Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[20,000leeks]

Yes, it's been talked about quite a bit in the past (I just finished reading Mud's excellent post on the topic), but I do have a couple of vague ideas.

First off, what magic should, ultimately, cost. This is usually the worst part of Roguelikes - in order to use some fancy-pants magic that immolates a whole bunch of evil kobolds, a portion of mental energy is expended, or some reagents get consumed, or what have you... Which is nice and convenient, but doesn't really take into account that a large area has just been made very very warm with no corresponding change in the surroundings. I'm not putting this very well, so I'll use an example.

Say a mage wants to move something (which, for the purposes of this argument, is an everyday task - it could be pretty much anything, like throwing fire at some pesky trolls, or producing a bunch of flowers from thin air, or what have you). She waves her hand, expends some 'mana', and the object is moved. Hey presto. But what about the physics involved?

It would be interesting (and kind of in-keeping with the quasi-realistic nature of the game) if Dwarf Fortress had a magic system that would push the magic-user backwards with the opposing force (I'm sure some people have heard this line of reasoning before, it's in a pretty popular series). Of course, that's just an example. My line of argument is that doing things by magic should have a semi-realistic cost associated with producing the end effect. Things cannot simply be produced out of thin air - for one thing, eventually the world would be chock-full of magic rings, amulets, swords, and floodgates. To do magic should be a somewhat difficult to nearly impossible task, depending on what the aim in mind is and just how magicified you want the world of DF to end up. Everyone may have magical abilities, for example, but doing most things physically rather than magically might be simply quicker and less taxing. Or on the flipside, very few people have the kind of magical strength to do anything useful.

This doesn't mean that magic should be totally useless, however. Magic could be used for all sorts of things - transporting stones to a stockpile, for example. But the cost involved (the magic-user gets thrown five hundred meters backwards and is physically exhausted, for example) should make doing things like that prohibitive. Magically constructing a portal that shortens the distance between the stockpile and the mine, however, should be quite possible (maybe the magic-user has to prepare quite thoroughly, invest in special equipment, research what she's going to do..) and beneficial, even if the cost is still quite high. This way, there's no cliched magic-user who can do pretty much anything without lifting a finger, but magic retains the mystical sense surrounding it.

Second point, which is kind of along the lines of what Mud said in his post, it'd be a good idea to move away from the cliche of magic that revolves around making items stronger or hurting things. Why not cross out the creative aspect of magic, and replace it with a transmutative one? In other words, rather than pulling a coin out from someone's ear, you turn their ear into a coin. This way, no new properties are introduced into the world, at least not strictly speaking, but old ones can be combined. Rather than surrounding a sword with a fiery aura, your magic-user takes a small quantity of lava and ever-so-carefully transfers the quality of heat from the lava to the sword, trying not to transfer any of the *other* qualities too. Rather than creating an artifact of mind-numbing power from thin air, the magic-user has to gather the constituent raw materials as well as any objects with properties she'd like to instil into the finished object and painstakingly (and probably time-consumingly) constructs it piece by piece.

These ideas might be difficult to implement the way I've described it, but you get the general idea. Magic becomes a more realistic (never thought I'd say those words in the same sentence) force. Of course, this is just one perspective - maybe magic shouldn't be realistic, and the whole point is that it *can* be unreal. I just think it'd fit in quite nicely with the overall feel of DF if it worked this way.

[Aquillion]

No.

Everyone keeps posting their ideas for magic, so even though it's years in the future or whatever I suppose I should give my two cents:

I think that there should be lots of different types of magic out there, and that the player should never be sure that they've seen all of them.  "Wizards", such as they are, should be mysterious and powerful, almost a race unto themselves, but there could be lots of other magic, and there shouldn't be any unified rules that the player can use to predict how it will work.  The only universal rule is that magic ought to feel 'magical', and even that can be bent a little for alchemists and the like.

There could be aged, quasi-human sages who read ancient books and recite incantations alongside kobold shamans who make deals with dark creatures along with elven spiritualists who are able to talk wood, plants, blood and bone into doing what they want.  Artifacts should contain a mysterious power, not one bound by laws that any of the above would understand.  Demons likewise are scary and don't play by anyone's rules.  Half-civilized northerners could carve runes of dubious power on their weapons, while hags living on the outskirts of civilization brew strange potions, powders and poisons with effects that may--or may not--be true magic.  Ghosts, evil spirits, and other stray bits of magic could be found in the shadows anywhere, and the humble prayers that various strange faiths use to keep them at bay could be magic of a sort.

If it follows the rules then it isn't magic, see?

[Capntastic]

Aquillion is wise.

Magic should always be something mysterious and never fully under the control of the player.  If you can just read a scroll to make yourself faster or stronger, then it's just simple cause and effect, which leads to understanding, which takes away the 'magical'ness of the act.

I have no real strong ideas as to the effects of magic for DF, but I support the idea of spell reagents and rituals that must be discovered, collected/performed, and possibly done incorrectly if you mess something up.

Taking the stars and such into account would be great for this.

[20,000leeks]

Yeah, that's a good point... having definite rules for magic does kind of make it less magic and more just a different type of science (although I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who once said that really advanced science is indistinguishable from magic). The only problem with a system that has no or appears to have no rules is really coding it, but with enough ingenuity, anything is possible - and given what Toady's achieved already, I'm kind of hesitant to say "this is difficult", let alone "this is impossible"  

The idea of cost is important, though, and the constitution of magic is kind of closely tied up in that. That's going to determine how much magic is used and what it's used for. Personally, I dislike overly magical systems, so I'd rather see something where magic is insanely expensive, but has insanely useful results.

On the flipside though, the idea about there being hundreds of different types of magic (for want of a better word there), has serious potential. Magic collected from ritual sacrifice, magic collected from natural energy (maybe even different types of natural energy), magic found in the deepest darkest niches in caves, this all leads to the diversification of possibility that makes DF such a great game. Although you do have to ask the question, if there's all this raw magic lying around, wouldn't magic seem less... magical? I mean, if anyone can amble down to the river, grab some river-magic, and then fill a bucket of water with it, it'd be kind of commonplace, no?

[Aquillion]

One of the plans in the distant future is to have a "Wizard Tower" mode, where you control a Gandalf/Merlin style wizard.  Obviously, there aren't too many wizards like that in a world, and they tend to stick to themselves.

For lesser magic, I don't think the plan is to have nethack-style scroll shops all over the place, no, and I suspect we won't have hordes of magic-user adventurers running around like in D&D or most other games.

But there are other ways to put magic into a gameworld without making it seem too common.  Many things can be subtly magic...  runes on a sword, for instance, or trinkets and pure waters sold by the elves.  These things might only show their magical nature under the right circumstances, or might grant it in indirect or subtle ways.  Nobody says that every magical thing in the world needs a big neon sign labelled MAGIC pointing at it.

Some magic could have extremely high costs, yes, but other magic could just be hard to recognize and hard to put to straightforward use.  Some magic, like artifacts or deals struck with strange creatures, could have intentions and purposes of their own, and have unpredictable effects as a result.

[Capntastic]

The idea of small magical trinkets that have odd properties is a nice one, especially when there is more to the game.  A jewelled ring that gives off a pleasing scent, or a scepter that attracts butterflies.  All sorts of subtle, not 100% 'combat useful' ideas.  These would, I believe, be much more interesting toys than a simple "boots of speed +1" or "amulet of fire resistance".  

Of course, imagine the fun of finding such an amulet, and wearing it into battle against a dragon, only to discover it works only during certain phases of the moon.  The framework of DF is glorious in such that having a plain and boring system of magic would be an injustice.