[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft

[James Wilson]

On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Travis Casey wrote:
>On 22 September 1998, Vadim Tkachenko wrote:
>> Vladimir Prelovac wrote:
>> Basic question:
>
>> OK, I want to create the 'Apocalypse' spell, destroying every player in
>> the area of effect, except myself.
>
>> And at the same time I joined the game 5 minutes ago.
>
>> How are you going to define the limitations on the spell being created?

[snip]

>Of course, even if a character can *design* a spell, that doesn't
>necessarily mean he/she can *cast* it.  Most spell design systems end
>up by assigning a difficulty of some sort to the spell -- either a
>difficulty value for difficulty-based systems, or a spell level for
>systems which use those, or something else like that.  Thus, the
>character may research the Apocalypse spell, and then find that he/she
>won't be able to cast it until he/she reaches 51st level.

most spell systems I've seen are based on the idea that a given spell 
has a certain degree of efficacy (sometimes dependent on caster level).
I dislike this constraint and have been thinking about a system as follows:

('power' here means the amount of work done by the spell, e.g. the number
of hp done in damage, the weight lifted, etc)

1. effects are independent from the power of such effects.
2. complex effects are more difficult to produce.
3. making a given effect more powerful consists of dumping more
of the mage's available energies into it. 

for example, producing flame is a trivial magical effect, so should be very
easy to learn. Producing a tiny bit of flame should likewise only take a 
small amount of energy. However, a mage who knows the 'flame on' effect
is free to dump scads of magical energy into it in order to create lots and lots
of flame. This would, of course, be rather an inefficient way to kill people 
(most of the energy would go to heating up the atmosphere), but there's nothing
_complicated_ about it. 

Advancement as a mage would then consist of learning new, more subtle
effects and increasing one's capacity to manipulate magical energies. The 
two are quite distinct and one can easily imagine a demon, for instance, 
which wields huge amounts of energy but is not particularly skilled in its
application.

In this regard, an 'apocalypse' spell would be quite complicated or
even impossible, as it would have to be sufficiently deadly that any
given player, no matter what their protections or hp, would die. If players
do not all share some crucial weakness, this will in general be very 
difficult. However, one could make do with a compromise such as 
teleporting the players into the someplace very deadly. (Set the controls 
for the heart of the Sun!)

>Deciding the granularity of the effects is an important thing -- for a
>paper RPG, I prefer low granularity, since the GM can work out
>details.  In an mud, I'd prefer high granularity, so the automated
>systems can do more of the work.

yes, this is very important if you don't want to stick the admins with the
job of implementing all the spells that players want to develop.

[snip]

James