On Sat, 23 Jan 1999, Andrew wrote:
> Sorry, I think I jumped the gun here. It's exactly the same as your idea :)
> Sorry about that. But hey, I've always said Great minds think alike ;)
Not necessarily: you allow the player to specify how powerful he wants to
cast the spell. In mine, it was automatically determined by how much
skill he had. There's problems, however, with both approaches. There's
a certain redundancy (the spell is successful more often and does
more damage) that might tip the scales of balance. Of course, the mana
charge does help in that.
Yet another alternative would be to have the power-level of the spell
linked to external sources. I once tried a magic system where the mana
belonged entirely to the room -- magicians would become more fatigued as
they cast spells, and fatigue would increase the chances of failed spells
(which I dressed up by having interesting things happening, sometimes bad
for the magician to discourage them from mindlessly fireballing
everything -- I didn't allow fighters to run about and arbitrarily hack
whatever they thought they could kill, so why let mages do the magical
equivalent?). This also made mages a little smarter about how they
fought. That is, the warrior mentality with a sprinkling of "cast" during
combat would probably get you killed. Furthermore, the magical power of
rooms was divided up into "particles" (earth, water, fire, wind, and
chaos) -- certain spells would draw on certain magical particles, and
certain types of environments were more conducive to certain types of
spells. That is, a fireball in an area heavily saturated with "water
mana" wouldn't be very strong and more fatiguing to cast than making a
tidal wave (which would logically be harder to do under normal
circumstances, if logic can be applied to magic).
This is the system as it was implemented in the version of my mud I began
on Circle bpl14, and it will probably find its way into the C++ version,
as soon as I finish the underlying server architecture (still have to do a
script language, more complete telnet negotation parsing, help system, and
natural language parser). For those of you wondering: no, my source code
is not available nor are there any plans for making it available. Also,
my mud, should I ever put it up, will be known as "Windrune: The Chaos
Particle." Development on the server code is currently on hold, while I
upgrade to Linux Slackware 3.6 (yeah, I'm not a Red Hat kind of guy) --
which takes forever to download, requires a fleet of zip disks for backup
(well, at least I'll have backups for the first time ever :), and a lot of
time.
-dak
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Ensure that you have read the CircleMUD Mailing List FAQ: |
| http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 12/15/00 PST