Conceptual question about spell design

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Sophia
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Conceptual question about spell design

Post by Sophia »

Here's something I've been wondering about lately... what do you all think is the best approach for keeping magic interesting for a bunch of old-time DM players like us?

To me, part of the reason that custom dungeon difficulty tends to be through the roof is that many of the DM spells are intact, and knowing them all from the beginning is a huge boost.

So, one option is to change the spell/rune system. This can allow the designer to introduce new spells, and change the formula for old ones. It's more work, but might be more challenging and satisfying for the player. But the thing is: upon the second playing, the situation is also pretty much back to the way it was. If you change the fireball incantation, that only makes fireballs inaccessible until the player knows this-- in the second playing, they can start casting fireballs immediately.

That leads then to the option of spell/rune locking. This way, even if a spell is known, you can't use it until you've actually gotten the scroll. It prevents too much experimentation, I guess. Do people find locking in this manner annoying? Conflux actually did both change spells and lock spells, and was very hard besides.

I think a little bit of magic experimentation is fun, though. I also think it would be funny to "reward" players trying to brute-force the spells by having a few undocumented spells that do rather nasty things to the party. Perhaps instead of a meaningless spell simply fizzling, the message would be something along the lines of "the mana from the meaningless spell disperses randomly," and the party suffers a random, mostly minor, mostly bad effect, like a stat lowering, a waterskin emptying, or so on...

Continuing this train of thought, I wonder if locked spells should show up as "meaningless," as "needs mor practice," or give a special "this spell is locked" message before they're unlocked...
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Paul Stevens
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Post by Paul Stevens »

Spells, like keys, should be found before they
can be used. And, like keys, can be put into
random places when the game starts.

"You need more practice". 'You have not studied
this spell sufficiently". "You must first read the
instructions for that spell". Something along those lines.
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Post by Remy »

The thing about finding spells before you can use them is that it's a common aspect of mose crpgs. D&D-style games require you find and transcribe scrolls, other types you might buy spells or simply earn them through experience levels.
The spell-building system of DM has aspects of that; finding scrolls that told you how to perform spells was easier than just brute-forcing through the runes to find which combinations worked. It also used experience to a lesser degree by making certain spells harder to perform at lower levels, with the added caveat of letting a more experienced champion choose whether to make a more powerful spell or less powerful version at the cost of mana.
But, the problem is, as Sophia said, once you know the spells, the building aspect is really just added flavor. The idea of finding scrolls doesn't really eliminate that - it's just a case of attempting to limit a common problem of rpgs - seperating what the player knows from what the champions know. Making the player find scrolls really is no different than, say, how EOB handles spells. In EOB, you find a scroll and transcribe the spell. Then you rest to "memorize" it. Then, when you want to cast it, you click the book, click the level, and click the spell. In the DM game, you'd find the scroll, rest to gain mana, and cast the spell by clicking symbols. The rune-system is merely an access point.
One way to not completely move the spell-building to merely flavor is to make spells more reliant on experience level than they are now, or make them possible before finding the scroll, but more likely to fail. Finding the scroll, thus "learning" the spell, increases the chance of success (or competely eliminates the chance of failure except for experience-level minimum failures). This helps seperate player knowledge from champion knowledge without eliminating brute-force spell casting or lucky guesswork. You could even introduce Sophia's "backfiring" spell mechanic for unlearned failures (and, again, remove it after the spell is learned, even if it still fails).
You could expand this in a few ways - either all attempts at spells, whether they're real or not - have a chance of failure and doing something detrimental to the party (with the idea that magic is something that shouldn't be toyed with). You could rely on stats, say Wisdom, more heavily than experience level, for determining success (particularly for unlearned spells) and how "bad" the backfire could be. As a dungeon designer, you'd have to be sure to provide adaquate champions with enough stats, but that shouldn't be a problem if this is the kind of concept you want to implement. It also might prevent power-playing champions to be the best at everything, but that may not be a problem.
Also, Sohpia's idea of having spells that are never documented - never found on scrolls - could be implemented as well.

