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[Belteshazzar]

I would hate to do away with the hefty tome filled towers and dubious diagrams despite enjoying this idea. It is likely that the tomes and diagrams are used to determine fortuitous linguistic possibilities, likely runic relationships, and desirable paths of design. Likely so as to not blow the poor fellow sky high the first time he tries to form a sentence in the language held in far grander tongues than those of mere mortals. Dropping a preposition could either make you look the fool in the eyes of the gods or worse.

Besides it seems somewhat facetious to say that the 'tongue of the world's founding what molds reality to match it' has simple translations compactable into a single volume. However, it does seem unlikely a wizard is going to need to refresh his memory every time he wants to cast the same light spell he has been using since day one (the only reason DnD even adopted this system was game design and Vance's Dying Earth series.)

[alfie275]

Thats why I said that you forget it only if you don't use it, also maybe the more words you learn the shorter the time it takes to forget them, down to the time of a week, but the more you use the word the longer it takes to forget each time you do.

[Felblood]

True enough, but that boils down to making every word in the system into a rustable skill, which is clearly memory and interface overload. There's no justification for trying to store or display that much data, when it's just going to make wizardry slightly more inconvenient, in a not particularly interesting way.

Any spell you don't use constantly is to risky to use when you need it? Cue abuse of "burn everything", the spell that solves everything, anyway.

Perhaps, wizards write tomes and tomes of books on proper casting techniques ("swish and flick") and good orders to teach words and runes in. The vast majority of books aren't written for the writer to read, after all. Leaving behind a journal for others to study is just the kind of thing a megalomaniac wizard would do.

Creepy symbols can come into the game through the runes, and the towers can be justified as good places to cast from, or as energy collectors etc., so the basic imagery can hold out. It's just that the traditional vancian justification for spellbooks would need a little tweaking.

[flabort]

i always thought the purposes of wizard towers were to:

a) collect as much astral energy/mana/runic power as possible
b) experiment to find spells that are more efficient
c) experiment to find spells that don't inadvertently kill the caster
d) provide relatively safe residence for wizards, when those mistrusting of magic would kill them.
e) provide storage for spells that work, don't kill the caster, and are efficient and useful, for apprentice wizards to learn, instead of from their master, who is probably sleeping or dead at the time.

i also thought the reason wizards don't let their apprentices use big powerful spells is that the energy exerted to cast them would kill the apprentices, which is another reason for the tower, is for elder wizzards to teach younger wizards.

[Neonivek]

Well we need to be careful here because there are two distinct groups of wizards (Warning: Fair bit of Speculation, but I think I am safe in my assumptions)

A) People with magical powers: They have spells and can be powerful. They can be played through Adventure mode

and

B) The Wizard Entity: They have spells and are highly powerful capable of being a world threat, they create new species casually and create towers for some reason. They are only playable through Wizard Mode.

So the tower would mean different things to both kinds of wizards.

Ps. I wonder if I said that already... hmmm just in case Ill be more productive.

The purpose of Wizard towers are all of those Flabort. The tower itself can also serve as a giant magic generator for the Wizard Entity.

[Silverionmox]

A reason for wizards to build towers in the middle of nowhere could be local concentrations of magical energy on that specific location 40 meters in the air or deep underground, or a favourable environment for rituals. That would be a good reason for wizards not to live in the city, where they can have people do their laundry, have access to more goods etc.

[Eagleon]

True enough, but that boils down to making every word in the system into a rustable skill, which is clearly memory and interface overload. There's no justification for trying to store or display that much data, when it's just going to make wizardry slightly more inconvenient, in a not particularly interesting way.

Be careful not to shoot down ideas based on coding difficulty/resource requirements alone when it's not clear how everything is handled. I don't really see this being a problem, myself - not every wizard will have every word, and the function for skill rust is probably fairly simple to calculate en-mass. I know it could be made so - you have a lot of potential ways of filtering out the ones that don't need to be rusted at all. You also wouldn't have to see the word skills as regular skills at all - they could be in a separate section, or perhaps hidden completely. Whether it would add to gameplay is another matter.

