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[Dakk]

^

I like the way this is going.

Here's my 2 cents on the matter:

Mana, like Osmosis said, should be a treated as a static flowing thing, similar to liquids, with levels hanging from 0-7. Having specific kinds of magic (IE fireballs, ice storm, etc) is cool and all that, but the great thing about DF is the ammount of influence the player has over the game. As you already can, right now, in the middle of an alpha, channel way, raise it several z levels using crazy thingamajigs of pumps, axles and gears, to make waterfalls, artificial wells and the like, you should be able to manipulate magic in different ways, for a pletora of reasons. Mana could be channeled using runic engravings, certain runes could act as a pump to direct mana to some specific place, in order to attain certain results, a nice example would be channeling magma to your water supply, and with the help of a wizard, use said mana to change all the water into wine! You could also channel mana into you wizard's workshop, increasing his power and range of influence, and helping him learn or maybe even create spells. Making huge engravings in certain shapes (pentagrams and the like) and make crazy things happen, such as creating a portal for summoning creatures (and said creatures could go on a rampage if your glyph wasn't well drawn or your wizard is too much of a n00b), negating gravity to make lifting water through z levels easier, enchanting your forge so the weapons and armor made in it become magical, etc.

Of course, your wizard should also be able to use magic individually, to a lesser extend. Playing a wizard in adventurer mode would require them to at least have some combat spells , and they would also be important figures in the world gen, creating towers in places with higher magical concentration, summoning demons, etc.

HOW this would be implemented though, i don't know, but i'm eager to see somethingat least similar to this in DF's future.

[Mikademus]

One thing I'd like to suggest, over dwarfs getting their magic from food-fests, is that instead, perhaps they could draw power from their fortresses directly.

The way I think this could work would be to allow engravers to set gems and precious metals into their engraved walls, as Runes, and then dwarf magic would draw power from those Runes, causing them to vanish as their power was used up, and the entire wall to go back to it's natural, rough state.

That keeps dwarf magic thematic to both the nature of the game, and to dwarfs, since they would gain magical power from their Dwarf Fortress, and directly from a fairly labour-intensive, "dwarfish" activity. Dwarfs are known for working hard, and working with stone, precious items, and runes, a lot more than they are for eating too much.

Well, this is superficially similar in that the fortress is "consumed", but it has one huge drawback compared to the hunger-based model. It will never spell the doom of the settlement. Your engravings and encrustations may run out but all thatyou need to do is assign labour to make new. You can also make mana banks, in effect, mana batteries. However, hunger CAN spell doom for your fortress. When your ravenous magic user goes on a rampage devouring 80% of your food stores that keeps your 175 dwarves alive, then you know you're in a much worse state than simply having a few less decorations.

Thus, hunger is better because of
(1) the challenge, and Dwarf Fortressness of that challenge (doooooooooom!)
(2) it isn't yet another attemp at disguising mana and mana banks

EDIT:
VVV   I assume SirHoneyBadger in the next post argues the same point that I do.   VVV

[SirHoneyBadger]

But look at all the gold and platinum and gems you start to accumulate by the end of the game. Having a huge surplus of food that you need to survive, that you've developed over a long game into a self-sustaining economy, is-atleast to me-somehow a lot more pertinent than having piles and piles of essentially *junk* that you can't eat, and you can't really make into anything all that useful.

Vast riches in the real world are important and nice to have because you can use them to create something from. A good life, a mansion, a fleet of cars, sail around the world, donate to charity, cure a disease, or buy a chain of restaurants. You don't generally sit around and look at your money, no matter how pretty it is. You put it to use, or you invest it.

The best you can do with vast riches in the game-aside from decoration-is to buy caravan after caravan of stuff you don't really need.

Food atleast has a specific purpose in the game that absolutely is tied in to your fortress's survival.

[Mikademus]

<ot>

Btw, could someone add this thread to the Wiki's list of recommended threads?

[Shaostoul]

A method of magic that you can't battery. Any type of volume related to fortress size, food stores or anything of the sort has battery issues. Wealth is a good method, the more magic you use it deteriorates the condition of the entire fortress. (clothes, engravings, walls, floors, everything.) however that could get very costly.

