Originally Posted by
Silfir
Satiation doesn't seem like much of a solution. It's not like late game characters are short on food of all things. Overshoot on that count and the first victims are going to be the early game spellcasters once more. Most other suggestions above - random negative effect, fail chance and so forth - will definitely nerf HP casting, but it will do so at all phases of the game, and once again it's the late game spellcasters who are better prepared to face the repercussions. Granted, they might stop casting from HP in the late game except in emergencies - but early game PCs will suffer along with them, and be unable to save themselves with HP casting in emergencies a lot more often.
The idea is that satiation is something that doesn't grow with the PC's level, like PP or HP does. When you're casting from HP in the early game, you're typically only going to use a few HP in the process, meaning only a small impact on satiation. And using it only in an emergency as well will mean that you're looking at basically enough hunger to remove a few turns from the time it requires to reach the next lower stage of satiation. Most early game spellcasters don't have huge HP reserves to play with, so there's an inherent limit to how much hunger they can incur prior to simply dying of spellcaster's exhaustion.
Meanwhile, the challenge isn't about whether the late game character has food, it's about whether the late game character has the time to spend
eating the food. As I recall, the time required to eat food is proportional to the amount of satiation it gives, or thereabouts. Most significantly, it introduces a major danger to trying to do HP-casting against the Orb Guardians - with no teleportation, you're liable to get stuck in the middle of a fight with the guardian; stopping to eat is impractical and the risk of entering the range where your stats start to drop is a major issue.
If a spellcaster wants to routinely cast from HP for contexts where it's unnecessary, such as "teleport-walking", then the abuse of stats (which I still support as an extra source of discouragement) should be the bigger concern. The main issue, as I see it, of HP casting for late game spellcasters, is that they can do it during important battles, and that this makes things too easy, too often.
Originally Posted by
Grey
Early game for casters is easy I think. And there's nothing wrong with nerfing HP casting then as well, just don't prohibit it entirely. It should be reserved for rare and desperate situations, not something to rely on.
The idea is that HP casting in the early game already has its strong limitation - available HP. When you've only got double-digits of HP in total (especially when your max HP is below, say, 30, as it usually is for the first few levels, at least for the PCs with lower toughness), and you don't have the sort of equipment necessary to protect yourself strongly, and relatively few sources of healing, the risk of casting from HP can be high - and since you only have a few PP, you're also more likely to
need to be able to do it. It doesn't need to be "nerfed" because it's already relatively risky in the early game. It's in the late game that it becomes too easy to do, when you have huge reserves of PP and HP to play with, high quality equipment to protect you, and often many sources of healing. Hence why we need something that hits harder as you get further into the game.