I think a more interesting system would be based on memory. You always remember how to say a word, but sometimes you mix words up if you haven't used them much.

"What was that word for 'clean', I know I studied it this morning. Ah yes. <break> <clothing>" *snapsnapsnapflump* ".... oh dear. I seem to be naked."

A wizard with a poor memory stat would have this happen much more often as they gained more skills, but still be fairly effective if they only really studied a few. Adds an element of intrinsic talent to the system.

[flabort]

ah, that now brings us to the subject of spell falior. (how do you spell that? firefox seams to be broken today). what happens when someone interupts

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"create 50 -iron bolts- at a relitive velocity of 'fast' heading in the dirrection my finger is pointing" or "convert all avalible mass in the next door neighbor's kitchen into pure addimantine, and create a creature with 5000 arms and 7 legs that speaks fluent dwarven, and cannot harm a dwarf intentionally or accidentaly, from the addimantine, throwing in a dash of giant cave spider hair for a beard"

? does the caster's finger turn into a stack of 50 -iron bolts- intent on gouging out his own face? is the creature created a

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

spirit of fire

with 5 million arms and no legs, speaking fluent elven? does a

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

carbosilicate amorph

fall out of the sky? what happens if the caster pronounces a word wrong? for example,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"cover Urist mcGirl with bibancim" is mispronounced in the language of magic so it becomes "turn Urist mcGirl into Bibancim"

oops.

[alfie275]

Words don't have to be skills just invisible items that get lower quality over time.

[alfie275]

Sorry fo double post but I thought of new word: Target, when used in creation of spell or for spell scroll allows you to target a thing in a similar fashion to the look command, ie:
Burn Target.
But Target can only choose a creature not part of one, to burn somethings head you would do:
Burn Target Head.

Aslo with scrolls the cost is directly related to the total combined 'power' of the words, each word has a set power, for example Foot might have one of 4 but Die of 1000.

[sonerohi]

1004 dwarfbucks to have access to the most useful militiary spell around? I'm game. Wizards could cripple entire sieges, leaving it up to the militiary grunts to go round and exterminate them. Or leave them there for apprentice wizards to practice spells on.

[Jakkarra]

maybye the spells could have a chance of causing brain daMaGedamaGEDamAgE

[jockmo42]

I really don't like this idea at all. It's flexible, but seems very, very difficult to implement, and even clumsier to use.

I always thought of dwarven magic in the form of item attributes and runes. Artifacts could be even cooler, whether mistakes or not. A chair that produces mist, barrels that turn their contents to blood, or maybe beer. A bed that changes the gender of whoever takes a nap. Not to mention the awesome history tracking that could happen here.

Honestly, unless Toady comes up with a non-intrusive, flexible, emergent and easy spell system, I think direct control of magic will become a huge exploit, or a huge hindrance in this game, and unless it's done well, it should be very out of your face.

[Hectonkhyres]

What you are missing is that we aren't necessarily talking about dwarven magic: we are talking about magic that happens to already to exist and which some dwarves have managed to tap. We are making the magic engine for humans, tree huggers, and magecarp as much as the dwarven master race.

I am fairly certain that the Flying Spaghetti Monster didn't invent the laws of physics with 12th century Tibetan culture the only thing in mind. Obviously he had to set things up to usher in the existence of Caribbean pirates and VOLTRON.

[jockmo42]

What you are missing is that we aren't necessarily talking about dwarven magic: we are talking about magic that happens to already to exist and which some dwarves have managed to tap. We are making the magic engine for humans, tree huggers, and magecarp as much as the dwarven master race.

I am fairly certain that the Flying Spaghetti Monster didn't invent the laws of physics with 12th century Tibetan culture the only thing in mind. Obviously he had to set things up to usher in the existence of Caribbean pirates and VOLTRON.

I'm not missing anything, and if I had, It wouldn't change my point.

Regardless of my suggestions for dwarves, I really think magic can be flexible and emergent like the rest of this game without turning it into some text-based wishing jargon. It just sounds unnecessarily clumsy to me.

You can have a system for everything without a system that literally does everything. It's completely erratic, and sounds like a nightmare to program.