Making dwarves tire faster from casting a spell, possible, but then you just make an army of spell casters... (limit amount you're able to have?)

If any of you played "Magic Carpet" you could collect magic. Killing creatures and harvesting their essence. Birth of children expelling extra-essence.

Could always just to the classic DnD style... you learn this spell and once you use it, you have to learn it again. That or rest inbetween castings (not cooldown, actually sleep)

Certain races detest magic use and make you gain powerful enemies.

(Okay, don't smite me for this, but I liked it and ya...) Alchemy? Casting circles? Wear to the casting circle? Larger the circle the greater the spell? A massive 100x100 tile "transmutation circle" for something (idea disappeared). Upon obtaining legendary use of circle not required, but assists in power of spell.

[Tormy]

<ot>

Btw, could someone add this thread to the Wiki's list of recommended threads?

Done. 

Mana, like Osmosis said, should be a treated as a static flowing thing, similar to liquids, with levels hanging from 0-7.

I don't like the idea of mana being a "physical object". Mana is the concept of an impersonal force or quality that resides in specific entities, at least that is my opinion.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I'd like to try to find a little middle ground between the latest posts, and make the suggestion that perhaps mana "flows", but not like water or magma, or a stationary flow (like a chasm?), but instead works more like a living thing, more or less randomly (if slowly) moving, consuming (non-magical material), producing (magical material), and generally forcing you to keep on your toes.

You could still draw power from it, but you'd have to be careful about what "mood" the mana was in, when you did.

It would be like harnessing this vast, incredibly useful and powerful-but temperamental-creature to a mill. You might end up with a whole lot of flour, or you might end up dead.

[Granite26]

people talking about magic flows may want to look into the old aether theories

[SirHoneyBadger]

I read them over, but they honestly didn't seem that relevant to the discussion, atleast not in a way that leapt out at me: Maybe you could illustrate what you had in mind as pertains to them?

Another interesting inspiration for a DF "magic source/magic system" might be William Hope Hodgeson's 'The Night Land' novel and it's sequel 'The House on the Borderlands', which-while admittedly as much anachronistic sci-fi and surreal horror as fantasy-uses the concept of "clog", an energy that comes from deep within the earth, and which not only provides electric-like power, but also destroys "unnatural beings" on touch.

Not to go off-topic, but-bizarre though it is-I can't recommend the novel itself enough for it's highly original vision, not to mention it should appeal on these boards for it's decidedly "dwarf-fortress-like" nature. It's completely free online if anyone's interested:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10662

[Eagleon]

I'd personally like to see a magic system without anything like mana or "energy". This is the case in my own story setting, except for humans, and only because they need to use the energy to feed a daemon which does the actual casting, which then disappears afterward. There are two other ways, for two other races. It's a rather in-depth explanation so I'll put it in spoiler tags for people that are interested.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The gryffons create magic by "divining" glyphs, very intuitively. These are sort of like runes, only each one is unique in configuration, and a lot of them may be in three dimensions (and thus might not be practical to transcribe to the real world). Their shape is what creates their effect - simply by existing, even if only in the conscious thought of the user, they bend the world around them. The ease by which an individual can divine a glyph appropriate to a task varies, and so does the ability to hold one in their mind for long enough to create any effect. So the best gryffon magicians need both excellent visual memory, and a sort of highly intuitive, almost creative abstract skill - the limitations here on magic users are reliability and ease of use, more than enough IMO to keep gryffons from dominating on the battlefield in my setting.

The lumani create magic by knowledge of the world around them. They can achieve a telepathic gnosis of ordinary matter, and use that understanding as a bridge to affect its properties. They do this very rapidly and instinctively, but they're limited to natural forces - heat, gravity, motion, electricity, etc. They can melt the ground beneath you to great depths, fly, and with the help of other lumani working in shifts, move barges through the air across an ocean. This requires no energy on the part of the lumani - they simply establish an intimate connection with an object, will it to be hotter or heavier or in a different shape, and it usually works. Their limitations are from the fact that they can't sustain their effects permanently, that they generally have a very short range at which they can connect to things, and that both humans and gryffons can use glyphs to create barriers to their mental probing.

