when miscast protection comes online—but now even the highest-level spell you got isn't being helped as much by it.

If the point of miscast protection is to give you a bit more leeway with skill training, the method of piety gain counteracts this effect. The protection will certainly help out eventually, but it would feel more consistent IMO if you could get piety early on from things other than training magic. I like "train magic = piety," I'd just give some supplement that helps early on. I'd stand by what I suggested in another thread: As the god of knowledge/lore, Sif likes it when you "obtain lore" about items—every time you ID an unknown item that was discovered after worshiping Sif (no stockpiling for piety), you get some piety.

[Octopode-monk-of-XOM]

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[johlstei]

I don't think finding CBOE around lair/orc is particularly common/reliable, and even if you do, do you often have enough XP in evocations to use it at all safely then? I find casters much more XP-starved than brutes, and aside from channeling items, evocations largely overlap with spells.

[Octopode-monk-of-XOM]

removed

[johlstei]

I don't have time for a proper response now, but your posts are fine. Don't take my disagreeing with you to mean "don't post", no sane design forum works like that.

[crate]

CBOE and channeling work differently and are good in different situations.

CBOE requires significantly more xp-investment and is always going to be significantly riskier (and for mummies, is basically completely unusable unless you have clarity, since generally in the situations where you would use cboe paralysing yourself for 10 turns is not acceptable).

CBOE is very good but it is not exactly a replacement for Sif channeling, and of course you also have to find one, which is not guaranteed.

[njvack]

For what it's worth, I also think Sif is fundamentally OK, and that her main issues are interface ones. Channeling, oddly, doesn't bother me a huge amount (though it may be because I use it way less than I should); the thing that more irks me is having like 50 books and needing to find and travel to the book you want when it's time to learn a spell. It's somewhat tedious in even a non-Sif game, really, but more books makes it crazier.

I know the idea of a divine library — some way to catalog the spells you've found — has come up here before. Although the idea of a god reducing interface burden that exists for all spellcasters bugs me a bit, if it thematically fits for anyone, it'd be Sif.

[rchandra]

Sif books are also worse than normal books since so many of them are artefacts. I can ctrl-f "book" and see "Death, Annihilations, Envenomations, Ice" and figure out what's available to me. When every book title is "Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre" the lack of a library or global M screen gets much worse, I need to decide which spells I might want and ctrl-F each of those individually.

[Sprucery]

Every character should be able to list all the spells they've seen in one screen for convenience. Sif could grant the ability to memorize spells straight from that screen.

[johlstei]

Every character should be able to list all the spells they've seen in one screen for convenience. Sif could grant the ability to memorize spells straight from that screen.

There's no reason to only give an interface convenience to people worshiping a single god. Disabling it in abyss/pan unless you worship Sif would be okay.

[TeshiAlair]

Here's an idea to make Sif a bit more interesting:

Weaken low level mana channeling slightly.
At higher piety, give an ability called "greater channelling." This requires a baseline amount of MP to work ala Sublimation, and costs some piety, but gives you a great deal of mana and gives MR- to nearby enemies.

[zardo]

I also think Sif channeling is quite good and can't quite believe people are serious about CBoE, which requires vastly more invo to be any good and is pretty much only useful for sustaining high mana throughput in the few situations where that's meaningful. Not only is it useless in an emergency it can actually cause one and requires backup items to protect from bad outcomes. I think this shows a significant misunderstanding of what Sif channeling is good for.

[Greyr]

invo

CBoE requires evocations, but you probably already know that.

[Siegurt]

Actually, what I would *really* like for Sif, is if invocations counted as a "spellcasting skill" for the purpose of gaining sif piety, having to stop (or slow down) piety gain in order to use the skills the piety gets you is kinda annoying. Perhaps just a pet peeve of mine.

[PleasingFungus]

Actually, what I would *really* like for Sif, is if invocations counted as a "spellcasting skill" for the purpose of gaining sif piety...

That seems neither intuitive, nor flavorful, nor particularly necessary for balance. It's a tradeoff, just like all skill investments.

