Book amnesia should be more visible


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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 17:39

Book amnesia should be more visible

A lot of players don't actually know it exists.

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 17:51

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

I guess the prompt for using a scroll of amnesia, or perhaps the description of the scroll of amnesia, could mention book destruction as an alternative.

I'm not sure where else it should be.

Does ctrl-I do anything? That could give a list of memorized spells and offer to forget them, then ask if you want to destroy a book in inventory, use an amnesia scroll in inventory, walk to one of the books holding that spell, or walk to an amnesia scroll stack. That's clippy-esque in its handholding, but the OP doesn't make any proposals.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 18:04

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

Probably spellbook descriptions should explain book amnesia.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 18:41

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

Why it even exists? Have anyone had a game where amnesia scrolls would not be enough?

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 18:43

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

I've updated the REST manual on the dev wiki in both the Books section (where it was overly prominent) and the Spellcasting section (where it was not mentioned at all).
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 18:48

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

sanka wrote:Why it even exists? Have anyone had a game where amnesia scrolls would not be enough?


I agree, I don't think it's necessary to have both book and scroll amnesia.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 18:51

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

xentronium wrote:
sanka wrote:Why it even exists? Have anyone had a game where amnesia scrolls would not be enough?


I agree, I don't think it's necessary to have both book and scroll amnesia.


I've found it helpful in low scroll games where I have several duplicates of a spell in different books. Especially when I memorize a useless spell to build skill for a spell I can't memorize, and run out of scrolls to remove the spell. Well-traveled players may disagree, but it's useful for noobs and removing this function "adds nothing". Sorry that the existence of this ability causes you such pain.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 18:57

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

I think you can now memorize spells without miscasts, so I guess it's rare to be useful to learn a low level spell just to train for a higher level one.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 18:58

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

Alternately, you could always make book amnesia more prominent while eliminating the scroll.

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 19:02

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

sanka wrote:Why it even exists? Have anyone had a game where amnesia scrolls would not be enough?


No, but it's fun to use up extra spellbooks like this to save amnesia scrolls.

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 19:31

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

sanka wrote:Why it even exists? Have anyone had a game where amnesia scrolls would not be enough?


Yes, actually, I did have one game where I actually didn't have enough amnesia scrolls to change my spell list around like I wanted to. Whether functionally unlimited amnesias are desirable is unlikely however.

More often I do it 'just in case', for the same reason I drop piles of jerky, bread, royal jellies, and fruit all over the dungeon rather than just eating them on the spot. Because maybe this will be that one game where I run out of permafood...

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 19:40

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

FR:
No more scrolls of amnesia.
Forgetting a spell removes that one spell from the book and changes the book description to "[adjective] damaged". The book is not destroyed until the last spell is removed from it.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 19:46

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

I think that (scroll | book destruction) and Sif would be enough sources of amnesias. That is, if we want spell choice to be an interesting thing, which I think it could be.

I guess I think book destruction is inherently more interesting than the scroll, especially when the scroll does the exact same thing as a god ability.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 19:57

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

The god ability changes things further though, in the sense that you can plan on infinite amnesia, and that lets you change your gameplan more seriously than "a lot of times, within reason". With sif you can do it for every branch or even individual tough enemies.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 20:44

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

johlstei wrote:The god ability changes things further though, in the sense that you can plan on infinite amnesia, and that lets you change your gameplan more seriously than "a lot of times, within reason". With sif you can do it for every branch or even individual tough enemies.

Well, the ability uses piety (and a fair amount of it) so it's at least kind of limited. And I have a really hard time imagining myself actually doing this; the number of good spells that I can reasonably cast is usually a much stricter limit than the number of spell slots I have.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 20:48

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

Well... it uses sif piety, so it's not really that limited. I've used it pretty liberally, and never dropped a piety star or anything.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 20:50

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

Maybe it should cost more piety to amnesia spells memorized before worshiping Sif.
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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 21:13

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

sanka wrote:Why it even exists? Have anyone had a game where amnesia scrolls would not be enough?

Several times, yes.

If we had to remove one of book or scroll amnesia, I'd argue that book amnesia is more interesting (albeit more problematic for other projects people talk about, e.g. the 'goldification' of books); I'm not convinced that we need to remove either, however.

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 22:45

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

Leaving only book amnesia makes Vehumet's spell gifts really awkward, you'd want to remove them or revert them back to books (or you could duplicate sif's ability I guess).
How is book amnesia more interesting? It's not like you're going to use it if you still want the book...

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 23:17

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

you'll use [book amnesia] if you want the spell levels more than you want the book; that's not the same as not wanting the book at all.

I have been in situations where I destroyed books which I had some desire to keep around for later because I needed spell levels now; not often, but it has happened.

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 23:30

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

I'd prefer to have just scrolls of amnesia. The few times I've used book amnesia it was a bother to search around the dungeon for the optimal book to use for it, especially if I'm amnesia-ing more than one spell and each of my spells appear in multiple books. It was just too much effort for something that wasn't really fun.

Plus a typical thing you want to amnesia is your lower-level spells from your background's starting book. There are several of those and usually only one book, so book amnesia wouldn't be enough.
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Post Thursday, 4th June 2015, 00:05

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

OK, how about this:

Learning a spell (from a book) removes the spell from the book and marks the book as damaged or worn or whatever. If you learn the final spell in a book, that destroys the book.
Special passive ability for Sif Muna followers in good standing: learning a spell from a book doesn't remove the spell from the book. This applies both to found and gifted books. No piety cost. Rationale: Sif Muna doesn't like it when books are damaged.
Kiku gives books, but doesn't care that you damage them to learn spells from them.
Vehumet's spells already don't come from books, so that's not relevant here.
Any character who knows spells can choose to forget a spell at any time as a special ability, regardless of the original source of the spell.
No more scrolls of amnesia.

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Post Thursday, 4th June 2015, 01:32

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

Berder wrote:I'd prefer to have just scrolls of amnesia. The few times I've used book amnesia it was a bother to search around the dungeon for the optimal book to use for it, especially if I'm amnesia-ing more than one spell and each of my spells appear in multiple books. It was just too much effort for something that wasn't really fun.

This is a very reasonable point, and something I've noticed. (Our book UI is generally not that great; I've seen multiple people talk about stashing specifically so that they could see all memorizeable spells at a time, for example.)

Berder wrote:Plus a typical thing you want to amnesia is your lower-level spells from your background's starting book. There are several of those and usually only one book, so book amnesia wouldn't be enough.

This is kind of silly; 'not enough' is not the relevant concept!

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Post Thursday, 4th June 2015, 09:57

Re: Book amnesia should be more visible

sanka wrote:Why it even exists? Have anyone had a game where amnesia scrolls would not be enough?

Or otherwise - have anyone had a game where magic books wouldn't enough for deleting spells?
I can't remember such game.

PleasingFungus wrote:This is a very reasonable point, and something I've noticed. (Our book UI is generally not that great; I've seen multiple people talk about stashing specifically so that they could see all memorizeable spells at a time, for example.)

I always do, an I thought everybody do.
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