quote: Original post by dwarfsoft
Well, I love a good topic about Magic Systems, but I have to say that if Voice Recog was available, why not allow players to create their own "hotkeys" of spells? Wouldn''t it be hilarious if you hotkeyed "Shit" and "****" and other expletives to do weird tasks for you. How funny would it be when you had a mental block and you needed to cast a shield and you say "shit! What is that spell again" and ''shit'' is linked with the spell for blowing vapourous gas from your anus?

Fun times for all I think. Or maybe I should stop sniffing glue

Yes, stop sniffing glue. Or smoking crack. (Side note: everyone should listen to "some advice from your sunscreen dealer" by sunbabies inc. on mp3.com)

Silvermyst: okay, so typing out words will work. Which brings up another point, which I''m sure Boby will enjoy--backfiring. (He seems to like the ideas of mistyped stuff.) Is the spell parser going to have to be able to recognize what a spell was supposed to be and backfire accordingly, or will a mistyped spell simply fail to happen? And, do we want to keep the letters involved grouped in one area of the keyboard, or should they be spread out? If they''re together, the player can likely type with one hand and still move; if they''re spread out, it becomes more realistic in the sense that a mage must largely stop what he''s doing to cast a spell.

If we do use typing a combination of letters as our way of casting a spell, we still have to establish some other rules.

I think the most important one is how you see magic.

Does magic happen only after performing certain words/gestures (spin around three times, hopping on one leg, while saying ''alakazam'') or do all gestures and words have a certain effect (if you only spin twice, hop on both legs and say ''ala'', will a spell still happen)?

I guess what I mean is, do only very specific letter combinations result in a spell (-X-A-Z-Q-E-F) or will any combination result in something (the ffaaffaa approach).

I think that when using letter combinations, you could allow the player to hotkey his own letters. Magic Missile might be defaulted as A-K-L-Y-I-K-O but the player might hotkey this to M-I-S-S-I-L-E to make it easier to remember. Although I think that as you mentioned, when characters are spread out across the keyboard, it creates a certain difficulty, which might be used to balance spells. For example, spells that are supposed to be simple could be Z-A-W-E-R, but spells that are supposed to be hard could be Z-P-G-Q-M.

BTW Is there technology that would allow for a system that requires a player to actually press two lettters at the exact same time? (I guess there is, thinking of the CNTL-ALT combination) How about three buttons? How about four? Just an idea (seems harder to have to type four buttons at the same time, than type them in a row. Could add another level of difficulty)

Backfiring:
I like spells that backfire. But I''m not sure when this should happen. I think a system where when you miscast a spell, most of the time it''ll just mean that the spell fizzles, but maybe 5% of the time (what factors would affect this?) the spell backfires leaving the caster off worse than he was before. The effects could be preset (if magic missile backfires, it''ll target the caster instead of the wanted target) or be somewhat random (who knows what''ll happen know that my magic missile spell backfires. It might target me, or any of my teammembers... it might even still hit the wanted target)

In the letter-combination system, would a spell backfire because of mistyping a combination? If a spell is A-B, would typing A-C be wrong but at least better than typing A-Z? (if A-B is magic missile, typing A-C might fizzle the spell, but A-Z might backfire the spell onto the caster). Should all letter combinations have a certain effect? (would be fun to design, because only certain spells would need to be desirable, and most letter combinations could give funny, horrible or deadly spell results)

I think the focus should be to force magic casters to really be careful about what they type.

In DungeonMaster (guess what, it''s my favorite) magic used an easy combinatory system :
there was four groups of six symbols, you would choose one symbol in the first, then one in the second and so on.
First group was for spell power, from lowest to greatest
Second was for element involved
Third was action
Fourth was magic realm

ex:
low force (LO) fire (FUL) = magic torch
greatest force(MON) fire (FUL) fly (IR) = fireball

each symbol would take a certain amount of mana (depending on the spell strength)

When in combat, you would click fast on the symbols to achieve the spell you wanted, with the speed involved, you would miss some spells.

It was fun, easy and logical and you only need a mouse or a keyboard
The logical aspect allows to remember spells very quickly...

It seems that pretty much everyone likes the idea of combining certain "spell words" if you like to produce different spell effects, even if we disagree on the interface used to compose them (which is kind of besides the point anyway)

In order to get this to work you need to define a simple language grammar. Maybe the first word is defines the overal spell type, followed by any number of modifier types, followed by a number of target specifiers, denoting how many targets of what type (friendly/hostile/self) the spell should hit. How the modifier types affect the spell depends on the original type, so in the fireball example, earth gives the fireball more mass, therefore more damage but less range, more fire gives larger, hotter ball (more damage, larger blast radius) and water - perhaps that counteracts the fire element and causes the spell to fizzle, or perhaps if water and earth and fire form a triplet then the fireball becomes a gobbet of burning oil... How flexible the system is depends on how complex your spell ''language'' is.

