[MUD-Dev] Spellcaster, or Waving Hands

[Richard Woolcock]

clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:
> [snipped]
> About the only other thing I'd like to change would be to remove the
> reliance on the 5 fingers of two hands.  Thus players with
> ambidextrous toes, or more fingers per hand could have an advantage.
> This of it as varying the thread count...

And what if someone loses an arm, hand, or even a finger?  What about
spell affects requiring more than just your hands...for example your
right hand might represent offensive magic, whilst your left hand
might be used for defensive.  Thus as soon as you see...

   KaVir raises his right hand, and starts moving his fingers.

Your respond with "raise left" or whatever.

   You raise your left hand, and start preparing a magical defence.

Then when you see:

   KaVir points his little finger at you and flicks out his thumb.

You realise its a focused attack, and respond with "palm index".

   You open your left hand, palm outwards, and wiggle your index finger.

   A bolt of energy leaps from KaVir's fingertip, arcing towards you,
   only to bounce of your force barrier.

However, why stop with hands?  While you're defending against KaVir's
attack, and probably countering with something of your own, you decide
to scan the area to see if any of his friends are nearby.

   You wiggle your ears.  You sense someone approaching from behind.

Uh oh, time to make a getaway.

   You kick off a shoe and begin flexing your big toe.  You vanish in
   a blaze of white light.

Only problem is that mages might start looking a bit silly...

One spell system I wrote before was using spell books.  Mages could
design their own spells in it, by creating pages, writing on them,
then putting them in their books.  A spell might look something like:

start.damage.spell
victim.target
reverse.spell
message.1: You heal $N.
message.2: $n heals you.
message.3: $n heals $N.
end.spell

There were a selection of options available, including the ability to
have one page 'pointing' to the next - thus some cunning mages would
put together devastating chain-attack spells.  Looking back, it was
badly written and somewhat limited, but it made a nice change from
"cast heal <target>".  It was also quite entertaining watching the
mages guard their 'secret' spells, sitting in saferooms and 'flipping'
through the pages of their books.  Because the system was very 
flexible, it also resulted in a lot of (unfounded) rumours about what
mages could do.  It was a bit like the way witches were treated in
medieval times - anything bad that happened in the mud would get 
blamed on the mages, including eq loss, crashes, and anything unfair.
I remember people complaining to me once that a mage had worked out a
spell to create super-powerful equipment.  It was complete rubbish,
no such spell-combination was available, but it was quite amusing.

KaVir.