Currently Unstable Spellbook draws random scrolls from a list of 10 eligible scrolls with replacement. My suggestion is to change this so that scrolls are drawn without replacement.

This idea came to me after someone on Reddit claimed to have drawn a bunch of strings (a string of 4 and a string of 6) of the same scroll in a row, all within the same game. Generally when this happens it gets people out of the game and has them thinking there’s something wrong with how scrolls are chosen.

My suggestion, to draw the scrolls without replacement, would make longer strings of duplicates like this impossible. It would also make the Unstable Spellbook more strategic in its use because you could keep track of which scrolls you get and then be able to make plans for potential upcoming scrolls. To make this less tedious, you might consider allowing the player to see some of the potential upcoming scrolls, similar to how some versions of Tetris show you the upcoming pieces (though not necessarily in exact order like Tetris).

Some further notes and thoughts:

• Identify, remove curse, and magic mapping are all half as common as the other scrolls. This could be handled by having a deck of 17 scrolls, with 7 duplicates for the more common types but only 1 copy of each of the 3 above.
• If you do go with a deck type system, maybe the player could keep adding more scrolls (beyond the needed for each upgrade) to bias the deck in their favour. This would make the Unstable Spellbook into a kind of deck-builder minigame, like Slay the Spire!
• Another idea might be to remove the popup choice for upgrading scrolls you draw, in favour of allowing the player to add both regular and exotic scrolls separately, giving them separate distributions within the deck. This loss of control would represent a small tactical nerf to the usage of the book which would partially offset the strategic buff caused by letting the player know and have more control over the distribution of scrolls they get from the artifact.

Anyway, thoughts, opinions, suggestions? I personally love the Unstable Spellbook in its current form but I have talked to others who don’t like it at all. My thoughts around this suggestion are to attempt to bridge this gap and make the item feel less random while still preserving its random flavour. The tradeoff is that this suggestion would make the item a bit more complex, though I don’t see think it’s an unreasonable amount of added complexity.

Alchemy is quite a complex system in the game and many players don’t engage with it at all. Even at the most tricked-out “deck builder” version of this suggestion, it’s still quite a lot less complex than alchemy because the choices are much more straightforward: want to see more of a scroll? Add another copy to the spellbook!