Is the study of magic a lost art?

malachantrio · 2005-03-16T15:46:17

I will try to keep this post making as much sense as possible but unfortunately ideas kinda stream out of my head without much planning so bear with me a little. I play a lot of RPG games, and I always like to be a mage or some kind of derivative therin. I spend all my time levelling up and, in most games, 'purchasing' new spells or spell upgrades. Often when describing my character to someone else I find myself saying things like I'm a lvl 28 mage with FireBall spell 9. Without sounding amazingly picky and pedantic, in a way that kinda takes the mystery out of being a mage. Its just a little depressing that my character's knowledge of the arcane forces can be summed up with a name and a number. Often I think to myself this spell that throws lightning is very nice but what I really want is something that errupts from the skies to my enemies. No okay I know this is starting to seem pointless and vague and probably annoying too but, I was thinking the other day and came up with something that I'd like some opinion on. What if the player decided how his spells worked, how they damaged, the range, the power etc... Of course this needs to be regulated to save everyone having a spell that costs 1 mana and annihlates the entire universe. So how about this: Instead of leveling up and 'purchasing' a spell, you purchase a spell type for instance fire projectile or fire radial, lightning rain anything you can think of really and also a 'school of study' such as projectile speed. Then the character can create a new spell of whatever type (fire projectile for example) and call it whatever they like. Then the player can choose to start studying attributes of the spell like the speed of the projectile which might have the effect of stunning an enemy. if you set yourself to study this particular school then as you use the spell the speed of the projectile gradually increases, thus increasing the stun effect of the spell. However to keep the play balanced you give the school of study a side effect. e.g. as the projectile gets quicker it uses more mana. the player may study that for a while and get a stun effect on his spell of 3.9 seconds and then the player decides I want to increase the damage, so he starts to study projectile size. See now you can even use inter dependencies and say that as the size of the projectile gets bigger the speed gets slower (not too much though so the player can still customize exaclty how they want the spell even though it would take alot of time and much studying) and uses more mana. You could even have more schools of study such as mana consumption, impact explosion etc.... As you go through the game you may even learn how to study two schools on one spell at the same time. I understand that this would be an absolute nightmare to play balance. I have no intention of implementing it in any games I am currently involved in as I don't have the experience, and to be honest with my first few projects I am trying to start out small. But I would like the opinion of any one who has anything to say about this - good or bad (I won't even take offence if you flame me down) And finally thank you for reading through this drivel - A coherent writer I most seriously am not :)

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by malachantrio March 08, 2005 11:14 AM

31 comments, last by GameDev.net 19 years, 10 months ago

Is the study of magic a lost art?

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Is the study of magic a lost art?

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