[MUD-Dev] Focus on Hocus Pocus

[Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Corey Crawford wrote:

> I've almost completed a magic system of my own, so this thread
> interests me.  The focus is different (creating spells rather than
> how magic works in general) but it still piques my interest.

> The first thing I thought when I read this was, "Ok, so the first
> mages who play the game for the first few months will be creating
> the spells everyone else will be using". Where do the newbies come
> in and create spells? They have already been written by older
> players!

> My second thought was, "How are you going to label and pre-create
> all affects the players can think of?" Talk about a nightmare.

> Now other than the fact that making a pre-created list of all the
> affects will be insane, I think it could work really well if you
> did it the other way around:

All these ideas about having complex, interresting magic and
spell-creating systems should come with a warning. If you make a
system that has a player skill threshold that is too high, nobody
would want to play your game (as a mage anyway). Playing RPG such as
Baldurs Gate II, the solution is a wealth of spells that may be
found along the way and learned, and as described in a previous
post, figuring out which spells to use in what situation is the hard
part of being a mage.

If you choose to make a high skill threshold on your magic system
and player designed spells, it should be available to the high level
player (one who's bored adventuring for a while, and wishes a
different task), and you really should provide a basic set of spells
that are readily available for the beginner mage.

Also, you should make sure that the way you implement it ensures you
that the balance of the game is kept. No beginner mage should be
allowed to cast 'create castle' even if she makes the right
gestures, uses the right components and say the right incantations.

Also, after having playes Black & White, i kind of liked the gesture
system, and thinking about that thought it could be a nice way to
implement a high player skill threshold magic system. Unknown to the
player, magic energies can be manipulated using signs (written) or
gestures (depending on implementation). The signs are unkown to the
player and she has to discover them. Spells would be programmable
set of signs that manipulate the energies. Some rules have to be set
up to map specific energy manipulations to specific events (this is
not trivial), mapping undesired results as well for 'wrong'
manipulation of energies. As the mage researches the new spells,
they can write them down in their spell books and 'read up' on them
to cast them more easily (as in the D&D abstraction of spells). The
'quality' of the written signs (how close they are to the true
forms) will determine how effective they are, if they leak magic
energy, disresonate etc.  This will cause some magicusers to have
'suboptimal' spells in their spellbooks, that could have been better
if they had 'put a curl at the end of that last character' or the
like. To disallow different mages of exhanging sign-knowledge
off-line, the signs are random for each mage (make up an in-context
excuse). Written spells can be copied, but no sign-info can be
obtained from them. General rules for designing spells should be
explained by simple examples (f.inst.  creating a weak example
spells with few features and explaining the system), but a large
part should be up to the players to find out.  Problem of this idea
is (as you write) to map the effects to the spells, and the bad
effects to the faliures in in consistant way. You would have to have
a hold on all effects from day 1, or a researcher may have spend
time finding some gesture to do nothing, and when you implement
paralysis later on, linking it to the sign she already tried out.


Hans Henrik Stærfeldt   |    bombman at diku.dk    | work:  hhs at cbs.dtu.dk      |
Address:                |___  +45 40383492    __|__       +45 45252425     __|
DTU, Kemitorvet,        | Scientific programmer at Center for Biological     |
bygn 208, CBS.          |  Sequence Analysis, Technical University of Denmark|


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