Sif Muna

Sif Muna is a god very popular with spellcasters because the abities are very reliable and useful. However, she is also unpopular with designers because the abilities are all bland (neither amnesia nor channeling nor book gifts are unique) and there is no theme to speak of. There are a number of proposals on how to improve the god. — dpeg 2011-09-19 21:09

Sif Muna removes the two basic problems of any spellcaster in the most simplistic manner: How to obtain spells, and how to get rid of them? The piety system being too plain (piety gain for training magical skills) is part if the problem.

The issue is old, not new: 2876082 by dpeg, 2811313 by brannock and 1962498 by nrook.

By gammafunk and dpeg. See also this forum thread — 2014-09-24 21:18

Keep as an active power, but add a small piety cost and increase the food cost. The amount of MP gained can go up a bit.
Rationale: channeling is an interesting active power, but is annoying to use after combat. The change wants to keep the former, and disincentivise the latter.

Sif helps with increasing the max MP cap. (By Hurkyl.)

(Passive Int increase has also been mentioned, but I like increased max MP better: stat increases already features in Zin and Cheibriados; you can get Int boosts from items, whereas overriding the max MP cap is a solitary, strong effect; this effect makes channeling more relevant in combat.)

Sif doesn't need another active ability for power concerns (the god is strong and works well) but there are reasons to add one nonetheless: providing choices (currently, Sif provides tools, but no new decisions), and providing opportunities to use piety. There are a number of ideas for an active, late-ish power. Nothing is settled at this time:

• Guaranteed Casting: spend substantial piety to cast a spell without failure chance. Pro: a strong, ultimate, active variant of miscast protection. Con: people are worried this might be too strong. (By Brannock.)
• Guaranteed Single Casting: as above, but just once for each spell.
• Delayed Casting: Does to any available spell what Delayed Fireball does to Fireball.
• Faster Casting: Like Okawaru's Finesse, only for casting. Strong, but not very enticing. (Plus, Sif will eventually hand out Haste.)

Some aspects of Sif get complained but are not the target of this:

• books come too late or are too weak (we don't think so)
• miscast protection is too weak and should refund the MP (note that increased max MP indirectly addresses this)
• piety from training magical skills (this is perhaps true but will not be addressed this time)

This is for much later. The concept:

• Any book the character stumbles upon (i.e. sees) goes directly to Sif. (It disappears. You can assess it through M as if you had the book in inventory.) Theme: Sif wants followers to transfer books from the dirty dungeons into her impeccable library.
• Sif will still gift books, but these are (a) more special (no duplicates!) and (b) temporary. Dropping such a book makes it go to Sif's library.
• You can keep a book as long as you like (difference to Vehumet's spell gifts) but when Sif is ready to lend another book, she tells you.

There is an obvious parameter here: how many books Sif will lend you at the same time. The above uses just one book, but it could easily be two or three.

Some consequences:

• When you abandon Sif, the dungeon is rid of books. This is intentional!
• Before abandonment, you can (and should) finetune your spellset, because you won't get new spells for a time. I think post-god change effects like this (managing a scarcity) are more interesting than the god randomly trying to kill… and failing, unless you forgot to play by the numbers.

Now there is definitely demand for a general casting god. What follows is not a proposal for a Sif Muna overhaul, but a collection of ideas on how to modify Sif Muna, keeping that objective but making the whole affair cooler and more flavourful (instead of just nerfing, which would be pretty easy).

• Piety gain for training magical skills is kept, but you get diminishing returns the higher that particular skill is. Rationale: Sif Muna is interested in broadly educated followers, not specialists.
• Sif's theme of knowledge seems to lend itself nicely to something like piety for exploration. However, that will be done for all the good gods anyway. Instead of using the same mechanic for Sif (which for most games is equivalent to piety over time, in contrast to the current slow piety decay under Sif), there could be certain piety chunks for each proof of obtained knowledge: runes spring to mind.
• If using the library idea (see below), then players could donate spellbooks for piety gain. If we also use books as a mean to unlearn spells (see below), then books would have two uses, which might be interesting.
• Expanding on the “god of knowledge” theme, there could also be piety gain for identifying items. A simple mechanic would be to reserve 30 piety for that, which are filled as you identify item base types. (There are various Consolidated Gods proposals for knowledge gods, where such a mechanic might fit better.)