[khalil]

Actually, what I would *really* like for Sif, is if invocations counted as a "spellcasting skill" for the purpose of gaining sif piety...

That seems neither intuitive, nor flavorful, nor particularly necessary for balance. It's a tradeoff, just like all skill investment choices are...

It's a god encouraging you doing something that the god doesn't want you to do. Part of me wishes it was based of spellcasting similar to how Kiku's stuff is based of necromancy, but then the formula would have to be changed because there is approximately a 100% chance of a Sif worshiper having way more spellcasting than they do invo.

[PleasingFungus]

It's a god encouraging you doing something that the god doesn't want you to do.

trog encourages you to eat corpses so that you can berserk, but that means you can't sacrifice them to get piety! what's the deal with that?

the invo thing is a tradeoff, just like every other non-spellcasting skill investment a sif character might want to make. dodging, fighting, evo, invo are all good for sif characters, but none of them get you sif piety, so you'll probably invest in them less and/or later than you would without that constraint. that's okay.

[Aule]

Crawl already has a nasty habit of throwing too many abilities at the player - potions, scrolls, wands, spells, god abilities, mutation abilities, species abilities, evocable equipment, elemental evocables, moving, firing, and probably some others that I'm not thinking of off the top of my head. Passive modifiers add variety to the game by changing the context in which abilities are used; active abilities add variety by, well, giving you more choice for which abilities to use. But crawl already has an enormous variety of abilities available to any player past the early-game, leading to the trueism that players die because they forgot one of a hundred abilities in the corner of their inventory - fog, curare, etc etc etc.

All that long lead-up is to say that there is in fact a cost to adding more abilities! You said earlier that you prefer adding active abilities to passive modifiers (and this post is as much a response to that as anything), but I think you should weight the costs on player sanity a little higher than you do.

(this is why poison spit & breathe fire are the worst random muts, as an aside.)

To me, most of those "too many" thrown out things are thrown out because they're just not interesting enough to bother with. That includes several potions, scrolls, wands, spells, and abilities that I just do not care about at all. By contrast, the suggestions about buffing Sif - especially the one that involves guaranteed cast - are very interesting to me. I won't play with Sif anymore because there's no real benefit to doing so compared to some other gods. Changes as suggested would make the game that much more interesting, IMO.

[dpeg]

I cobbled together a dev wiki page on the matter, which was partially inspired by this thread (hence my posting) but especially by ##crawl-dev discussion. It's not clear that anything will happen along these lines, but the ideas are there.

[Hurkyl]

I see that some of the suggestions on the page are about limiting access to spell gifts. I really don't like those suggestions: in my opinion, one of the neatest features of Sif Muna is the ability to freely and dramatically customize your spell set for particular branches. e.g. I might unmemorize some other spells I'm commonly using to make room for Ignite Poison and Cure Poison when visiting Spider, or Airstrike when visiting Slime, or Flight when visiting Shoals, or other similar things.

I've occasionally done this in a rather dramatic fashion, e.g. loading up on wizardry effects and unmemorizing several buff / miscellaneous / attack spells to make room for Tornado in Slime long before I'm actually ready to add it to my normal spell list (miscast protection is nice here too, when I'm casting tornado with 33% to 50% miscast rates). Or similarly to grab Necromutation early when visiting Tomb.

Of course, I know many people are more rigid with their spell selections -- I know only grew accustomed to taking advantage of this because I played Sif Muna a lot when I first started (and still do) -- and such people don't find this interesting. But I think it would be a shame to make changes that eliminate this feature entirely.

[The Ferret]

Every character should be able to list all the spells they've seen in one screen for convenience. Sif could grant the ability to memorize spells straight from that screen.

I was idly thinking of a possible Sif-replacement deity (note: not saying that Sif needs to be replaced) that works something like that.

This deity - let us call her Sil Runa the Archivist - appreciates sacrificing spellbooks (to add to her archives). In return, Sil Runa offers you spells with a total spell level equal to the total spell level of the sacrificed spellbook, minus spells in the book you've already memorized. The spells are weighted toward schools you have trained, but with a significant (20%? 40%?) chance to be completely random spells. Sil Runa aims to keep your "spell library" balanced in terms of spell level; the fewer spells you have at a given spell level, the more likely it is that a spell will be granted at that level.

