white_noise wrote:I don't get all the conspiracy with numbers. I think in games like this everything should be perfectly clear. So when you build your character you know exactly why you pick this and that. Not like "let's try this and see what happens". Hardcorish nature of the game makes experiments deadly.
The tension between uncertainty and the cost of experimenting to remove that uncertainty are one of the main features of roguelikes. Even if you have perfect information about everything that your character has seen, and know every item and enemy he might see in the future, and know everything about the game mechanics, you still wont know what is around that next corner. If you have an enemy before you and know all the damage ranges and probabilities and everything, the outcome of the fight is still random. You might win easily, or take a lot of damage, or even die. You wont know until you fight it. And how to deal with that is the thrill of playing roguelikes.
In a game that is built on uncertainty and randomness, more information just leads to cognitive overload at some point. Crawl is designed so you don't need perfect information about everything to win, and even to play very well. Giving people information means they will want to use it, and depending on the player this will either lead to boredom, or to hunger for even more information. It's really a lose-lose situation. Of course information helps, but people don't even read the manual. Waving numbers in the face of people who don't understand them isn't going to accomplish anything.
That being said, I can see how displaying the same bar for every spell and labeling it "power" is misleading. I'm sure there is something about this in the manual, which everyone really should read because it is very useful, so I'm not too bothered by it. But if someone came up with a better label for that column that would be nice.