Class/magic feature branch

[Derakon]

What does the -10 in the spell effects tell me?

Frost Bolt for example:
effect:BOLT_OR_BEAM:COLD:-10

And how to define the max range for a spell, currently i see only TOUCH or BOLT_BEAM?

I was going to suggest you read the documentation at the top of the file, but all it says is:

effect:effectarameter (if needed)arameter (if needed)

So, uh, good question! It might be a modifier of the chance that you get a beam instead of a bolt?

I would hazard a guess that the max range, assuming it's possible to control, is set via a "param" line, but those are also not very well-documented yet.

[Tibarius]

new mage class, working title: wizard

Ok, i have thought about how to design or overwork an arcane caster class and about spell distribution and number of books. Just to let you know Nick, i am updating the mage class with the rogue in mind as hybrid class.

+ I have found a solution for not having the light spells available, i will give an early infravision spell instead, that also increases galadriel phials value because that holds the light spell
+ I have a damage development in mind, which starts with melee-combat for the first spell, then improves to the elemental bolts and finally mana bolt / mana storm
+ i have 9 books, 3 in town, then DL 1, 15, 30, 40, 60, 90
+ rangers get nature magic so elemental brand is not in the mage list anymore
+ enchant armor and enchant weapon is light magic to my understanding, since priest and paladin are both more combat orientated
+ mages do not use pickaxes .... so i will have an arcane version of stone to mud in the spell list, eventually even two: a low level touch and a high level bolt version (this spell is too important for sneaky types which pick their fights)

I will come up with the complete list as soon as i have it done in the class.txt file and testplayed it a while.

But i kindly ask you as maintainer Nick, to give me the OK for that. I don't want to do all the work and then finally you say something like: but i don't like it or i got no time to update the files or something like that.

I am willing to do the work for mage and rogue (arcane magic). But only if i know the time and work will not be wasted.

Edit: My first try to create a burning hands spell with
effect:TOUCH:FIRE
dice:4d4

failed with an parse error. So i either need a documentation of what is possible or i can only use existing syntaxes and replace level / mana / damage / type etc.

[Nick]

But i kindly ask you as maintainer Nick, to give me the OK for that. I don't want to do all the work and then finally you say something like: but i don't like it or i got no time to update the files or something like that.

I am willing to do the work for mage and rogue (arcane magic). But only if i know the time and work will not be wasted.

All right, here's the situation as I see it.

Angband is a community game; it started as a fork of Moria by some university students in the early 90's, and has since had a series of maintainers (sometimes a team of them). This is not really an official position - it kind of comes about through community agreement, or be handing on by the previous one, or some combination. Currently, that's me.

Angband also has a long history of people altering the game to play the way they prefer it; sometimes they name this version and put it out for others to play, and we call that a variant. There is also a tradition of people giving their opinions on the current state of the game, or making suggestions, or submitting code changes, which the maintainer then gets to act on or not.

My attitude to this last one, at least in the case of big changes, has been to discuss on these forums, and usually to go along with the consensus of opinion. Some of the big changes (curses, for example) have not had a lot of discussion, but I have put them out as a feature branch to see if people really hate them, or if not can help with improvements.

The current feature branch on magic is the result of a long discussion with multiple people on the direction for spellcasting. In that there was broad agreement (or at least, not broad disagreement) for the general idea of reducing the number of spells and books, and making spellcasting realms a bit more distinct and coherent. So what I have been doing in this thread is putting out early versions of classes as I have them ready, and asking for testing and feedback.

Now, you have been very helpful with the testing and feedback, but you're also fairly clearly unhappy with the general direction that I am taking. Given that I'm developing Angband on behalf of the community, you have some say in that, but so do all the people who have agreed with the current direction (either by helping to develop it, or by tacitly going along with it).

So in short, you're most welcome to develop mage and rogue classes the way you think they should be, but at this stage I'm going to stick with 5-6 books for pure spellcasters and (for mages) roughly the type of spells that are currently in place. I am very interested in practical difficulties, but not in a change of philosophy - unless there's consensus from the community that my current approach is wrong.

