I'd like to see the decreases more focused against casters than other characters. I feel that the loss of HP casting has hampered non-casters using wands/potions of wonder to allow limited bookcasting, far more than it's hampered dedicated spellcasters.

maybe cause repeated and often lifecast to add aging instead of simply draining stats?

thus the rare life-casting melee boys would only have to deal with retraining some stats

but life-casting abusing mages would grow both more magically powerful/learned about the nature of magic [due to the age increase], but also become frail way quicker. it could also make aging once again meaningful for extremely long-lived, magic-based races [like elves]

One of the very few places where most of my mages used to end up casting repeatedly from hp is D50, and aging is already an issue there. Don't like the added aging idea, especially since it's very unfair for certain races while others just laugh at aging (mist elves spring to mind).

I agree that the current penalty is a bit harsh and has stopped me from ever hp-casting. Maybe penalise something like Mana and Perception instead of such vital stat as Toughness? At the very least, casting from hp should reduce satiation greatly in addition to other penalties.

HP casting was clearly hugely OP and the nerf was a very positive change IMHO. Maybe it can be reduced a bit quantitatively, but I wouldn't make qualitative changes like removing the To drains and changing them to aging (which elves laugh at), satiation (which characters stocked with stoma or lizards laugh at) or Ma/Pe (which most characters laugh at).

HP casting should be an emergency thing, something that you only are forced to do in extreme cases, and not a routine thing. So the player must lose something valuable. And To also makes sense thematically - you are using your life force to cast the spell.

I agree with your viewpoint Al-Khwarizmi, there should be some penalty to life-casting. ..As The Creator says at the start of this thread, it should probably be less-mean, so classes that aren't powerful in magic can still have some fun with it.

So how about making the penalty proportional to the magical power of the caster? The low-level mages and non-mages can use it if they need it, without too much consequence. But powerful mages will be penalised if they try to abuse the power. Good enough?

I agree with it in practice but it was far too harsh, even dipping into your HP once for a couple of PPs would result in a fairly prompt loss of toughness and willpower. The abuse was scaled far too high. *Repeated* HP-casting should be punished definitely and the resulting stat drops from all the abuse is fair.

Ah, that's a good point YourMum .. maybe the penalty should both be proportional to the magical power of the character, and also the number of life-castings attempted? i.e.: if the player does one life-casting, the penalty might not even be noticeable, but if they do a second life-casting in a short space of time the penalty applied again, but multiplied by some factor.

I like the idea of the penalty being proportional to magical ability. So, if a character has 500pp they really have no excuse to be hp-casting, and deserve a harsh penalty. But, if your fighter with 20pp hp-casts, there should be less penalty.

I don't think that makes much sense thematically. I agree (like 99% of players) that magic is OP with respect to melee, but I don't think the solution is to make it easier for melee characters to cast, to the point that melee characters would even be better at some aspects of magic (HP casting) than dedicated magicians.

Nope, it doesn't make much sense thematically. But it makes a whole lot of sense in trying to keep the gameplay fun. I'll give thematically-weak decisions a pass if they're done for the sake of gameplay.

Perhaps make it reliant not on PP, but on HP? Mages usually have a smaller HP pool, so this way it would be easier on melee classes. It also makes sense thematically, though it does punish early game HP casting more.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't happen, HP casting should abuse stats but the level is too high. Herbs train stats but you don't get 1 point of Dx for each piece of moss you use. Casting exercises Ma but you don't get a point of Ma every time you cast and let your PPs regenerate. Stat training just increases the chance of a natural increase, abuse being negative training (or anti-training or whatever) makes it a natural decrease instead.

Some might say this isn't so much of a problem of you've got a big bag of morgia root and keep munching between HP casts. Maybe that should be a sensible level. 1 HP cast has the same but negative affect as 8 morgias on your stat training, or something like that.

A change has been implemented already, should we not wait and see how it affects things?

Agreed. Worth waiting to see what has been done. :)