Patch with new classes

[Antoine]

I'm toying with the idea of producing a patch for V that adds new classes.

Now wondering whether it would be interesting for one of the mage half-caster classes to have a very limited number of spells. I.e. they have access to all the normal spells in the spellbooks, but they can only learn a few of them (say, 1 per 4 character levels rounded up).

Might create some interesting decisions

A.

[emulord]

Whatever you do, make sure that at Level 50, maxint/wis you can learn ALL the spells your class is allowed to learn. We dont want to prevent someone from learning a good lategame spell because they learned wonder earlier.

[Pete Mack]

Whatever you do, make sure that at Level 50, maxint/wis you can learn ALL the spells your class is allowed to learn. We dont want to prevent someone from learning a good lategame spell because they learned wonder earlier.

Why not?
If you want to learn the important spells, don't pick up wonder.

Even priests can learn pretty much everything they care about, guaranteed, with max learned spells = total spells - 5.
(All you have to do is ignore holy infusions.)

[Antoine]

Why not?
If you want to learn the important spells, don't pick up wonder.

Even priests can learn pretty much everything they care about, guaranteed, with max learned spells = total spells - 5.
(All you have to do is ignore holy infusions.)

How would a priest do with just 6 spells?

A.

[ewert]

Why not?
If you want to learn the important spells, don't pick up wonder.

Even priests can learn pretty much everything they care about, guaranteed, with max learned spells = total spells - 5.
(All you have to do is ignore holy infusions.)

This requires foreknowledge of obscure game mechanics, which new players lack, and IMHO thus can be thought of as baaaad...

[nullfame]

Now wondering whether it would be interesting for one of the mage half-caster classes to have a very limited number of spells.

I like this for Ranger since she has practically full access to the book. In practice she would just ignore the attack/status spells and focus on detection, escape, and boosts.

This requires foreknowledge of obscure game mechanics, which new players lack, and IMHO thus can be thought of as baaaad...

Oh, I don't know. I guess. If the spells were introduced sufficiently slowly it might not be such an issue. I.e., by the time you get your first spell you have 5 choices, by the time you get your second you have 9 (10-1 you learned). In a scenario like that there is never a time where you would choose wonder over the other available options.

I see that mechanic as fundamentally no different than priests stop learning spells on cl7 to guarantee orb on9.

[Derakon]

The main problem with limiting the number of spells you can learn to a number less than the total number of spells in-game is that the number of spells in-game (and what those spells are) is totally opaque. Most new players probably assume that the four spellbooks in the town are it, until they realize that they can learn more spells than there are in those four. After that, each dungeon spellbook is a complete unknown so they don't know if they should be saving spells for later or if they can learn that really tempting-looking spell they already have access to.

Veterans will just figure out which spells they don't use enough to justify (or alternately, can trivially be replaced by items, e.g. Satisfy Hunger, Light Area). Most non-knowledge spells are of marginal utility if you're playing as a hybrid class.

[EpicMan]

So you either force players to learn esoteric metagame information or have a very large probability new players will make bad choices and possibly "kill" their character without them actually dying.
Or you let players use all the spells available to their level and just limit what spells the class can cast. In which case you decide the spell-set instead of the player.

There are a couple of ways to make limited player spell selection work, but they require some re-coding:
1) Implement, but allow the player to change spell selections, either by a service in town, by a scroll that is not sold in town but is not prayer book 9-rare either, or maybe at levelup or learning new spells.
2) Warn the player explicitly up front that they only get about X spells per spellbook, so they have some idea of how many spells are available to learn. They still don't know which ones are best, but they are warned not to learn all of the low-level spells.
3)Let the player choose what spells they have access to before starting the game; this way they can make their decisions without super-limited options (in theory, assuming good spell descriptions and basic Angband knowledge). Players could still shoot themselves in the foot if they choose a lousy selection of spells but they got to pick out of the full selection, knowing what was left for them.

[EpicMan]

My last post sounded kind of harsh, I didn't intend for it to be. I think choosing a subset of the available spells is an interesting game mechanic, and would play a patch/variant that did it. I just was trying to point out the current system doesn't do what you want very well.