I doubt these specific examples would be -exactly- implementable in what we ultimately get in DF. I just thought I'd get some different ideas out there.

I think also the debate on "magic missiles" and such is missing a key point - DF has components that would make even a lowly fireball interesting. Namely thermodynamics I don't think it follows that the reason that games with fireballs end up using them as arrows, is that fireballs are arrows. Fireballs are not arrows. They have heat, which makes them messy to use in certain situations, which could cause interesting stories and situations to happen in some games, but don't for lack of creative anticipation on part of the designers.

[Silverionmox]

Making it require as little bookkeeping as possible is good. However, it's a computer game and at some point quantifying effects will be necessary. The trick is to make thinking in numbers unnecessary in the game.

[Tormy]

I'd personally like to see a magic system without anything like mana or "energy".

The D&D system is a quite good example:
"Whereas most games systems opt to use mana-based spell-casting systems where one selects spells at the time of casting, paying for the spell-casting with points of 'mana', D&D instead uses a slot-based system.
Essentially, the character is granted a number of 'slots', each slot can be used to cast a spell of only a specific level. As a character gains experience they are granted additional slots but also access to higher level slots (and thus, higher level spells). In addition, most classes must prepare spells into these slots before they can be cast, ostensibly just after waking up."

[Granite26]

aether was a physics theory, a lot like the force.  It flowed in through and around everything.  The Sons of Aether in Mage used it as a kind of 'hidden truth'.  Their ability to manipulate the Ether gave them their powers (sort of, but Mage was weird).

Anyway, there is a robust existant pseudo-science history behind a secret substance that floats everywhere and permiates everything.  Sounds a lot like the mana mist people were talking about.

I'd personally like to see a magic system without anything like mana or "energy". This is the case in my own story setting,

It sounds like you are giving your critters at will or at concentration spell like abilities.  Balance issues asside, 1: There's no reason that spells can't be modded to have a zero cost, and 2: There are still going to be a sufficiency system for powering magical effects, and any stat that powers that is functionally equivilant to mana (from a numbers perspective).  Your Lumina's magical effects rely on a roll against their mystical knowledge (or a straight compare).  In effect, they check that to see how much power they can generate which determines which effects they can drive.  Mana is the power used to calculate that ratio, EVEN IF YOU DON'T EXPLICITLY INSTANTIATE IT OR ACKNOWLEDGE IT.  (In short, mana is a useful shorthand, much like i is useful in mathematics depite never existing.  Adding it as an intermediary serves as a lubricant that would make modding infinitely easy and more veristile.

[Silverionmox]

I'd personally like to see a magic system without anything like mana or "energy".

The D&D system is a quite good example:
"Whereas most games systems opt to use mana-based spell-casting systems where one selects spells at the time of casting, paying for the spell-casting with points of 'mana', D&D instead uses a slot-based system.
Essentially, the character is granted a number of 'slots', each slot can be used to cast a spell of only a specific level. As a character gains experience they are granted additional slots but also access to higher level slots (and thus, higher level spells). In addition, most classes must prepare spells into these slots before they can be cast, ostensibly just after waking up."

While being a fitting example, numbers sneak in the back door by needing to arbitrary limit the wizards' power by a maximum number of spells known as well as memorized per level and related to the intelligence stat too.

[Eagleon]

Yeah, I was never really too impressed with D&D's system. Game-balancing factors should be transparent to setting, i.e from the perspective of a person in the world, it should make consistent sense. Hopefully it will still work to create an enjoyable experience for non-magic users, but it irks me from a writer's standpoint to nerf things just because they don't allow everyone to play fair. There's no reason a wizard should forget a spell after they've cast it, and never before. You don't forget how to do other things for a while after you do them.

As DF is a single-player game, I think it's much less of a problem to have ungodly powerful magic out there for the taking - the player decides what he wants to do, and so do the NPCs. I think that's the beauty of it. I want to see how history develops in DF with Armok 1 style magic; obviously magicians will quickly dominate with the ability to implode the skulls of dissenters, but if there's enough other stuff going on at the same time, it could still be very interesting.