dpeg wrote:Book amnesia is also not terribly important because there are so many amnesia scrolls around. Of course, that could easily be changed: imagine Crawl with only 50% as many amnesia scrolls, or 25%, or 0%.
i think reducing the number of amnesia sources is a pretty bad idea; without sif amnesia, i've certainly ended up in situations where i very strongly desired amnesia but only had book amnesia available. this is especially common with veh, i think.
HardboiledGargoyle wrote:Anybody tried using it in-game to some advantage? You have to look at what books you have, what spells are in what books, what books you can afford to destroy. Map it all out. This is necessary if you want to turn the maximum possible number of unwanted books into amnesia scrolls. And you need to plan this out ahead of time, because once you destroy a book, there's no going back. So get a pencil out. It's an uninspired minigame, shallow yet complicated.
Compare! Much better is the old suggestion to make amnesia free, and when a spell gets memorized, have that spell removed from that book. To boot, that would be consistent with the behavior of other reading materials found in the dungeon. Spell books comprise the only remaining text that doesn't disappear after use! (Random Uselessness used to sometimes re-assemble itself but RIP.)
most of this is fair; the 'shallow yet complicated' sentence doesn't actually mean anything, but i wouldn't argue with the objection that 'optimal play' for book amnesia is unfun.
not super enthusiastic about free amnesia. i don't think book amnesia would need a replacement if it were removed, beyond maybe somewhat more ?amnesia, and i think deciding what to use spell slots on is probably going to be a much less interesting commitment if you don't have to worry about freeing them up after. the consequence of not being able to re-memorize spells you amnesia'd (without another book) seems like it'd be almost completely irrelevant.