[MUD-Dev] Focus on Hocus Pocus

[Madman Across the Water]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> ---- Original Message -----
> From: "Matt Chatterley" <mpchatty at hotmail.com>
 
>> I'm planning out a system whereby the Mud implementation holds
>> the *components* of magical spells - effects, types of spell,
>> elements, and so forth.
 
[snip]

> This sounds like an evolution of the basic system in the Ultima
> games.  While the Ultimas did have a preset list of spells, if I
> remember right, in some of the games you did have to figure them
> out.  There were reagents and power words and different reagents
> and words had different effects.  You then combined them to
> produce the effect you wanted.  For example: Flam = flame, Vas =
> great, In = call/cause (i think), so I want to make a fireball
> spell and I figure out what power words describe it, combine them
> to form "In Vas Flam" (or was it "In Flam Grav?" -- been too
> long).  And reagents served a similar purpose.

Just to be pedantic- you always had a list of spells. But in Ultimas
V and, I think, VI, there were a few additional spells that you
could construct. Oh, yeah, VI definately had at least one spell
outside the default set- that was the first game where you could
learn and cast Armageddon. But I digress...

I wrote rules for a tabletop game once that was based on this
concept. I gave the players a vocabulary. In fact, I stole
Ultima's. Each word had either a point value or a multiplier, and
when you constructed a magical sentence, you would first add all the
point values, then apply all the multipliers, and that would be the
mana cost. I considered further complicating the system with
reagents but never got around to it- most likely I would have
allowed regs to lower the cost, but in a fashion that would have at
first at least required a human to judge the appropriateness of each
reg to the spell.

When I was planning to make a variant of Angband, one of my
co-conspirators was very much in favor of putting in a modular
system, and taking it one step beyond what I had. In the system I
had created above, I did not allow repetition of words. So "Vas
Flam" was as powerful a fireball as you could get. He would have
removed most of the words like Bet and Vas (Minor/Small and Greater)
but allowed "In Flam Flam Flam" to be a more powerful
fireball. Again, with the additive mana cost, possibly with a law of
diminishing returns- either with each additional Flam adding less
damage, or costing more mana, or both.

At the time, I shuddered at the thought of writing code intending to
handle all the various possible combinations of words. What is Lor
Flam?  Particularly bright fire? A light spell that burns undead? 
What if you add a few Lors to it? How about Flam Frio (Fire Ice)? In
a good vocab system it will be hard to generate patent nonsense, but
there are some things that are a bit of a stretch- Ex Frio? "Freedom
Ice"? Sounds like something they sell at the cart outside my office,
come to think of it.

Does the order of the words matter?

I'm concentrating here on vocab based systems, which doesn't cover
the full range of possible solutions spaces, but it's what I spent
my time on when considering such a thing.

Adam B
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