The book gifts leave something to be desired: you amass them and that's it.

• Borrow books instead, i.e. you only get them temporarily. You have to choose which spells to take before they're gone again. (We can and should still keep “Sif Muna's [randart book]” by considering them as proper gifts. The proportion of borrowed versus gifted books could be tweaked, of course.) Some more ideas/options on this:
  • The player can donate books found in the dungeon for piety gain.
  • There could be an ability to keep a borrowed book for longer. Instead of Sif lending books, the player could also browse her library (with piety determining which books you're allowed to see); this should be shop-style lists rather than portal vault-style levels (don't want this ability to be an instant life saver). It seems good to allow the player (at most) one borrowed book. Note that the proposals of temporary books and the library could be combined. Finally, nrook suggests that the library is a fixed set of books (how many you get to see depends on piety).
• Gift spells rather than (or in addition to) books. If doing this, the player should not be able to ask for a specific spells. Rather, Sif could offer a list and the player choose one of them.
• Invocable spell: An ability that gives you a single invocations-castable spell, usable in the same way as other invocations (and hence distinguished from spells). Armour does not affect the casting success, but invocations does. Could be limited in usage or cost piety for each usage. Might be best to allow at most one such invocable spell. Choice of spell could be random (e.g. Sif presents a list of five), or as a gift (you can accept/reject), or more active (you could ask for a spell from some book to be invocabilised). In any case, the level of the spell(s) offered should depend on piety.
• Borrow spells: eronarn much prefers Sif gifting/removing individual spells on a XP-gain timer. You're presented with several spell options (which must match your not-taking-items-into-account capabilities enough to have success rate better than 'Bad'). You choose only one and you immediately have access to casting it and get Sage in all of its schools. It is predetermined whether Sif will take it away or not — let's say, 80% it will be with a very long tail distribution, 20% it's permanent (% increases with piety). Making heavy use of the spells Sif gifts grants piety above and beyond piety gain for training spell skills.
• Copy spells: be able to learn spells used by monsters. This is an interesting idea but suffers from the fact that there are rather few spells cast by monsters. So at least for now, this is mostly flavour, if we want to use it at all.

• higher MP regeneration for a duration
• lesser spell MP cost for a duration
• temporary increase of max MP
• use up spellbook for MP re-gain

However, neither of these lends itself to piety-cost free use as the current Channel Energy does. (Whether that's good or bad depends on how useful Invocations are supposed to be for Sif Muna.) There was the idea to have Sif use Spellcasting, similar to Nemelex using Evocations.

Sif Muna makes not much use of Invocation otherwise, so that makes a lot of sense. — t0d 2011-05-26 11:41

Instead of tweaking Sif, perhaps just go all out and make her a god designed specifically for pure casters; support spellcasting very heavily, but punish 'uncultured, boorish' physical attacks with penance. The following ideas are probably horribly unbalanced, but I'll throw them out there in case something good can be made of them:

• Fighting is deprecated, so followers cannot train Fighting, and cannot attack with anything but magic (and thus must play carefully, with low HP). Either disallow players with Fighting skill higher than some low cutoff (say, 2) from worshiping her, or have such followers' Fighting skill instantly busted down to 0 upon conversion.
• Very slow piety gain, based slightly on spell skill training but more on book sacrifice. Should *not* max out piety before the extended endgame; rather, have very slow gain through an entire game.
• Invocation, costing piety, allowing the player to either request a specific spell or request a specific spellbook (if the latter, piety cost will be slightly higher than than the piety gain from saccing a book; players request a book, learn the desired spells, and sacrifice it back to reclaim part of the piety). Not based on Invocations skill, Sif prefers you to spend your time studying magic instead.
  • “Request” how? New players aren't going to be able to get anywhere with a text prompt; researching every spell/book beforehand seems a bit unrealistic. — OG17 2010-05-16 09:17
• Replace Channel Energy with a constant, low-grade level of MP regeneration boost, based on piety. Endgame players with max piety recover multiple MP per turn (but not the ~8-9 that was possible with the invocation before).
• Remove Forget Spell (players who want it can just request the Selective Amnesia spell).
• Support spell success, based on piety and spell levels, like so: at low piety, followers get flawless casting of all level 1-3 spells (would just start with level 1, but granting flawless level 1 casting is rather meaningless), and as piety gradually increases, players gradually get flawless level 4 casting, and so on, until max piety gives you flawless level 9 casting. The idea, here, is that endgame followers are godly spellcasters but can't do anything else. (Maybe also ban evocations?)

Comments:

My preferrence: replace SA spell with an item; unread a book; Sif builds a RANDOMLY GENERATED(not a single guaranteed spell from Sif!) library, and you can read more as your piety increases. Sif Muna gifts books earlier than she now does but generally gifts much less. Sif Munites gain piety much more slowly than they are now, making Sif a more long term God even with reduced wrath effect. — ahyangyi 2010-02-23 14:12

I am actually not a fan of the added channeling ability. This makes Sif more of a spellcasting god, rather than a god of knowledge and magic. Vehumet is for spellcasting power, and even already has an ability which is extremely similar to channeling. I'd like to see Channeling replaced for Sif by adding 1 spell slot every 2 spellcasting levels, which when lost (by switching gods) automatically cause selective amnesia on the highest power spells first, which would generally not be the ones the player wants to lose. In my opinion, this fits much better with the knowledge theme of Sif, and makes all of those spellbooks a bit more meaningful. — tromboneandrew

I thought it would be a better idea to have the proposed Stealth God gift Enchantments/Translocation books, Jiyva gift Transmutation books, and then remove Sif Muna. This will give players the ability to gain any spell in the game via God worship but they actually have to make a choice more intersting than “Pick Sif and get all spells”. Enchantment/Translocation makes sense for a stealth god thematically (escape, infiltration, and nabbing items). Likewise Jiyva would encourage players to change their shape via Transmutation spellbooks. What do you think? – wesleyshaver

Sif muna could have the following abilities:

1. Divine Inspiration Instant, grants a boost to success rate to any spell cast in the turn this was used. If the spell casting fails, the boost is lost, but the spell automatically succeeds. Thus, a low level spell would be almost perfect with this However, this costs MP, piety, food, and magically contaminates the user. If the boost was used to successfully cast a high-level spell, there is an additional piety and glow cost after the casting (should also depend on the spell's fail rate, getting a boost for a useless spell should be more taxing than a great spell).
   Rationale: Fits in nicely with the theme of knowledge. The spell power boost allows a player to crank his otherwise weak spells to the max. The automatic spell success allows the player to get off that one spell he really needs, while the heightened piety and glow costs ensure that the player cannot simply spam firestorm when they are low level.
2. Bookcasting You cast one spell directly from a book. Basically, you can attempt to cast any spell that you have the book for, without needing to learn it.
   Possible Drawbacks:
   • Any MP cost is doubled, and the spell cannot restore MP (no bookcasting sublimate blood).
   • Piety cost
   • The spell is cast as though spellcasting is much lower, this means higher fail rate, and more food cost.
   • No benefit from wiz bonus
3. Instant learning You may forget a spell. Then, you can learn one spell from any of your spellbooks, or possibly from a couple more that are randomly selected. The learning, if successful, happens instantaneously, costing food, mana, and piety.

I like the amnesia thing–common scrolls for the plebians, and the existing ability unchanged for Sif Munites as an alternative (though borrowing changes the context enough that while mechanically it's the same thing, practically forgetting spells means something much different to her followers). I also like the borrowing idea. I'm a little confused why everyone keeps saying that the randart books should be permanent while the normal books are loans — shouldn't it be the other way around? Sif Muna is willing to part with her more common, mundane books for her loyal followers, but will only grant her own special tomes temporarily. Besides, it seems more fitting that the transient, borrowed spells should be the ones that are thrown together in randomized books while the permanent ones are the books you could already find if lucky. With the borrowing system in place, anything else like that shop-window like “browsing” seems redundant and unnecessary. I also really like the idea of binding one spell from one of your spellbooks to invocations instead of spellcasting, consuming piety instead of MP and relying on invocations rather than spellcasting and your EVP; it provides lots of interesting choices. Do you bind an emergency spell that you want to be able to access instantly without even needing to spend time on channeling, or a spell from a school that you didn't train in but want anyways (for fairness sake, it should use the EXP you've dumped into invocations but adjust it as if your race had the same invocations aptitude that it has in that school)? This should have the requirement that you can't cast the spell unless you have as many dots of piety as its spell level (and thus can't even put anything above level 6 in that slot–including necromutation, though extension is doable–though if you pick extension and use it a lot you'll run out of piety). Making assignment to this slot a one-time thing, like the enchantments certain gods put on weapons or Zin's mutation curing, seems sensible, though making it simply expensive to change is ok too. — Brickman 2010-09-20 06:38

