[MUD-Dev] Looking for a Magic System (inspired by Bartle's book)

[Erik Bethke]

William Leader wrote:

> Once the 'eye of newt' object is created the player could use it
> to create a potion, The potion creating code doesn't care what
> color the newt eyes are, it just cares that newt eyes were
> added. Then this code can read that property
> somepotion_newt_eye_value, and use that value as part of
> calculation to determine the power of the resulting potion. In
> this example if you used it as a multiplier effectiveness = 5 *
> somepotion_newt_eye_value then what color eyes were used has a big
> difference, and blue eyes could completely ruin the batch. If say
> a fourth kind of newt eyes was used, that had a negative value,
> then it could turn the potion into a poison. Or lets say that two
> ingredients where used that had very high negative values, and
> they were multiplied to create a very high positive value. Then
> two ingredients that are normally bad are extra good when
> combined.

> The nice thing about a system like this is that it creates issues
> for where crafters get their supplies. Should they collect their
> own, who do they trust to provide ingredients for them. How do
> they find out the yellow newts make their potion into poison
> without a great deal of experimentation? The other nice thing
> about this system is that you can used a small number of 'recipes'
> for putting things together that because of variation of
> components results in a very wide range of outcomes. Then there
> are benefits to smart players to keep their discoveries secret, A
> player who discovers the two bad ingredient combination above
> would have a competitive advantage over other crafters.

> Like I said because of the framework my system has this is very
> easy for me to do. It might not be so easily done in the GoPets
> code.

Having a bunch of replacable ingrediants is what I want for sure.
What I am stuck on is how to make it truly dynamic and alive.
Elaborating in the eye of newt example, I could make a spell looking
for "Eyes of Newt" and I could easily give it a score such as 1 to
10 to measure Eye of New effectivity from Red to Green.  However
this is one-dimensional.  How should a recipie for shortcake respond
to the presence of Eye of Newt?  As a player I would expect to see
that I could drag any item together and I would get one of several
outcomes:


  1) Success - the recepie worked and I now have a copy of that
  object

  2) Failure - the recepie failed and the ingrediants have been
  wasted

  3) Outstanding Success - either due to skill or superior
  ingrediant choice I have a copy of the desired object of a higher
  quality

  4) Discovery - I have a new object that I did not expect to get
  from from following this ingrediant plan

  5) Inert - the receipe failed but my ingrediants were not consumed

  6) Explosion - poor choice of ingrediants leads to tragic results

So the way to implement this I think:

  1) All objects would have their ingrediant list.  Substitution of
  an ingrediant from the same ingrediant family but of differing
  quality levels will produce a different quality object on the
  outcome.  I believe this is the SWG model.  This would result in a
  # 1 or # 3 Success

  2) All objects would have a prohibited ingrediant list.  Any
  ingrediant prohibited would cause a # 2 Failure

  3) Scanning all of the receipes and trying out the ingrediants, it
  would be simple to find out what else you might have made - this
  leads to # 4 Discovery.

  4) To handle Inert, would be to look and see if you are free from
  prohibited and explosive reagents, yet ALSO have an incomplete
  normal ingrediant list, if so this is just a regular no action
  result - for a more hardcore RPG I would consume the ingrediants,
  but for GoPets this would not be appropriate.

  5) To get an explosion, TWO or more ingrediants from the explosive
  list must be present at the same time - if so, boom.

Thoughts?

-Erik
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