Advanced spell forms are slightly problematic. Certain spells (fireball and cone of cold) which have advanced versions automatically kick in when the player is Skilled or above, and can’t be cast using the lesser form even if the player wants to.

• Some variants give you the choice of casting the basic or advanced form, but this suffers from an interface annoyance (an extra y/n prompt) and the fact that the advanced form counts as the same spell level so it is not actually any more difficult or expensive to cast.
• Advanced forms are castable even at Basic skill, but have a higher failure rate.
• The advanced form appears in the Z menu once you are Skilled.
• The advanced forms are implemented as higher-level never-generated spellbooks, e.g. “fire storm” and “frost storm”. Reading the basic spellbook automatically teaches you the advanced spell as well. This is dNetHack’s approach.
  • This allows you to balance them separately; in the case of fireball and cone of cold, the lesser spells could be dropped to level 3 or so and the advanced forms elevated to level 6.
• The advanced forms are broken out into completely separate spellbooks that must be discovered and learned separately.
  • This makes the balance of spellbooks a concern, since it would add more books of a certain school.
  • Both of the ideas that involve higher level spellbooks may create a problem with the Z menu only allowing 52 different spells if more advanced forms come along, not that that can’t be worked around.
• Skilled+ casting does nothing to the actual spell effects, but allows you to cast the spell mentally: you do not need to be able to speak or move to cast it.

The sleep spell has an advanced form, castable only at Expert, which creates area of effect sleep like a magic flute does.

The spell of invisibility has an advanced form which casts a make invisible beam, like the wand does.

The spell of light has an advanced form, which is a ray. It blinds monsters it is fired at like a camera flash does. (The camera flash is also transformed into a ray, which can be reflected.) In Wands Balance Patch-implementing variants, the wand of light should also have this effect for skilled users.

Spell of baleful polymorph: a beefed-up version of polymorph (or an advanced form) that, when it polymorphs a monster, allows you to determine what to change it into. Perhaps this does not work on pets, so you can’t give yourself a army of titans.