Mage Spells

[Derakon]

So what do we do if the player gets basically no usable spells for their first 15 levels? Shrug and say "tough luck, you should've played a warrior instead"? The entire point of the mage and priest classes is to have classes which are dependent on their magical abilities; setting things up so that you might have basically no useful magic seems contrary to that goal. On a related note, why would I want to play a priest instead of a paladin under this regime?

I can accept the "spells are a gift from your deity" explanation for why spells are learned at random -- but at the same time, as a gift from a supposedly-intelligent deity, they should be usable when obtained. Your deity wants you to succeed, after all. Giving you something that you can't use makes no sense. So the selection of learnable spells has to be limited somehow. Some possible ways I could see to do that:

* Unlock learning from dungeon spellbooks at some threshold level. That is, studying gets you a random prayer; up to clvl X that prayer comes from the eligible spells in the town spellbooks, and after that it comes from the set of all eligible spells, dungeon books included.
* Randomize the spellbooks each game, but leave studying as it is otherwise (i.e. pick a book, get a random spell from that book). This would come at the cost of rendering the dungeon spellbooks wholly unthematic, but it would ensure that you'd get a random-but-usable spell. Of course you'd constrict the spell list slightly so that the first town spellbook has easy spells and the last dungeon spellbook has mostly high-level ones.

You could also make spell learning automatic on levelup, with the game preferring to give you spells from the town spellbooks but otherwise not caring if you have the book or not. This would prevent gaming the system by "saving up" a few levels' worth of spells so you could guarantee access to Orb. It'd still be really weird that your deity would be giving you a spell that you can't actually cast until you get the book, though.