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

[William Leader]

Erik Bethke wrote:

> 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:

Erik,

Well I understand what you are saying about the results being one
dimensional. I have found that if you have multiple ingredients that
have ranges of effectiveness and use them in a mathematical formula
for determining the result works OK. On the question of what happens
when you take an unexpected ingredient (say newt eyes) and add them
to something else( a short cake) how to implement what happens. From
design perspective I like the idea that something should always
happen, but I am not sure players would always agree. The problem is
that most players would get very unhappy if they take some expensive
ingredients and put them together in bowl and the game tells them
that they have made a bowl full of worthless scum. So it might be a
requirement from a player happiness perspective that uncombineable
items should be rejected back to the player.

The other thing about the discovery process is that most players
will not go through the work to experiment with strange combinations
of ingredients. I imagine some would, but for the most part, when
some recipe is discovered it will just end up on a web site, and
players will just go the web site and look up what they want to
make. This means that if you put a lot of work into making a
crafting system where things blow up, that content will be rarely
experienced by players. Most players will probably never know, nor
care about it. It might end up being a big expense without a good
return. This is the exact reason why I like the variation of quality
method, because it takes very little work to implement, and most
players will care if they are making good items or bad ones.

One other thing I want to throw out is that in terms of flavor text
this can be done by having an object calculate its name at run
time. By this i mean you might define a Cake object that forms the
base for all cakes. Now the cake object when asked its name will
check a value associated with the object that stores a cake
flavor. Now if you have a player make a cake with the base
ingredients, then a cake object is created, but if the play adds in
Chocolate chips or Newt eyes, then when the cake object is created
the flavor variable can have "chocolate" or "newt eye" stored in it,
Then when the player examines the cake, the name "Chocolate Cake" or
"Newt Eye Cake" is returned. To get more complicated, you could have
a numeric value stet by a flavor ingredient that changes the effect
of using the object. For example the chocolate might change a value
to 10 for example, and the player's hunger could be reduced by 10
later on if they eat the cake, Newt eyes could set the same value to
25, causing the players hunger to be reduced by 25 when they eat a
newt eye cake (because we all know newt eyes are a very satisfying
meal.) anyway the point is with a flexible object system, you can
create an interesting crafting system. Done right, you don't have to
define many many objects.

If you are inclined you can contact me directly to discuss technical
stuff, or we can start a tech thread.

-William Leader
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