I'm very happy to help you with developing your own classes, and you are most welcome to publish those in any way you like, but as you've described them they won't be going into the main game.

I hope that clarifies things

[Sky]

ooooh boy do i like the druid.

at first i was like, WTF, Nick, you don't even give me a dagger?? *mumble mumble* and i was about to die to a kobold so i told myself, "might as well try this weird spell here, Shape Of Fox, see what it does".
Woha, +5 speed base? yes please.

can't wait to see what comes next.

[Tibarius]

thx

I hope that clarifies things

Thank you, it does - and then i won't come up with an overwork because that is a waste of time.

I have thought a lot about how to balance and distribute spells now. And i am convinced that you can not handle it well with 5 or 6 books only. From my point of view you are ruining the game - even tho i can understand that a coherent magic realms setting would be something nice to have.

But even more important is playability and balanced game mechanics.

You are not finished yet, ok, but i fail to see how you could achieve that later on. I don't like the reduction of books. I think the opposite should happen. I am very frustrated to see one of my favorite games going that way.

[Derakon]

I don't think I've seen you give a full explanation of why you feel that reducing the number of books is a bad thing.

ZAngband and its many derivatives (e.g. PosChengband) have 4 books per realm, two from stores and two in the dungeon. ToME 2 has one book per realm, though granted, all spellcasters in that game use more than one realm. Why is large numbers of books so crucial to the Vanilla spellcaster?

[Pete Mack]

Derakon: The difference between 1d1 and 1d3 for a priest at STR 16 is 2x; it's vastly bigger than the difference for a HT Warrior comparing a 1d4 dagger to a 1d6 rapier. In any case, a priest rarely starts with significantly more than 1 blow, so he'll want a 2d4 Mace rather than a 1d3 whip in the first place...

What, you've never started a priest out with fisticuffs?

I mean, I'm kind of joking, but I'm kind of not. 1d1 fists aren't that much worse than a 1d3 whip, and anything stronger is also a lot more expensive.

[Derakon]

Derakon: The difference between 1d1 and 1d3 for a priest at STR 16 is 2x; it's vastly bigger than the difference for a HT Warrior comparing a 1d4 dagger to a 1d6 rapier. In any case, a priest rarely starts with significantly more than 1 blow, so he'll want a 2d4 Mace rather than a 1d3 whip in the first place...

The gap between "want" and "can afford" can be substantial, depending on what the rest of your starting kit is. I don't like buying maces and find whips to be a poor value.

[Nick]

New builds are now up on the build page, including a redo of recharging and some magic devices to improve mages, and the new priest class. Feedback, as usual, most welcome.

I have also removed all the old spellcasting classes, so this branch now only has warriors, mages, druids and priests, but packaged the old classes with the game as a file called (unimaginatively) old_class.txt. Note that adding and removing classes can now break savefiles (as book objects are defined in class.txt), so finishing test games in the version you started in is probably a good idea for a while.

From tomorrow I will have significantly less time to work on this, but I'm hoping to keep the momentum to some extent, at least.

[kaypy]

Not really related to magic users, but at the moment normal equipment is getting squelched on sight (there may be other criteria, but I am definitely seeing squelched unidentified items, and as near as I can tell if I unignore and check them out they are always +0). I think you probably ought to have to step-on-to-identify things as normal before they squelch.

[Sky]

so, how does the shape-change spell work? do you go on a different blows curve? is it always convenient to be empty-handed, or does wielding magic weapons help? do brandings help?

[Nick]

so, how does the shape-change spell work? do you go on a different blows curve? is it always convenient to be empty-handed, or does wielding magic weapons help? do brandings help?

You get plusses and minuses for each specific shape, and then everything (blows, to-hit and to-dam, brands and slays, etc) is calculated as usual with the new values. You can see what they are if you look at shape.txt. Typically the shape will be mostly better, worse in some ways, but have the big disadvantage of being unable to use items.