• I liked the earlier suggestion to have Sif Muna's channel energy be a passive regeneration bonus. This is much more balanced imo and removes the need for invocations which I feel never really fit with Sif Muna: the whole point is to learn things for yourself!
• In all the time I've played Sif Muna, I've never found Forget Spell to be useful. There was no reason to use it at all with Selective Amnesia, and with scrolls of amnesia, its usefulness is still ranges from null to mild. It is uncommon to unlearn mid or high level spells, so the use of these scrolls tends not to be pressing need. Even if you find very few of them, it isn't a big deal. You'll mostly be unlearning your early attack spells, rmsl (replace with dmsl) and lev (replace with flight) and so on. You usually unlearn low-level spells which don't take many slots anyway. I really feel as though it could get the axe. I don't think the ability to unlearn spells needs to be emphasized as hugely important, again, it's mostly low-level cantrips being unlearned by high-level characters who have no further need for them. This seems more like housework than an epic ability.
• I also find the usefulness of protection from miscasts to be somewhat questionable. It isn't as though you should really start casting ice storm at Fair in clutch situations just because you have this protection, so I'm not sure precisely how useful it really is. I do know that when I don't have this protection, I don't feel much of a difference. It is useful for learning new schools I guess, but again this isn't hard to deal with, really.
  • Miscast protection is extremely valuable for nearly everything that isn't a direct damage spell. In particular, it allows you to safely cast transmutations and charms sooner than you would otherwise be able to. It's also very useful for Poisonous/Freezing Cloud. — minmay 2011-05-31 23:37
• I'd like to see a system where Sif gives you a virtual library that you can learn from at any time. They always appear on your (M)emorize list, perhaps in a different colour or notation. Make it a list of, say, 9 spells that you slowly gain access to. Over time (perhaps at piety timeout points or whatever), Sif swaps new spells in to replace them, resulting in access to a random set of spells at a given point in time.
• I've harped on about this many times before, but I still feel that the divination magic is wasted on Ashenzari and should in stead be given to Sif Muna. I think it is better to improve an existing god than try to scrape together unrelated things for a new one. It may seem that I am biased against Ashenzari, and that is because I am. Some might say that Sif Muna is too powerful already, I think this is untrue. The problem with Sif Muna is that her powers are of wildly different strengths, with her first power being the best!

Proposal by mumra.

This attempts to completely rework Sif based on the “Librarian” theme, as well as a number of opinions and suggestions I have seen.

The major problem with Sif lies in being somewhat boring and predictable; and lacking in flavour, especially compared to some newer gods. Sif's powers are all about reducing variance which is perhaps not entirely desirable in a game like Crawl. Additionally, none of the powers are particularly connected to a “librarian” theme except the book gifts.

My proposal involves removing all the existing powers (although if the replacements are considered too weak, one or two of them could be brought back in, notably Selective Amnesia and/or Miscast Protection since they are both marginally learning-related, which a librarian would surely approve of). Additionally I propose removing the existing piety gain mechanism (which simply encourages casters to do what they would anyway; i.e. train up their skills - and implies a theoretical situation where it's impossible to gain any more piety once your skills are maxed).

The “librarian” character taken to its conclusion gives us two basic themes in a reworked Sif:

• Exploring the dungeon and finding (returning?) books for Sif's library
• … And doing so quietly

Surely the #1 thing that all librarians hate most (even more so than books being returned late!) is people making noise in their library. This is a core theme of my proposal to give Sif a stronger “librarian” character; it also brings the god to a slightly different target market - suitable for stealthy and stabby characters rather than blasty (Vehumet) type characters.

