3 magic schools max

[Sandman25]

Every late game mage feels the same. No matter if you are FireStorm/Ice Storm/Tornado/Shatter user, Charms is a no-brainer, almost everyone gets Haste I believe. Most get Translocation with cBlink. Most get Summoning for Dragons/Haunt/Shadow Creatures etc. Necromancy for Regeneration and maybe for Necronomicon spells.

I suggest to limit number of useful magic schools to 3 so FE would have to choose either he wants 27 Conjurations, 27 Fire and 27 Necromancy or 27 Conjurataions, 27 Fire and 27 Translocations or 27 Conjurations, 27 Charms and 27 Necromancy and so on. No character can have more than 3 magic schools with skills greater than 3. So you still can have Necromancy 3, Air 3, Ice 3, Hexes 3 etc if you wish so. I think it would lead to greater diversity in tactics, you would have to adapt to spells you have instead of having an universal set of spells. It would make lower and middle level spells more useful.

[crate]

Every late game mage feels the same.

????

[Sar]

So every Elementalist will play the same, 3-school spells will be mostly useless (because most probably will still want Charms), and wizards, ogres etc. are screwed?
There already is mechanic that is kinda like that, antitraining. But Crawl isn't a very restrictive game, you can max all your skills regardless of race or background.

[Psieye]

Every late game mage feels the same.

????

He probably means "every late game mage wants the same group of support spells: Charms, Phase Shift, cBlink, etc etc". The same kind of complaint as "every late game warrior feels the same: get melee skill, also train Fighting/Dodging/Armour, get Charms online".

To which I say: "you mean in the extended game and there is still plenty variety once god choice and equipment are factored in".

[crate]

so if you learn the same spells every game you have the same spells every game

interesting

[Sandman25]

He probably means "every late game mage wants the same group of support spells: Charms, Phase Shift, cBlink, etc etc". The same kind of complaint as "every late game warrior feels the same: get melee skill, also train Fighting/Dodging/Armour, get Charms online".

Yes, exactly. Thank you for the clarification.

[crate]

Those spells are good but there are definitely games where you do not want to learn haste. I sometimes get phase shift, almost never get cblink, usually learn but almost never cast blink. There are a few spells that almost every character who casts spells will want to learn but the number of those are pretty small, probably about 10 spell levels total.

edit: by the way I was pretty sure that this was what you meant from the start but I just plain didn't agree with your premise

[Sandman25]

Yes, I realize my suggestion is extemely unlikely to be implemented. It just does not feel right to have Ice/Fire Storm/Necromutation/Haste/cBlink/Summon Dragons at the same time.

[crate]

Well if you've spent 150k turns killing demons to get that much xp you should be able to get something for it. I don't see why that's a problem. I've certainly never had all those spells on a single character (nor can I really understand why you would want all of those on one character.)

[Swiss]

Yeah, none of those spells are actually on my list of things to always get castable on every character, with the possible exception of Haste. And spell level restrictions -do- exist... if I did want to learn all of those spells, it's quite likely I wouldn't have enough levels to get something else I wanted, even with 27 spellcasting at XL27.

And it's not like you never have to work around a spell not being available - I just did a 15 rune game where a spell I desperately wanted failed to show up ever, and I had to work around that. It's not rare for that to happen - even something relatively common like Haste will sometimes just not exist anywhere when you want to learn it.

[Sandman25]

Ok, you convinced me. I still can self-restict if I want to avoid having the same spells set. Everyone gets what he/she wants spell-wise.