A use case scenario: you roll up a human Venom Mage. After memorizing Mephitic Cloud, you find an early Sil Runa altar, and choose to follow her. You sacrifice your Young Poisoner's Handbook. There are 15 spell levels worth of spells in the book, but you've already memorized 4 (Sting and Mephitic Cloud). In return, you are granted 11 spell levels' worth of spells, that you may memorize at any time:

[*] First spell generated. Roll a die; it's a completely random spell. Roll another die, with the proper weighting; it will be a SL 2 spell. Randomly pick a SL 2 spell; Sure Blade is entered into your spell library.
[*] Second spell generated, 9 levels left. Roll a die; it's a spell that uses one or more of the schools you have skill in (at this point, let's say Poison Magic and Conjurations). Roll another die; it will be a SL 6 spell. Randomly pick from eligible spells: Conjure Ball Lightning is entered into your spell library.
[*] Third spell generated. Yada yada, it's useful, it's SL 2. Cure Poison is entered into your spell library. But you just sacrificed Cure Poison! Oh well. Hope you still want it.
[*] Fourth spell generated. There's only one spell level left. Should there be a failure rate, so you aren't virtually guaranteed every SL 1 and SL 2 spell in the game, just by the way the algorithm works? In any case, if there is failure, you pass, and you get Magic Dart.

Obviously this is a very rough start, and it's more of a thought experiment than anything. Lots of rough edges to smooth out, even with the core mechanic. I'm thinking that Sil Runa demands that spellbooks be added to her archives; each spellbook that you know of (i.e. can find via Ctrl-F) and don't sacrifice lowers your piety cap by some amount - so you can't reserve books for use after you abandon her (or if you do, you have to choose carefully). Piety gain has to be worked out; obviously 1dX piety per spellbook doesn't work. I'm thinking piety is awarded by the number of un-memorized spell levels offered, but that presents its own problems - if you're a Conjurer and you find a transmutations book on Dungeon:4, should you be rewarded with a massive chunk of piety because the rand was kind to you? And then in the late game, piety gain slows down - what to do about that?

I'm thinking that Sil Runa should be attractive to hybrid characters, not just pure spellcasters. (Yeah, everyone except for a Troglodyte should be a hybrid, but you know what I mean.) I'm not quite sure how to accomplish that, but I have ideas. Gifts of scrolls from her archives? Maybe unique evocables too?

Sorry for the derail - just thinking out loud!

[Wahaha]

One problem with this idea is that it doesn't let the player learn a spell that was found earlier. Which is a pretty common thing to do. So I think it's too restrictive and less useful for the player in many ways, and also more complicated.

[CommanderC]

Sif is a pretty weak god, but it doesn't bother me. The real problem of Sif is the user interface of his/her channeling ability. A simple solution would be to transform it into a duration, like Trog's Hand, that can be activated and deactivated, like a ring of flight.

[Siegurt]

Hm, what if it restored more per channel, but had a cooldown such that you couldn't invoke it as often.

So for example right now say you could channel three times for 3 Mana each time, instead you could channel once for 9, but then couldn't activate it again for 2 more turns. (Numbers being arbitrary) It would be a fairly small buff to channeling, and would reduce the number of times you needed to activate the abiliity.

[crate]

That would actually be a really huge buff to channeling in the situations where it matters (you get two more turns to do productive actions) and wouldn't even solve the problems with it out-of-combat (you still want to channel instead of rest, except now you can't even do that with e.g. 020aa since you can't repeat-command it).

[Glenstorm]

A simple smallest change approach would be to just automatically channel every time you take an empty action "Being otherwise idle, you channel a little mana." The food cost would probably have to be cut from channeling, but the food cost wasn't really that interesting anyway, and rarely hindered using the ability. This gives you channeling on resting for free, and saves you from having to bind 's' or '.' to aa for combat.

[damiac]

Food is a concern if you're channeling in battle, it takes time to eat. Out of battle it's true that it doesn't really matter much usually.