Sif's main task for worshippers is to find and donate books to her library. This can be done by standing over a book and pressing the 'p' key.

This will award piety; but will also gradually grant access to Sif's complete library (including spells you may not have found).

I propose a library mechanic as follows:

• Sif Muna tracks a “lending level” for each spell school. This starts at zero and caps at nine.
• When you donate a book, a single spell school is picked randomly from the spells in that book, excluding schools in which you have already reached maximum lend.
• On donation of your first book (at any piety level) Sif grants an ability to access the library.
• The library consists of a menu of spells (ideally there will be a first page to choose a spell school, and a second page to choose a spell level, although on either page you can press '*' to list all spells)
• Spells available will be determined by your lending level in the given schools. e.g.: if you have a lending level of Air 1 (and all others zero) then no spells will be available. You need to also have a lending level of Conjurations 1 to gain access to Shock (Conj/Air). This would of course also give you Magic Dart access. If this is too harsh and makes the number of books required to reach high-level spells way too high, then perhaps each book donation could give two or three lending levels. However taking the following point into account, it will still be possible to get higher-level spells (but with less predictability!)
• When you select a spell, Sif will “lend” you a book containing at least that spell (possibly others, possibly including ones at higher levels than you can access). This could be a standard book, randart book, or god themed book. This costs a reasonable amount of piety; you must have enough piety to perform the transaction!
• You can keep the book for a certain number of turns (perhaps modified by invocations or piety). Sif will remind you when it's nearly time for the book to be returned - again with 'p' - you can keep it longer but will suffer a piety hit (late fees).
• Destroying a borrowed book loses you even more piety than destroying a book you have just found!
• Borrowed books should perhaps be immediately revoked if you renounce your faith!

Note: This provides a semi-randomised library that slowly builds up from lowest to highest level spells (still with a chance of getting higher-level ones). But it might still be a bit too predictable, and maybe there should be some further random variation in sometimes making higher-level spells available (and perhaps not all of the lower-level ones immediately). However, as I've proposed will be much easier to implement, maybe the available spells could be fuzzed later if this didn't work out. There will also be a nice bonus in that when you find a really high-level book that your character couldn't possibly use yet, you get to unlock some new lower-level spells that could actually be useful at the current time.

Note: the 5- and 6-star abilities are very powerful and fit very nicely with the “quiet” theme. I don't know if any further abilities (other than the spell library) are truly needed. Still, Animate Spellbook could be fun and of course some existing powers could be kept.

The “Be Quiet” conduct is very excessive here. 20 piety is *huge*. Piety maxes out at 200, although ****** is something like 160. In other words you're proposing a >10% piety loss just for casting a level 9 spell! Since level 9 spells are ones you'd want to cast frequently, this penalty means there's no point in casting these spells at all (the skill investment for them is simply too high to be worth the piety cost). You might as well give penance for them, or even excommunication. The “Wordless casting” power helps a bit, but it still works out to a piety cost for casting spells… likely not worth it.

With that said, I dislike the idea of having a piety cost for “noisy” actions. Sif muna should not give you spells and then heavily disapprove of them. It would be better if sif muna simply did not give these spells at all. But that also seems difficult to justify.

As it is, I think under this proposal the best strategy would be to abandon sif muna if you want to cast high level spells. Or, you could simply avoid sif in the first place if you want high level magic… but in that case, what's the point of a caster god? Right now, this sif proposal sounds like a god that gives you a bunch of spells, and then punishes you for using most of them.

I think you have good ideas here, though. This conduct is the only thing I have a serious issue with. — evilmike 2011-09-19 22:44

The numbers have been toned down, but let me just clarify: Firstly, this is intended to distinguish Sif a little more from the “big guns” spellcaster Vehumet … if all you want to do is cast Foo Storm, Vehumet should be the way to go. Secondly, don't underestimate the high piety silence abilities. This means in reality that whilst you can't use the high explosive spells as much, you can on the occasions when you use them do so without alerting the rest of the level, as well as being able to shut down other spellcasters … actually making those spells somewhat more useful and powerful than under normal circumstances … you just can't spam them as often. — mumra 2011-09-19 22:58

