11 Feb, 2008, Mabus wrote in the 1st comment:
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I have seen in the past a few games that allow creation of spells by players. From the name, the damage types, to the mana costs are set by the players upon creation of the spell. The system then figures out healing/damage/whatever and the spell is saved with the character. I am thinking about coding such a system for our game, but haven't yet even sat down to draw up the initial documents.

If you were designing this from the ground up what ideas, concerns and design thoughts would you have for such a system?
11 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 2nd comment:
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First concern, which is probably obvious, is balance. Depending on how you balanced the rest of the game, this can be more or less easy. I'm quite fond of Morrowind and Oblivion where you can design your own spells, and the game uses set formulae to determine the mana cost based on the effects you choose. (Reverse direction from your system, but same thing, really.) In those systems, the main things you set are strength, duration and range of the effect (where range is actually the splash of the effect). For each effect type, these factors are combined to give a cost. And as you add effects, the costs are combined, but not with simple addition. In other words, you can get much more mileage out of your fireball if all it does is fire damage; if you want it to have electricity damage too, you will get less than half of the fire damage in each damage category if you want to keep the mana cost constant.

The other concern is abuse of the name; in general letting people freely enter text can be problematic in some cases. They could name it the same as a real spell, for example, which could mislead people; or there's the usual possibility of entering something obscene. Both cases though can be handled with some monitoring; the first can probably be handled automatically by comparing against the list of current spells.

One nifty idea would being able to copy the spell for other people (assuming you have wizard skills). This would add a new dimension of crafting; it might be quite hard to craft these spells, and a wizard could make some degree of profit selling spells for people who wanted them.
11 Feb, 2008, drrck wrote in the 3rd comment:
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One concern I would have with such a system is obsoleteness. If you allow player-created spells that even have the chance of being "better" than stock spells, you'll see a migration toward them and abandonment of the old stuff. This may or may not have an effect on your particular game, depending on what kind of emphasis you want these custom spells to have, but I've seen similar issues on other games (mostly with custom equipment vs. stock equipment, though).
11 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 4th comment:
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The trick to solve that is to have your spells use the same formulae as custom spells, except that the world's spells get a slight bonus applied to the mana cost etc. So if you tried to create the same spell as a stock spell, you could get the same effect but you would have to pay a little more mana. And if you don't want to use this premium idea, you can still design your spells around the same system and avoid the problem of player spells being more powerful (proportionately, of course).
11 Feb, 2008, Mabus wrote in the 5th comment:
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drrck said:
One concern I would have with such a system is obsoleteness. If you allow player-created spells that even have the chance of being "better" than stock spells, you'll see a migration toward them and abandonment of the old stuff.

Fine by me, if the system is engaging, and the players find it more interesting.
drrck said:
This may or may not have an effect on your particular game, depending on what kind of emphasis you want these custom spells to have, but I've seen similar issues on other games (mostly with custom equipment vs. stock equipment, though).

I can appreciate that, but in our world "custom equipment" (player-character crafted equipment) is the best equipment.

Thank you for the concerns. I am starting to get a few basic ideas of "how" together in my head.
11 Feb, 2008, drrck wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
The trick to solve that is to have your spells use the same formulae as custom spells, except that the world's spells get a slight bonus applied to the mana cost etc. So if you tried to create the same spell as a stock spell, you could get the same effect but you would have to pay a little more mana. And if you don't want to use this premium idea, you can still design your spells around the same system and avoid the problem of player spells being more powerful (proportionately, of course).


Well, I was more referring to unique effects that can't be gotten from the stock spells. I don't think a system where custom spells can only use existing effects is very innovative or interesting, but that's just me.
11 Feb, 2008, Mabus wrote in the 7th comment:
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DavidHaley said:
The trick to solve that is to have your spells use the same formulae as custom spells,

That is how I am picturing it already.

Basic types of spells (self, targeted, targeted damage, area damage, group, item, utility, creation/summoning, etc.) with the variables passed to them from the created spell. Still trying to wrap my head around the "research" and "storage" (spell book, for example) as well as how skills will handle various types/schools of magic.
11 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 8th comment:
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drrck said:
I don't think a system where custom spells can only use existing effects is very innovative or interesting, but that's just me.

Morrowind and Oblivion make it pretty interesting… you sometimes want to tailor a set of effects to a given situation, so you make specific spells for specific situations.

They make it particularly interesting because the only enchantment effects you can add to objects are the spell effects you know.

Mabus said:
Still trying to wrap my head around the "research" and "storage" (spell book, for example) as well as how skills will handle various types/schools of magic.

I would have the spells be in the character's head for all practical purposes, that is, you can't lose your spell-book. It would be realistic but really annoying to have a loss of spellbook mean the loss of all your spells; the warrior doesn't forget how to fight when he loses equipment so to be "fair" it might not be good for the mage to forget the spells either. But perhaps the mage would always remember a base set of effect types, and could reconstruct spells from there, much as a warrior has to reconstruct a set of equipment.

As for research, I would probably have it work like whatever crafting you already have in terms of delays etc. Haven't really thought about it much to be honest. :smile:
11 Feb, 2008, Tommi wrote in the 9th comment:
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Quote
If you were designing this from the ground up what ideas, concerns and design thoughts would you have for such a system?