[Tibarius]

mages & books

I don't think I've seen you give a full explanation of why you feel that reducing the number of books is a bad thing.

The development of a warrior type characters power is based on finding good gear. There are 12 equipment slots and to simplify things i assume there are three equipment power levels: starting-mid/game-top gear. So from newbie warrior to top gear end game warrior you have 36 steps.

Mages power do not rely on equipment mostly but on the available spells. Here come their books into play. With 9 books (4 town) you basically have only 6 steps from starting mage to top gear mage. (I know that is not totally true but at some point the mage will need resistances etc). But if you go for killing power then the books count basically most.

The less steps there are between starting power and end game power the bigger the difference between the steps are. To make an extreme example:
imagine there are only two magic books: the first from town and the second with all end game spells at DL 60 or something like that. You got the 2nd book you are end game ready, you don't got it you are a bummer.

I consider the 9 book power differences already as too big. So the solution to this problem is ... make the power difference smaller. Making the power difference smaller is done by increasing the number of relevant drops. In this case books. It would be even better if you would split the power increase to single spells. A mage with about 25 to 30 spells would have almost the same power differences like a warrior if he would gain single spells instead of complete books.

That was the playability aspect. Now for inventory management. Since the birth option selling=off is set there is much less need for inventory management. While in older days you had to take decisions ... what do i keep in inventory?, how often do i recal to town? (and take the risk to recal back to a place not being at stairs) what does sell for most gold? From my point of view there is just no need to reduce the number of books.

I explained why reducing the number of books is no good plan from a game power / mechanics point of view. But maybe someone could explain me why reducing the number of books is a good thing at all??? Thanks.

[Philip]

Every class has a lot of points where their power increases, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. Every level gained, every minor gear improvement, every worthwhile magic device makes your character more powerful. You seem to be asserting that dramatic changes in power are problematic, and seem to believe it is evident enough that it doesn't require justification.

Well, I believe sudden, dramatic changes in power are just fine, even critical to gameplay. If we didn't have them, the game would be boring. The game is at its most fun when your character feels underpowered and you have to pick your fights very carefully, emphasize stealth and detection, and run away a lot, and then suddenly find a great weapon/bow/magic device/dungeon book and start blasting everything that used to annoy you so much. For slow and steady advancement, you already have clvl (though for magic users, clvl can also introduce jumps in power, so long as you already have the book) and minor improvements to gear.

As for inventory management, I don't think it got any easier? Sure, you gained 3 slots, but as you have noticed, you no longer have Stone to Mud, so you'll need to use a wand for that (if you want it, that is), so that's two slots. You'll want a Rod of Light for corridors, so that's another slot. If Haste Self is gone forever, you might want to add a Staff of Speed to the list, too. That's all your extra slots already filled, and we haven't even gotten around to a good stack of attack wands/rods, which you might want to use to substitute the damage output.

[Derakon]

Thanks for the explanation, Tibarius.

The development of a warrior type characters power is based on finding good gear. There are 12 equipment slots and to simplify things i assume there are three equipment power levels: starting-mid/game-top gear. So from newbie warrior to top gear end game warrior you have 36 steps.

Mages power do not rely on equipment mostly but on the available spells.

Okay, this seems to be the most fundamental point at which we disagree. Yes, spells are very important to the mage, but they aren't the only thing that matter! When a mage finds a Ring of Intelligence (+3) for the first time, you bet they feel a lot stronger with it than without it. Even though they can cast Haste Self, they still deeply appreciate finding +Speed gear. And of course their miserable HP total makes +CON gear hugely important.

Nor is equipment the only thing that matters to the warrior. Some of the most important gear warriors are looking for goes in the inventory -- Rods of Detection, Staves of Speed, Potions of Healing, all of these make warriors stronger.

I would certainly accept the premise that the mage is less gear-dependent than the warrior is. But equipment and inventory items are still huge sources of power for mages. A mage with only four spellbooks is still going to have plenty of moments where they think "I just got noticeably stronger" over the course of the game.