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

[Travis Casey]

On 23 September 1998, Niklas Elmqvist wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Travis Casey wrote:

>>  - Make creating spells a probabilistic process.  That is, the player
>>    can sit down and think up a spell, and try to have his/her
>>    character create it, but the character has to make a skill check to
>>    do it, which is harder for more complex or powerful spells.  Thus,
>>    new characters either can't create powerful spells or have a low
>>    chance of creating them, while more experienced characters stand a
>>    good chance of successfully creating them.

> However, IMHO, I think it would be much nicer to delegate the research,
> design and creation of spells (ie spellcraft) to the players instead of
> the player characters. It is sort of the same problem/dilemma as in
> pen-and-paper-RPGs: should the players think for themselves when solving
> puzzles or do an intelligence or puzzle-solving skill roll? Personally, I
> tend to lean towards the first option. In this context, that would mean
> that the players themselves do the actual spellcraft or research
> themselves. (This could be done off-line, but experimenting must be done
> in-game. You don't want to march into Smaug the Dragon's lair without
> having tested your neat new "Wyrm-BBQ" spell under safe circumstances...)

Umm... what I meant is that players would design the spells, but a
check or series of checks would be needed in order for the character
to then be able to design and implement it.  This is to prevent such
things as smart players creating stupid mages, then designing spells
that their characters shouldn't be able to understand, much less
create.

> My vision of a system like this would be a sort of programming language
> used by the player to create spells. Each spell would consist of a single
> function, and also be named accordingly. When defined, the player can
> commit the function to memory (memorizing the spell) or write it down into
> his spellbook or grimoire. Of course, nothing would stop the players from
> calling already defined spells/functions in their spellbook/memory in new
> spells.

My own thought is to have a set of simple magical commands which can
be used directly:  e.g., you might have the commands:

create
destroy
move
resize
shape
join
sever
etc.

When used in the spell programming language, these would be equivalent
to the pre-defined keywords or library functions of most programming
languages.  There would also be control-flow statements, but these
would only be usable in a spell/program, not as direct commands.

> Of course, this leads to the problem of new players downloading some neat,
> diabolic spells from a webpage somewhere, creating the spell and then
> wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting world (in addition, you'd get a terrible
> spell inflation). However, this could probably be remedied in some way...

That's part of why I'd want part of spell creation to be a
character-based process.

> a) Use a spell balancing system such as in Turbine's new graphical on-line
> RPG Asheron's Call -- the more people that know and use a spell, the less
> effective it is. This means that diligent mages living secluded in towers
> will guard their secrets jealously, and when a spell gains in popularity,
> people will stop using it. It also means that clans/guilds will commit
> large resources to obtaining spells through research or trade and train
> their members in their use -- spells will become a valuable commodity.
> When a spell loses in efficiency, people will become disinterested in it,
> and a few (game) years from then, the spell could be
> reinvented/rediscovered and put to use again (until it becomes inefficient
> again).

I'd thought of a similar system for netrunning programs in a cyberpunk
RPG, the rationale being that the more common a program became, the
more likely it was that someone would have developed and distributed a
defense against it.  Following the same idea, you could have NPCs
having pre-prepared counterspells for the spells that become too
common.

>>  - Make spell research take time.  That is, "Ok... you can research
>>    that Apocalypse spell, but at your skill level, it's going to take
>>    you sixteen years of game time."

> Hmm, I would also like to introduce some notion of time into my concept...
> However, I dislike typing "research Armageddon" and then just wait for two
> hours while my character is busy researching.

My own thought was to have this be something that happens in "off
time" -- that is, while the player is logged off, we presume that the
character is devoting some fraction of his/her time to researching the
spell.  This means that the player doesn't have to wait around for it
to happen (or, at least, doesn't have to wait around logged into the
mud doing nothing).

It also creates a secondary effect... namely, that the fastest way to
do spell research is to spend some time offline thinking them up,
log in and submit them to the system, then spend more time offline
letting your character research them.  This means that players who
spend a lot of time logged in adventuring won't be able to research
spells as fast... which corresponds nicely to the fantasy stereotype
that the mages who are doing the spell research are those walled off
in their towers somewhere, not those adventuring.

This also gives a bit of an edge to those players playing mages who
have real lives and can't be logged in 16 hours a day -- at least
their characters can be researching things!

> So materials, in my programming-language analogy, would be sort of like
> precompiled libs or modules which could be called by the players spells?
> Neat. Then, continuing with the analogy, the efficiency of all calls
> inside the material would be set to a fixed level -- in a normal feather,
> the efficiency would be quite low, but in a Simurgh feather, this rate
> would be considerably higher. Of course, a master mage could probably just
> skip the material step and perform the required invocations on his own and
> maybe even get better results -- materials could be sort of a shortcut for
> less skilled magic-users.

> Come to think of it, associating magic "code" or "methods" to materials
> would make it easy for the builders to add support for all kinds of
> materials. Otherwise, in a magic-physics engine, you would have to
> hardcode stuff like "iron does this and that..." and "copper attracts
> this..." and so on.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.  For some reason, the idea that spell
components could have spell code associated with them had never struck
me... but now that you mention it, it gives me all sorts of ideas!

My world of Tobara is one in which *everyone* is capable of doing
magic, but most people only use simple spells -- mages are those who
are capable of doing more complex spells.  Armed with your idea of
magical code being associated with materials, I now have an
explanation!  Just in case you're wondering, here it is...

  Let's take a feather as an example.  Birds fly.  In a magical world,
  they fly not because of physical laws, but because birds have an
  innate property of flight -- or, to put it another way, birds
  already have the code for a flight spell built into them.

  Someone who has a bird feather can access that code.  To do so
  requires rebinding it to a new target, and then feeding it enough
  power to activate the spell and allow it to make whatever you're
  casting the flight spell on fly... but you don't need to know how to
  create a flight spell.  The feather already has that, and you can
  use it as a black box.

  That's the kind of magic that most people can use -- they can access
  the spells that are already "inside" things, feed them power to
  activate them, and rebind them to other objects.  A mage, however,
  is someone who has the knowledge and skill to create and modify
  spell code... a mage can cast a flight spell without needing a
  feather or other object that already contains the spell code.

  Certain kinds of spells don't "exist in nature" -- that is, there
  are no existing objects which have them built in.  For example,
  there's nothing out there that causes corpses to get up and walk
  around.  These sorts of effects can *only* be created by a mage.

Again, thanks... I'm going to have to explore this idea more, but I
think it's going to be very useful to me.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
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