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

[Matthew R. Sheahan]

pretty much everything i see around that's intended to be an "advanced
magic system" amounts to a spell programming language with magicians as
mana hackers.  it occurs to me that this is really laying the bones of
the system pretty bare to the players, and is dissonant with many fantasy
themes (ones where magicians are, knowledge-wise, children with candles
in a very big, very dark room -- as opposed to technically super-competent
magickal engineers a la Zelazny's Lords of Chaos).

where the injury really comes in here, though, is that is turns magickal
R&D into all D, no R.  there's no room for creating an effect that no one
even knew was possible before.  and how cool is _that_?

so what i'm kinda thinking of is something where maybe you have a set of
tokens that can be permuted in a very large number of ways.  say, a set
of symbols that can be given different colors, sizes, spatial relationships,
accompanying incantations/gestures/items, what-have-you.  easy to make the
final result set here very large.  if want, you can keep everyone from
using every effect by restricting access to a given symbol, color, etc.
then you distribute some basic spells in the form of instructions, but
let people play with the system all they want.  (that's research.)  then
populate some of the rest of the result set.  no need to fill in the whole
thing; just put in enough easter eggs to keep life interesting.  you can
always pop in more effects and explain it as shifts in the mana continuum
or some bleeding thing.

of course, to foster the proper atmosphere, you need some way of keeping
spell research from being some big buddy-buddy hugfest where once someone
knows how to achieve an effect, everyone knows.  one way of doing that is
the occasionally cited method of making a spell less effective the more
it's used by anyone.  (that would provalue "maintaining" your spells by
making minor variations on them to get onto a magickal frequency that isn't
worn out.)  or you can just create a strong PvP competitive environment by
other means, where it's against your best interest to give away your trade
secrets.

one thing i like here is that it's possible for research to be dangerous
in a non-contrived way -- just because you might not be sure that that
symbol set you've put together doesn't mean "extra-heavy fireball, maximum
range 1 foot".  ;)

								chiaroscuro