A god for pure casters whose main conduct is to not cast spells. Really. Let's stop at it.
Remember that Sif's piety gain is exactly the opposite – reward for casting spells. And before training changes went in, it was exactly that, just capped at available xp to cure abuse of sitting in a corner and casting repeatedly we had too much of before.
If anything, she should reward casting big spells above cantrips, not the other way around. — KiloByte 2011-09-19 23:07

I did open the proposal stating that I was suggesting a very different theme to Sif. If “pure caster” is an unchangeable aspect of Sif then fair enough, these changes are not appropriate (although perhaps the library mechanic still has potential). Still, if Sif needs adapting to be more interesting, then maybe a change of character could add more depth. Besides; the proposal does not stop you casting big spells; it just introduces a cost for it, and forces the player to come up with tactics other than “spam level 9 spell, channel and repeat”. Vehumet is the god that should reward casting big spells (and does). Sif is about depth and variety of knowledge, not necessarily specialisation or power. — mumra 2011-09-20 00:44

I think the proposal has a lot of potential. The silent casting power would just have to be cheap enough to be of tactical relevance. I like that you'd be casting the most noisy spells in short burts rather than spamming them all the time. Themewise, even the librarian will accept that outdoors there are calling for (noisy) action.
So on one hand, we want silent casting to be expensive enough to make you not spam it. On the other hand, we want to make it cheap enough to be used in all branch ends (say). I believe a value fitting these conditions can be found. Heck, I believe it could even be done with an approach completely bypassing Silent Casting. You'd have some piety hit for loud spells but much less than in the original proposal. The appeal of the Silent Casting idea is that it would have some tactical implications.
Regarding piety: Gain for casting means that all xp spent in Dodging and Stealth (to pick the two most important) is lost on piety. (Doesn't matter much in practice, though.) Piety for exploration plus sacrificing books with piety hits for noises sounds more interesting, at least to me.
On audience: If you're interested in characters who are not pure casters then additional uses of books are good. Dancing Books is a bit bland, but a good start. There could be a second power.
Regarding book sacrifices: I like that you can learn spells from the book before sacrificing it. This increases flexibility quite a lot, in my opinion. (This effect is the sole reason why Sif might want to keep Amnesia, in my opinion.) What about decreasing piety gain (for exploration) for all books seen but not sacrificed? (No matter whether the books is left untouched on the ground or carried or stashed away.) The librarian wants all books after all. This would put more emphasis on spell selection, you may not want to keep a copy of Annihilations in your stash (and also helps god switching abuse — the god should not take away spells you've learned from the library, by the way). — dpeg 2011-09-19 23:41

I've adjusted the piety loss formula to be a little more forgiving; I'm positive it can all be balanced thru testing in any case.
My intent was that the old piety-for-training would go; I didn't mean to indicate piety for exploration (I realise it sounded like that) - although that would be ok, it is going to be used by a number of other gods. If piety gain for stopping noise (i.e. by killing noisy monsters) isn't a good thing - and I realise there are issues with any piety-for-kills mechanic - then maybe something new is needed.
An interesting thing to note about this Sif is that she'd make a good late-game switch; when you've built up a nice pile of books but haven't quite found the spells you need, you could make the switch and donate all your books to get full piety and library access.
I didn't mean that spells would be taken away when you leave - just any books that you'd borrowed. This was to prevent someone spending all their piety on borrowing out books right before ditching Sif. On the other hand, maybe that wouldn't be such a concern at that stage in the game.
Regarding further uses for books and/or piety gain mechanisms; hopefully Wensley has some ideas :) The dancing books are certainly a bit gimmicky and don't hugely fit the theme. — mumra 2011-09-20 00:34

Piety for killing the noisy is okay as long as it is clear in advance who is classified as such. Waiting until a monster wakes to shout is probably not ideal. But while that is in principle okay, we don't want players to wait until a monster caster lets off a loud spell.
Piety on books alone will not carry the god. We could say that Sif likes kills of animals (nobody wants animals in his library). This would be enough to get early piety started.If that's not good enough, we're better off with book sacrifice and exploration. — dpeg 2011-09-21 21:36

Two more ideas from ##crawl-dev:

• This Sif could passively increase MP regeneration in the absence of noise. (Actual increase to depend on piety and/or Invocations). Analysis: no effect is almost all battles, but much quicker reloading afterwards. This got support by elliptic, MarvinPA and others.
• Instead of using actual spell noise which seems to be a lot more complicated than the base noise listed in spell descriptions (I am relying on elliptic here), have a very short list of banned spells (level 9 Conjurations, if I understand correctly).

