[MUD-Dev] Focus on Hocus Pocus

[Vincent Archer]

According to Matt Chatterley:

> I've never found one quite like this in any game I've played (but
> if anyone out there *has*, I'd be intruiged to know where, so I
> can take a look at their implementation).

Once, I heard a good definition of magic. Magic is when you talk to
the universe, and the universe answers.

> A player wizard would take a bunch of reagents, some time, a bit
> of thought and imagination, and create a sequence of events and
> effects, which cumulate to the spell that he wants.  He can then
> write this spell down (either as a one-shot scroll, or in a
> spellbook). In short, all spells in the game would be created by
> players, using provided tools - some wizards would be the
> 'programmers' of magic. In fact, programming is probably quite a
> good analogy. The tool I intend to provide will most likely use a
> simple form of pseudocode.

In other words, you want Magic as a Language, not as a bunch of
buttons you push to trigger, like a monkey looking for its bananas.

I worked once, in the realm of PBEM on such a type of magic
system. You can see an early draft of it (who, like about 90% of my
PBEM ideas, went stillborn) here:

	http://www.frmug.org/pbm/AgeOfMagic.Rules.txt

Basically, what I attempted there was to construct a grammar (which
was very simplistic) and a vocabulary. Spells ("alterations") were
treated as sentences: if your sentence was grammatically correct and
appropriate to the situation, you might get an effect.

(the system also describes research and the like, but is tailored to
a turn based system, where players submitted orders for each day,
and got the result back at the end of the game "month")

One of the chief effects of such a magic system is that it moves the
magic proficiency away from the character and into the player; the
best mages (aka the mages able to cast the most powerful and
reliable spells) are the one whose player is able to master a
foreign, and one would almost be tempted (because it's not natural
to our mindset) to call alien, tongue.

Much like programmers, in fact :)

In the end, you will end up with a subset of mages who can string
their own spells together, and a largeish bunch of people who will
simply parrot the spells they've gotten from someone in the first
bunch, without much understanding of what they have. But that won't
be determined by your character, but by the native player abilities.

To vest back power into the characters, make their vocabulary
arbitrarily limited, so that people have to tailor their spell to
their vocabulary (the learning/researching of the runes in my
system). Such a system would be easily served by a skill tree
system, where each skill is in fact a word of the system. Or a level
system, where each level allows you to know X runes (with the
concurrent choice: do you pick this highly specialised rune, or the
more general ones which make your spell harder and more expensive to
cast?)

The chief problem when deploying such a system is that you have
given the players a tool to speak to the universe (your game server)
and it will answer. However, the universe is not sentient. If
ordered to do something it "shouldn't do", it will do so obediently,
because the request was correctly phrased.

The trick is, if you have to prohibit grammatically correct spells
for reasons of "balance" (and it's mighty hard to do, given a rich
enough set of words), you're moving away from the realm of magic
langage, and back into the "push-button" system where some arbitrary
sequence triggers an arbitrary effect, while some other does
not. And you've lost the feeling associated with such a rich
linguistic system.

--
Vincent Archer                                         Email: archer at nevrax.com

Nevrax France.                              Off on the yellow brick road we go!
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev