Print

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

[Neonivek]

Even if we do this as Ritual only... what should stop a wizard from enchanting a Staff to shoot fireballs IF all spells require rituals?

Perhaps nothing

[Idiom]

[win]

magic should be special.

[/win]

The problem is that it wont make too much sense, if we will have some ungodly effective/strong rituals, but we wont have any basic [low tier] spells/spell system.

I really don't want small spells. It cannot be common in any manner. I want magic to be dark, dangerous, and feared. Rituals is what I think should be used. The price should be heavy.
Magic shouldn't be a solution to a problem, it should be an alternative problem.

I get bored with magic in games where I'm shooting fireballs from my finger-tips left and right, and oh look, another seige, I suppose I'll give them a ten second head start before I make them all fall over dead this time.
If DF is going to stand out, it can't be casual.

[Neonivek]

I really don't want small spells. It cannot be common in any manner.

Dude: Hey I am here to learn some magic

Wizard: Sure come on in... Yes I see your one of the few people capable of casting magic! Your first job is to open this jar of Mayo

Dude: Alright, well first I guess Ill cast an opening spell

Wizard: WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!

Dude: Opps sorry your right... Alright Ill create a volcano right ontop of the jar to melt it out of there.

Wizard: Now stop that single attacker

Dude: Alright, I guess I could use a stream of Icy Shards upon him

Wizard: NO!!!

Dude: Ohh sorry... I mean... Strike him with an Asteroid made entirely of fridged ice!

Wizard: Ohh man I am thirsty

Dude: Did someone say Flood?


Now what I just written wasn't fun, funny, and was actually pretty dumb... Which is Ironic because not having any lower scale spells is exactly that.

Now I can understand making magic so costly and hard to do that for the most part you do not want to use it for mundane reasons... but to eliminate it all together so it doesn't seem too common place? That just creates the above story and turns the Wizard into a Siege engine.

Also what is so mundane about the select few in the world who actually have magic to be able to throw fireballs? To my knowledge VERY few creatures in the game do it as it is...

This excludes Alchemy which in my oppinion fits in quite well as everyday magic... Since it is unlikely that it will teleport.

You need OTHER methods then excluding low-scale magic to make magic feel more unique...

[Idiom]

I'll rephrase it then: I don't want cheap, inexpensive spells.

You shouldn't need a wizard to kill 1 attacker. The Wizard should just scoff at the request and your incompetence to kill the invader yourself.

[Neonivek]

No the Wizard (Assuming we are speaking about having this in Fortress mode) Should go out...

So he risks his life against that one enemy... He spends components or energy dealing with a pointless enemy... and may need time to rest.

Congradulations... You used up your wizard pointlessly! You better hope nothing bad happens in the mean time

It would be the equivilant of using a Collaspe trap against a single enemy.

Or rather you may have something there... Cheap inexpensive spells can exist... But the Wizard looks down on you making him use them (In Fortress mode)

Hurray for me editing my messages 50 times!

[Granite26]

I think the point to hard magic is (takes off game designer hat and puts on storyteller hat) that it shouldn't be cureall.  It should be the solution of last resort.  Kind of like there are no small nukes.  Sure, the US has them, but we don't use them except as a very last resort, because the consequenses are so horrendous.

Think about how often Gandalf (the prototypical wizard) used magic.  He didn't.  He used lore a lot, he fought a lot, but just about the only spell he every cast was 'light'.  Not because he couldn't, but because there were better(certainly more interesting and aproachable to the reader) ways to do the things that magic could do.  High magic detracts from the players choices and makes impossible the hard fantasy tolkien stories we've got now.

It's certainly a valid way to tell a story, and I don't begrudge anybody for wanting to tell the kinds of stories that don't have magical solutions

Now... Back to the game:

1: Anything in the game will end up in the players hands.

2: Vanilla DF is maybe 20% of the intended eventual use of the DF codebase.  It's specifically built to be modable with new races, items, weapons, tools, metals, whatever.  Saying that your paticular version of your particular fantasy world doesn't have high magic is a piss poor argument for why the DF codebase should not support a high magic world.  The eventual addition of magic will not be the deathnell for the hard fantasy (that is the high realism, low magic, high medieval period with orcs fantasy that we have now) unless people abandon it en masse for the magical version.  Personally, I see future distributions with a radiobutton at world creation.  Do you want to create a world for : SteamPunk, True Medieval, Tolkien, Standard Fantasy, Post Apocalyptic, with the game using the right raws for it.  Most of these are already possible, and quite a few exist.

[Nonanonymous]

This has probably been said already, maybe not, but I think some of the higher tier rituals should give you lasting magical powers.  Like, magic that can transform your body in a way that is likely to frighten the ordinary populace, but now you have a few powers you can use whenever, instead of having to do a ritual each time.

[HisMajestyBOB]

In my opinion, low-level would be, say, an enchantment on your swords or arrows, or perhaps a magical trap - runic magic, maybe. Not magic missile.

[Mikademus]

Ritual is the highest tier in all magic system.

That is false. Some magic systems see ritual as the highest. Some see ritual as necessary only for lesser mages, real ones use only their mind. And just for kicks, since this thread is about meta-magic, then this particular discussion in this thread is about meta-meta-magic. Moar meta-levels ftw.

[tigrex]

Quote from: tigrex on September 11, 2008, 03:17:37 pm
Ok, I understand you.  My argument is that if magic is player-controlled, then it must be limited, balanced, usable regularly.  That's were magic points, spell levels and fatigue come in ... means of rationing the fun stuff.

I don't want to open the legends screen and read "Urist McWizard killed Elfy McTarget with a Magic Missile".  I want to read "Urist McWizard opens a volcano which spews magma onto Prettyflower, elven retreat." and go vist the smoking wreck later.

The problem with this is that it is rediculous... It would be like using Sephiroth's Supernova to open a jar of mayo

There are times when you just want to cast Magic Missles/Fireball/Flamesprey/Freeze/Death instead of causing a thermonuclear explosion against a stray wolf 
 

Actually, I don't like where you're going with this.  A wizard who needs to open a jar of mayo would simply do so the old fashioned way.  Similarly, a wizard accosted by a wolf would have men-at-arms to protect him.

Apart from the sheer cliche of Magic Missles/Fireball/Flamesprey/Freeze/Death, it turns the magic system into a combat system.  In other RPGs, the main use of wizards is to fight on the battlefield, like warriors with pointy hats.  We already have crossbowdwarves, so we already have ranged damage dealers.  And personally, I don't want to have to station wizards so they fire eye laser spells at goblin runts.  I want my wizard to act like a noble, to stay safe in his tower watching as his army of skeletons dismember his enemies.  I want magic to be a big deal, not just another weapon to reinforce your militia.

DF fortress' randomly generated worlds are unique, and I want magic that takes advantage of this.

Oh, BTW, I saw in the development notes that Toady has (for the next release) made it possible for blood spatters to have an owner.  He states that this is because in the future having a specific person's blood in a vial will be useful to spellcasters.  Awesome.

[Chthonic]

A wizard who needs to open a jar of mayo would simply do so the old fashioned way.  Similarly, a wizard accosted by a wolf would have men-at-arms to protect him.

Makes me think of the marketplace scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indy shoots the swordsman.  A wizard should be smart and practical.  He should use his cosmic powers to explore the universe (a la the sorcerer in Ramsey Campbell's The Darkest Part of the Woods) and, faced by mundane mortal peril, should be prepared to simply *stab*--the simple, unexpected, and expedient method of removing an opponent.

Oh, BTW, I saw in the development notes that Toady has (for the next release) made it possible for blood spatters to have an owner.  He states that this is because in the future having a specific person's blood in a vial will be useful to spellcasters.  Awesome.

Frazer's Golden Bough has an extensive discussion of systems of magic that real life humans believed in and practiced.  He divided them into two types: contagious and sympathetic magic.  In contagious magic, a part of a person can act as a stand-in (maybe a physical metaphor, really, like synecdoche) for the person, so that an action taken upon it in turn (according to the logic) is taken upon the person.  Kind of like a shaman stabbing someone's footprint in order to cause that person physical harm.  Maybe Toady has something like this in mind?

Wikipedia has a pretty broad discussion of magic in history and anthropology that could inform this thread.

[Tormy]

DF fortress' randomly generated worlds are unique, and I want magic that takes advantage of this.

Yes, I absolutely agree on this. All civilizations should have access to different magical powers. [Spheres could work very well in this case for example]
Also later on we will have randomly generated creatures/maybe civs even probably...so "random magic" will be pretty much possible in that case.

[TrombonistAndrew]

IMHO, a sufficiently DFish magic system must impliment having every act of magic require killing something. Thus, "magic" is using stolen life force.

So: if you want to make a fireball to throw? You gotta kill someone or something right then. Then have the skill to convert the stolen life energy to fire, then the skill to move it around. Kill something too big without the skill, and you fry yourself. Kill something lame like a beetle, and your fireball is practically useless - except maybe as a light source.

You wanna make an undead creature? Cool. Kill a couple living things, to get the energy to claim a corpse (not the same thing you just killed), animate it, get it to follow orders, and to not run out of energy after a while.

You wanna magically heal someone? You gotta kill something else. Or yourself.

Under such a system, it may be wise to differentiate between plant and animal life energy, or even limit what such energy can be converted to based on the living creature's abilities. Which would force wizards to keep a large slave and/or domestic animal population. Plus, this gives you one more thing to do with all those CATS!

[Sunday]

I think the idea behind Terry Pratchett's magic system would be very suitable for dwarf fortress:  "it takes the same effort to do something with magic as it would to do it mundanely" which means that there are very serious consequences to using magic at all, especially with major effects.

Of course, my general taste runs towards low magic and high death count, and YMMV.

[Silverionmox]

Providing the possibility for common magic is fine, but it's akin to providing the possibility for steam engines, fossil fuel, rifles etc. The industrial revolution is not something to be trifled with. If magic is clearly the best way to do something, sooner rather than later everyone will do it that way, and when that doesn't happen suspension of disbelief breaks.