Adding a conduct to Sif definitely seems like the key to making her interesting, and silence is appropriately unique. However, the game's noise mechanics themselves are too bland to support this. Right now, there is but a tiny handful of noise-generating actions outside of spellcasting, and spells are rather uniform in noisiness by level. If noise can be made interesting, then this becomes an interesting conduct, and the proposal works really well. For example, Sif worshipers might want to go out of their way to learn Levitation so they can avoid the piety hit from splashing around in shallow water, or pick spells they might not normally specifically because they make much less noise than others of their level. — SquashMonster 2011-09-21 20:53

Well not really new, as a lot of the ideas have actually been around for a while, as this page proves. But this proposal (or set of proposals) is triggered by recent Tavern discussion. — DracheReborn 2014-05-22 10:41

https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11017 https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=12375

My takeaways from the discussion are 1) Sif's simplicity is valued by a lot of players 2) Sif's thing is encouraging learning spell skills, so anything that discourages that (i.e. wizardry or casting from Invo) is a no go. Arguably archmagi falls here too. 3) While no one really likes Sif's random gifting, it shouldn't be too similar to other gods (Veh or Kiku)

dpeg summarises it thus as potential areas for Sif improvement in the first thread:

1. book gifting (from permanent books to borrowed books, for example)
2. miscasts (at least better interface)
3. piety gain (from skill training to something exploration related)

For point 2, a patch went in recently (thanks to neil and reaver) that accounts for Sif miscast protection in the spell failure display. For point 3, New Nemelex moving to exploration for piety makes it less attractive to reuse that mechanic for Sif (it's already used by Ash too). Instead I'd point to the suggestion in the second thread, i.e. that Sif grants piety for magic skills already trained before joining (perhaps limit this to new worshippers and not people moving from another god, though maybe this isn't necessary. Zin for example has the same issue.) This should help with getting Sif abilities online faster, which is sometimes an issue with this god.

For point 1, book lending is a theme that a lot of people like and as a result there are many complicated proposals for book lending. IMO simplest is best, and the following explores several proposals in order of increasing complexity.

Sif gets a new ability at ****, called “Request a book” which costs a large amount of piety (maybe from half to 1 * of piety). This ability can be used as often as desired balanced by the large piety cost.

Comparison with old gifting: Book gifts are available slightly earlier now, but costs piety. As an active ability, there is more work (read: keypresses) involved up front, but once you have all the books you want, you can just ignore this ability for the rest of the game without getting showered with books. This is basically very similar to the old system.

Alternatively, make the **** ability “Borrow a book”. The difference with the first proposal is that only 1 gift book at a time is in the character's possession. The effect of this change is that characters will lose access to spells from earlier book gifts, so they'd be encouraged to learn potentially useful spells at an earlier point. Unfortunately this makes the mechanic closer to Veh. IMO there still is distinction with Veh, since the character has control over when access changes and has access to more gift spells at a time. The individual number of spells per book can be a factor of piety. Possible inventory issues with losing the loaned book, but I suppose Sif can just charge penance for a lost book (similar to destroying books).

Casting from books with Sif seems neat thematically, effectively giving characters more spell slots, but unfortunately creates tedious inventory management. This can be alleviated coupled with the “Borrow a book” idea - the character only has 1 divine gift book at a time, and can always cast spells from this book without memorising them. Memorisation works as before to make spells permanent. Amnesty gets a much higher piety cost to encourage casting from book. This distinguishes Sif's loaned spells a bit more from Veh's gifts and gives Sif a small tactical bonus.

It's unclear how much control is desirable, but with either “Request a book” or “Borrow a book”, Sif can provide menus giving a random choice of different categories which are themed to individual spell schools, e.g. choice of Sif's Charms Vol I or Sif's Fire Collection or Sif's Selection of Hexes. Again this seems to be a fairly old and popular idea, but it's a way to differentiate from Veh's more random gifting. At higher piety, Sif can provide more choices of categories each time.