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

[Hulbert, Leland]

Damien Neil wrote:
> On 8/25/05, David Love <dlove at nighton.net> wrote:

> The overall system rewards players in several different ways:
> Reverse-engineering the basic structure spell system will probably
> be done by a small number of people who will eventually publish
> their discoveries for everyone to use.  They and other players will
> then design and share common spells.  This allows people who aren't
> interested in the details of spellcrafting to avoid it--they can
> just rely on common, published spells.

> Since runes, however, will be a limited resource, players with a
> good understanding of the spell system will have an advantage over
> those who don't.  By designing spells to specifically take advantage
> of the runes they have access to, they will be more efficient
> casters than the people who just use existing recipes.

As a mini-game addition, have some runes, particularly the high
powered ones, draw their information from the characters own stats,
including stats that are variable, and/or hidden from the player.
Maybe rune314 has a different effect depending on how tall you are,
and rune723 has an effect based on what percentage of your equipment
is red.  And rune807 is a no-op for female casters, but a multiply
for males (or vice-versa).  By making these, you are keeping the
spell-discovery mini game open to new players, who can get hints
from the web pages, but no difinitive answers until they try it
themselves.  By keeping those types of runes rare and powerful, you
keep from upseting the people who just want to cast spells
constistently, while still rewarding the explorer types who go all
out with it.  Also, once your casters determine the strengths of
various runes, they will still be willing to trade runes instead of
hoard them, since the runes will have different perceived values to
different players.

Lee
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