As for assigning hotkeys, I think this is a bad idea. The whole point of the method is to make give the player the feel of the act of spellcasting, as soon as you assign a hotkey, he can just assign j = ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooooooooooooooo or something, and then proceed to blast the living crap out of everything that comes near him. It is analagous to being able to assign a 30 move combo to a single key in tekken. Instead, perhaps you could allow the player to inscribe scrolls with his most powerful spells - these could be fired off in a single click, but would require money and forethought to use.

SANDMAN:

Agreed. Hotkeys would somewhat take us away from what the system is supposed to do. I was just thinking that spellcasters will at one point become very familiar with spells, and the gestures and actions they have to perform to cast a spell will become easier and easier. I think that this is somewhat reflected in the fact that when a player uses a certain spell over and over again, he''ll have an easier time typing the correct letters over time, but I think that you could reflect the rise in skill somewhat more by allowing some form of shortcut to the spell. Instead of a 10 letter combination, a spellcaster who''s experienced might only have to use 7 of those letters while assigning the other 3 to a hotkey.

Example:

Magic Missile combination is A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J
Experience Magic Missile caster would type A-B-C-D-E-F-G-and then the number he has previously assigned to the last three letters.

I''m sure this can be balanced (maybe by never allowing a shortcut to be more than say 40% of the total combination. So if the combination is 10 letters, you''d ALWAYS have to type out the first 6 letters, and then when you''re very experienced, you can hit a number key that takes care of the last 4 letters.
(of course this system is based on a precise combination of letters for each individual spell, instead of the other proposed system which lets casters adjust their spell on the spot by the letters they pick)

I''m drifting though, gotta stay on subject.

Why do you have to stay on topic? Drifting is what creates new ideas.

Hotkeys don''t have to take away from the effect of combining; factor in character spellcasting skill. For instance (with completely arbitrary numbers): a level one mage can cast spells of up to two characters. At level two he can cast spells of up to four characters, but can''t bind anything yet. At level three, he can cast up to six characters, and can bind two characters to one. Level 4: eight characters, bind 4 to one. Etc. etc. etc. This then becomes a playbalancing issue.

In addition, incorporate scrolls: a mage can stuff twice as many characters on a scroll as he can normally bind, but make scroll papers semi-hard to come by, or if a realistic time-system is put into the game, make scribing a long process. Just another play-balancing issue.

DRAQZA:

Yes. The higher the skill level of the character, the easier it should be for the player to cast spells. Add to that that a higher player skill level makes it even easier to cast spells.

I think it''d be best to use numbers for shortcuts, which again is a balancing tool, as there are only 10 numbers, so only 10 possible shortcuts, which seems to be right, as no caster should be superskilled at more spells than that.

I''m not sure that any shortcut system would work for the other proposed system (ffaaee).

quote: Original post by Silvermyst
DRAQZA:

I''m not sure that any shortcut system would work for the other proposed system (ffaaee).

The shortcut system I proposed for that system is more of an alias system. Instead of, for instance, typeing ''cast ffaaee'' you could have an alias system similare to what circle mud uses, and alias fireball=''cast ffaaee''. Then you just type fireball and it would cast the spell.

You could limit that amount of alias''s you can have per level as well.

Streich

quote: Original post by Streich

You could limit that amount of alias''s you can have per level as well.

Streich

Sounds good...that way, more experienced mages can toss out more spells.

Silvermyst: why wouldn''t shortcuts work for the ffaaee system? I mean, if you use hotkey shortcuts for it, then somewhere you''re going to have to define what key adds what to a spell. So, it would really be the same--either: "shortcut #3 = SILE" (end of MISSILE) or "shortcut #3 = ffaaee". Difference? None that I see...

I like the whole idea of having the player type in the runes for whatever spell they want. I dont think hot keys would be a problem though. Allow it, the player would have to be carefull what they hot key, wouldn''t want to mess up a key already being used to make a different spell, one that your not hot keying. As mentioned earlier the number keys would make great hot keys IMHO.

My reasoning to allow the player to hot key the spells is because I want to restrict him elsewhere. The amount of letters in the spell to be exact. Now he could only have 10 hot keyed spells, with the 4 runes (f, a, e, w) there is a possible combonation of 16 using only 2 typed letters. ( I''m allowing double letters). The player would get an letter added to the list they are allowed to cast as he grows in power. Now the ''ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffeeeaaa'' fireball could only come out of a powerful mage. Another way to restrict them is to increase the energy/mana usage with the number of letters in the spell. This is a great way of handling the above mentioned huge fireballs. And this doesn''t kill the slow typers that will want to play either. This is a very cool concept.

Glandalf
Just a Thought