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

[Adam Wiggins]

On Fri, 25 Sep 1998, Travis Casey wrote:
> On 23 September 1998, Niklas Elmqvist wrote:
> > 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.

Very nice.  Actually now that I think of it, Arctic actually does pretty
well with this using the now mostly-forgotten (at least, in the mud world)
D&D memorization system.  Since mobs can only memorize certain spells, the
creator(s) just decide which ones they should memorize.  Thus they could
have them memorize protection from heat if they predict a lot of fireballers,
stoneskin if they predict a lot of warriors, dispel magic if they expect
a lot of fireshielded people.  As players learn "tricks" to use against
certain NPCs, the admin will regularly go in and change which spells the
NPCs memorize, thus making them more challanging again.

Naturally the next step would be to make them decide which spells to memorize
based on the spells used against them last time they were killed.  I think I
suggested something similar to this on a large scale some time back; the idea
that if an NPC gets killed 90% of the time by the backstab skill, they
would gradualy become more wary of backstabbing until eventually it just
didn't work against them anymore.  Naturally this would "wear off" as they
*stopped* getting killed by backstabs.  This is, of course, the same theory
as Travis' cyberpunk stuff, above, or what they will supposedly be doing with
Asheron's Call.  It's possible to make any commoditity more useful when it's
rare, thus stimilating more of a virtual 'economy' of resources.  By the same
token you encourage players not to do the same thing over and over again;
if a given NPC gets killed fifty times a day by every method under the sun,
they are gradually going to toughen up to the point that it's not "worth it"
any more (since whatever the reward is stays the same, it's just a more
difficult fight).  But that far-away dungeon housing monsters who haven't
been killed in weeks is a *great* find; they are all fat and lazy and thus
easy kills.  (Naturally people will quickly discover this and "mine" the
dungeon for all it's worth, until the monsters are tough and dangerous again.)

> [researching spells offline]
> 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!

Note that this also means that any descent "powerplayer" will have 5 or 10
mage characters constantly researching spells.  There should probably
be some tradeoff between online and offline time to make this happen.

Personally, I'd much prefer research to be something fun you could actually
*do*.  Most of the scripted spellsystems folks have been suggesting
go into this category, since you create a new spell, try it out, singe
your eyebrows and your pet cat's fur, then go back to the drawing board.
This would be particularly fun in a graphical environment where you could
actually *see* the various elemental effects exploding in your face.

> 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.

Actually, it would be extremely cool if at least the basic form of
every spell existed somewhere.  For example, the 'raise dead' effect
which you mention could occur in spooky dungeons or ancient crypts
automatically.  (So if someone gets killed inside it, that's one more
undead warrior to fight future adventurers...)  Players would eventually
learn that any effect they see in the 'regular' mud world can be duplicated,
and then enhanced, through their own spells.

Adam