If i was designing such a system, i would forgo all existing spells and let the players construct all of their spells. I would use a component system, where a PC can buy or find components that when combine together form a spell that is unique to that player. They would get to name the spell. Each component would be graded on a 1 to 5 scale that determines the quality that, that component brings to to the constructed magic. Each element of a spell would require different components.
Attack Component: Fire, Acid, Ice….etc…. quality adds attack value and increases mana cost
Verbal Component: Prayer, Song…..etc….quality reduces mana cost also used for class differentiation
Material Components: Toads, Newts, Herbs….etc…. different material add properties like offense, defense, healing, area effect, targeting(self, other) etc
Time Component: The quality of the components and tools used to create the spell effect how long it takes to cast and recharge
Range Component: The quality of the components and tools used to create the spell effect how far you can cast, same room, next room.
And a whole swag of other aspects.

As for implementation, i would give each PC their own magic file, and write out the name and a series of numbers which are the values for each aspect of the spell and use something simular to spell smaug to do the actual processing of the spells. Sorry if this is rather malformed, i have just got home from work after a 16 hour day and am finding it hard to fous.
11 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Tommi said:
a PC can buy or find components that when combine together form a spell that is unique to that player.

I'm guessing that by "unique" you mean "tailored", "customized", etc., right, not actually unique? It would be fairly interesting if players actually got a monopoly on spells they created but I'm not sure what that would do to gameplay… :smile:

Quote
As for implementation, i would give each PC their own magic file, and write out the name and a series of numbers which are the values

Please, no more series of numbers; that's just asking for trouble. Let's move into the modern era and use at the least a key-value format. Series of numbers save a few bytes at the expense of readability, maintainability and expandability…
11 Feb, 2008, Kayle wrote in the 11th comment:
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DavidHaley said:
Please, no more series of numbers; that's just asking for trouble. Let's move into the modern era and use at the least a key-value format. Series of numbers save a few bytes at the expense of readability, maintainability and expandability…


Agreed…
11 Feb, 2008, drrck wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
Morrowind and Oblivion make it pretty interesting… you sometimes want to tailor a set of effects to a given situation, so you make specific spells for specific situations.

They make it particularly interesting because the only enchantment effects you can add to objects are the spell effects you know.


You may be able to apply the effects faster, more efficiently, or for less mana with custom spells, so I can see how they would be beneficial - just not interesting. Again, though, that's just my opinion and YMMV.

Kayle said:
DavidHaley said:
Please, no more series of numbers; that's just asking for trouble. Let's move into the modern era and use at the least a key-value format. Series of numbers save a few bytes at the expense of readability, maintainability and expandability…


Agreed…


Doubly agreed.
11 Feb, 2008, Tommi wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Please, no more series of numbers; that's just asking for trouble. Let's move into the modern era and use at the least a key-value format. Series of numbers save a few bytes at the expense of readability, maintainability and expandability…


Ummm yeah i didnt mean it as in the old smaug area file format. I just meant literally that the values being stored for each spell be numbers. One can structure a file however they like with the data for each spell being a series of numbers.
11 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
drrck said:
You may be able to apply the effects faster, more efficiently, or for less mana with custom spells, so I can see how they would be beneficial - just not interesting. Again, though, that's just my opinion and YMMV.

Oh. Well, I guess that for me being beneficial is a way of being interesting.

Tommi said:
Ummm yeah i didnt mean it as in the old smaug area file format. I just meant literally that the values being stored for each spell be numbers. One can structure a file however they like with the data for each spell being a series of numbers.

Sorry, I just get pretty jittery about seeing series of numbers stored in files since it makes so many things so much harder to deal with. :wink:

That said, I would also suggest avoiding numbers where possible, and storing actual strings that might (or might not) be turned into numbers at load time.
11 Feb, 2008, Mabus wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
I wouldnt worry about me using numbers "like SMAUG" (I do have a high respect for SMAUG, don't get me wrong), as I use a modified CoffeeMud with a MYSQL database.

Thank you all for the input. Every little bit helps during initial design.
12 Feb, 2008, syn wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
This may be beyond the scope of your project, however, what AC1 tried to do, which in the end was barely noticeable at all.. would be to have a spell economy so that if people use X spell the most, its power diminishes. Like the force behind that magic is a battery and to much use globally makes it get drained.

When something is used excessively the spell becomes weaker, less powerful, not as strong of a heal, etc. It was intended to keep people from spamming the same spells over and over, and eventually switch it up and use other spells, or less common ones.

I like the idea overall, and if they had actually implemented it to the degree they had talked about think it would have been really cool. That could be a solution to the possible problem mentioned above, about obsoleteness, or overuse of player spells.

-Syn
12 Feb, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 17th comment:
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Wouldn't such a system be very harmful to "young" characters, who only have a relatively small list of spells, and therefore don't have much opportunity to change spells? And wouldn't it encourage spell duplication in a system that allows you to create your own spells, in that you'd have a bunch of spells that all heal x HP for y mana, in order for players to rotate among them as they become more or less powerful?
12 Feb, 2008, syn wrote in the 18th comment:
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Yep all that is possible, the way that AC originally was doing it was A, spells were always a part of a specific group or level. So a level 8 acid spell might get over used, and spells 7-8-9 would have some form of power drop, a level 8 fire spell would not if it was not as heavily used.

Second things like level one-2-3 spells had little to no power drop, basically it was supposed to be a scaling mechanic, and spell creation was not really… well real. Basically it was discovering the spells in the game. Though with a custom spell setup you could always group it by certain key phrases a character must utter, or spell groups, like above and range X power of Y damage type, when used Z amount has power drop, making people utilize other spells, or game created ones that may be harder to drop in power as they are 'core spells'

/Shrug theres problems with any system, but this one could work if you try and sounds pretty cool to me still

-Syn
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