Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 689
Joined: Saturday, 12th December 2015, 23:54
Remove spell hunger
Spell hunger is rarely of tactical importance and recent development has tended to make it even less tactically important (all food costing 1 turn to eat).
Spell hunger misleads new players. See every new player mage start morgue in existence and some new player guides. DCSS has a disproportionate amount of in-game focus on food and hunger relative to how important the mechanic actually is, and spell hunger is a particularly big offender. The constant messages about feeling hungry basically trick new players into bad skilling. It makes playing a mage start in Crawl harder to get into for no good reason.
Spell hunger is frequently annoying. The need to eat chunks after every fight is a major distraction that interrupts game flow. Characters that kill things with spells end up eating hundreds of extra chunks per game relative to ones that kill things with a weapon. You can mitigate these hundreds of extra meaningless keypresses (or the automation of them that's used because actually interacting with Crawl's food system is an unbearable chore) by overtraining spellcasting, a tedium versus power tradeoff that is explicitly against Crawl's design philosophy. But you often can't eliminate them. A character with 18 spellcasting and 26 int has #### hunger on level 6 spells, which is ridiculous.
Spell hunger is bad for Crawl's food clock. Ostensibly, the food clock should serve as a limit on degenerate play. It doesn't function very well in practice because it's extremely loose, and it's extremely loose because characters take very variable amounts of time and food to win the game. Spell hunger is a huge offender here. As long as Crawl has to be balanced around mage starts that eat 600+ chunks a game, the food clock is never going to work effectively. Eliminating this extreme, ridiculous outlier of food consumption would be a good first step toward a food clock that actually does what it's supposed to do, and you'd be able to follow it up pretty fast with a ration rebalance and chunk removal.
Remove spell hunger with no compensation.