Randomizing spells, not just scroll locations, is another potential solution. That is, the runes themselves are randomized. This makes more sense if you've revamped the entire rune system, instead of using DM's runes, whose imagery suggests it's meaning, since you'd actually be randomizing their "meaning". What I mean is, a magic torch would always be the rune for fire - it's just that the rune for fire would change everytime you start a new game. You'd either have to guess at it or find a scroll that told you which symbol meant fire.

Obviously, these systems are much harder to implement and require alot more fore-thought than merely locking spells or runes (or just relying on DM-style spell-building), but they also - at least in my opinion - add some of the fun niftiness that DM's spell system introduced in the first place.
Last edited by Remy on Sat Dec 08, 2007 11:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by beowuuf »

Actually, I think zyx has got it perfectly right with Conflux - you still have the ability to experiment and gain spells before officially knowing them, which is great for interest and reward as you go on, yet you have locked spells and also spells with components that let you know that there is somehting to know

I do like the idea of negative combinations. Or, infact, I liek the idea that all combinations do somehting ,and therefore you can find just bizarre or detrimental combinations through experimentation until you learn somehtign extra to help - being poisoned by a poison bomb spell until you can harness the spell in a flask for example
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Post by Sophia »

beowuuf wrote:I liek the idea that all combinations do somehting
258 possible combinations is a lot of work for the designer... but I like the idea in theory, too. :)

Random runes is fun, but then again, I like the idea of runes with meaning, too. I like having a semi-logical (it doesn't have to be completely logical, because magic isn't!) interpretation, so you can look at a spell, see the rune meanings, and think "yeah, that makes sense." A dungeon based around logically figuring some of that stuff out would be pretty fun. Maybe in something like that, there would actually be more runes or rune combinations available than the default 4 sets of 6... an extra set beyond "class/alignment"? 7 or 8 runes in each set? Hm, I wonder what would fit in the magic area without looking cramped. Anyway, something like that would make brute-forcing really, really difficult, but could still reward thinking logically about the runes.
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Post by Joramun »

My favorite way of tweaking the magic system is adding components, and just telling the player "This spell requires a component".

It's like having another row of runes, but instead of 6 runes, you have all the items in the dungeon :D
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Post by Parallax »

There are really two questions here. The first one is: how do you prevent players who know the spells from using them before their current party learns them. The sceond question is: how do you discourage players from trying out every possible rune combination.

For the first question, as has been pointed out, possible answers include:
- Locking away runes.
- Locking away spells.
- Locking away spell components.
- Randomizing spells.
Another method is to make spells only work in certain areas. One could conceive a dungeon with a powerful source of magic at the bottom. The closer the party gets to the source, the more 'ambient magic' there is, and the more potent the spells. This is highly contextual, of course, and doesn't work very well in general.
There is also the possibility of making spells useful for a given task only. See, for instance, Sophia's Dark Portal dungeon for RTC. Most of the spells are only used once and casting them anywhere but in their proper place is absolutely useless. The advantage gained from knowing the spells is very small in that case.

For the second situation, discouraging people from trying all combinations, there are several solutions as well. As noted before:
- Having unpleasant effects happen on some rune combinations.
- Increasing the number of combinations.
- Contextual spells.

The first proposed solution is almost guaranteed not to be effective. Any visible effect such as cursing an item (as in Conflux) will elicit a note and a reload, essentially defeating the point. Taking this method to the extreme, outright killing the entire party on every 'meaningless' spell combinations would not only not discourage the scroungers but it would punish anyone who typoed a spell under pressure (usually in a hard combat.)
The only way I see this method being effective is if spells that should not be known are protected using one of the methods above and both protected spells and meaningless combinations produce a neutral response of the kind "#NAME does not see any effect'. The scrounger should get the hint after a while that he is not getting any new spell in this way. Bonus points if some spell combinations produce discrete, harmful effects, without the player knowing about them. :twisted:

Increasing the number of runes, by itself, is not enough. How many combinations does it take to discourage scroungers? How many runes until it becomes clear that you are trying to keep scroungers at bay and they make it a point of pride to try every single combination? This is clearly not a good idea. If your magic system calls for more runes, then by all means make more runes, but don't make them in the hope it will protect your spells from scroungers; it won't.

Finally, contextual spells, that Beo briefly touched up on, is my favorite. The same spell can do different things based on where, when and on what it is cast. The same poison spell could poison food if cast with food in hand, create a ven bomb if a flask is in hand, make a weapon poisonous for a while if that's what's in hand, scribe a poison spell on a blank scroll, etc...
One can also use the dungeon for context. An open door spell can be used to pick certain locks if cast in front of them, a dispell magic spell kills nonmaterial monsters, drains mana from physical monsters, or reveals fake walls, depending on what it hits first, for instance. It could also open RA doors. As Joramun pointed out it is like having an extra row of runes, and it makes the game richer. Not to mention that a scrounger will not easily find all the uses of a spell, some of which can be given as hints, and others left as Easter eggs. Taken to the extreme, one could imagine providing the complete spell list to the party from the beginning, and letting them figure out what each spell does, and how many differents effects it can have.

Sorry about the wall of text.
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Re: Conceptual question about spell design

Post by Zyx »

Sophia wrote:I think a little bit of magic experimentation is fun, though.
Parallax wrote:The second question is: how do you discourage players from trying out every possible rune combination.
Like Sophia, I think experimentation may be fun for some players. You can add flavour with a few unexpected nasty effects, but the point is not to discourage the player.
It is rewarding to discover a new spell by yourself, without being told. At least, I have fond memories of it. Who didn't try the quest of the mythical ful bomb spell?
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Post by beowuuf »

Also, there is nothing more boring than re-playing a game and it being exactly the same

allowing players to use spells they did not know the first time through but have earned through the first play will amke the experience different

Perhaps limiting these to otherwise lesser used spells, or using low level (as in dungeon level) items that are usually rejected by the time the party get deep into the dungeon

Perhaps rocks or screamer slices deeper down are spell components for a spell, so playign through again, a not unbalancingly good spell is able to be used by experienced players

And yes, there is some nice rewards for working out spells - like figuring out fireball in DM as flying air, etc
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Post by Joramun »

Parallax wrote: For the first question, as has been pointed out, possible answers include:
1- Locking away runes.
2- Locking away spells.
3- Locking away spell components.
4- Randomizing spells.
5- spells only work in certain areas.
6- spells useful for a given task only.
I prefer answer 3, 5 and 6. The first is frustrating because it prevents a funny feature of DM : spell research.
The second can be interesting if it's well used, as in Conflux.
Randomizing spell is arbitrary and removes some coherence in the dungeon, and can lead to balance problem, if a powerful spells ends up with the YA or YA VEN recipe. (let's say the fireball :D )
For the second situation, discouraging people from trying all combinations, there are several solutions as well. As noted before:
1- Having unpleasant effects happen on some rune combinations.
I think that both are funny and interesting, especially if you have no idea of what spells does what effect.
2- Increasing the number of runes, by itself, is not enough.
Well, I would say that adding runes is in fact a very efficient solution for preventing brute force exploring : each row of rune roughly multiplies the number of combination by 6. (4 rows gives 1554, 5 gives 9330)...
But it's not satisfying because it just makes the spell frustrating instead of interesting.
Adding one rune per row is more interesting (it gives the reasonable 399 combinations, having 7 runes in each set gives some additional depth).
3- Finally, contextual spells, that Beo briefly touched up on, is my favorite. The same spell can do different things based on where, when and on what it is cast.
That's also my favorite solution. I always liked the idea of having the ful spell produce just a spark, and being able to use it in various context.

I think that the best thing is to :
- avoid making too powerful spells
- implement several negative spells
- add contextual use for some or all spells

Actually, what I would have like in Conflux is some way to make the curse spell useful, for example by having a quest that required to curse a given item. (Or having demonic weapon that actually work better when cursed).
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Post by beowuuf »

The curse spell is useful - have you never found the spell to energise a xxxxx then?
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Post by Joramun »

See my answer in the other thread : that's not *really* useful.
More a waste of time and stuff.
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