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[nenjin]

After reading this rant on magic I cooked up some of my own ideas about how magic could work in DF.

I agree with Cpt. Failmore. It's the schlubs and practical people who make DF work, and in some ways, fun. You don't want to overshadow them (and the tons of soldiers you lose) by micromanaging a wizard so he can unleash teh perfect fireball. Magic gives you diminishing returns on fun the more effective it is.

I would like to see magic, just more as he described. Wizards being more about random "fun" than benefit. More chaos is usually more fun, and I think magic would be most entertaining if a dwarf wizard were like the noble from hell. If wizards were just combat oriented, like soldiers with area-affect attacks, they wouldn't be as much fun to have.

I could see their default job as "ruminating" where they wander the fortress away from crowds and think. Personality would play a large part in a wizard's behavior, especially "Openness to new ideas and experiences, quick to anger, confidence and cautiousness" When they decide what they're going to try, you'd get "Soandso McWizardry goes to work." 

And then they....

make it rain indoors
turn dwarves that piss them off into toads permanently
raise the dead inside the fortress
create a golem that enjoys walking through walls and doors (and who occasionally fights)
summon familiars that tend to poop everywhere and create miasma, and eat enough for three dwarves
randomly set things on fire
create permanent chasms in awkward places while screwing with the fabric of space and time
roll back (or forward) the seasons
summon demons/magma men/elementals
cripple your peasants by making them take part in "experiments"
experiment with captive animals/creatures, creating "super Goblins" or "super elephants" that then breed
make your plump helmets come to life to become mushroom men that attack your farmers
change people's gender (which either requires some same-sex coding...or it would end a marriage and give both dwarves MASSIVE unhappy thoughts)
mind control people (automatically making them friends, or old friends, possibly usurping elections)
polymorph random things (changing furniture into say, a rock, or a kitten into a tame Giant Olm)
change
   wood into SNAKES
   wood to stone
   flesh to stone
   stone to flesh (This Flesh Throne menaces with spikes of flesh and is encrusted with globs of flesh and encircled by bands of flesh)
mind wipe people (wipe their personality traits, making blank slates effectively)
create an epically huge stinking (miasma) cloud
teleports someone or something to a randomly location, possibly straight into HFS
tests an area of affect slow spell by casting it on themselves and then walking around your fort

...in other words, cause trouble.

Occasionally they might do something useful like....
 
throw a moderate fireball in a combat situation
enchant something (basically a high value decoration, like a singing instrument or talking sword)
move an impossibly heavy object or several objects at once with levitation
create food
instantly construct something with magic (at a variable quality)
produce an artifact (basically a strange mood...except wizards demand very high quality materials and aren't limited to one artifact in their life time)
duplicate a non-artifact item

...which we will call "spell casting."

But in general they would be a pain in the ass and trouble for your fortress.

They'd also run a higher risk of MADNESS than other dwarves. Their work regularly exposes them to good and bad thoughts of high magnitude...
 
"Soandso McWizardry pondered the infinite and was terrified/amazed recently"
"Soandso McWizardry had a failed/successful experiment recently"

An Insane Wizard would cause trouble at random on themselves frequently, so they would take themselves out of the picture quickly....(imagine a mind-wiped wizard wandering your halls) but not before doing some damage. A berzerk wizard would go full combat spells and throw lightning and fireballs. Wizards don't get melancholy, they go out with a bang one way or another.

The ways they show up could be varied. As was suggested in that rant, they could be homegrown, and the compulsion to become a wizard could be like a strange mood (and also based on personality, probably "enjoys intellectual discussions".) They might need an alchemist's craftshop or a new kind of workshop (library?) to take over, and require some kind of material to create their spellbook. (Say, leather, dye, cloth and bone?) Or they might show up on their own, or as part of the King's retinue. You'd probably want a character like this late in game, when they can't permanently cripple your fortress with their prestidigitation.

When they're not ruminating, spellcasting, causing trouble or doing default jobs, they're researching. Researching, in addition to other magical activities, is what gains the wizard job experience. Higher ranks of wizardry give the dwarf more options for what to do when they've finally settled on something. Researching would again require a craftshop for the wizard to work in.

I know a lot of people aren't sold on the idea of magic in DF, but cmon, how awesome would all that be, and what kind of stories would it produce?

[silhouette]

causes mroe trouble than actually helps -> TO THE FREAKING LAVA PIPE!

Serriously, no point if it only does a few moderatly good things and a CRAP load of horrible things.
Players would just toss em in a cage or something.

[nenjin]

That's arguably what all nobles do. Besides, a single character that can continue to produce high quality artifacts? I'd say that's pretty useful.

Some players will always choose to kill off characters to make their lives easier. I'd have plenty of fun dealing with the fallout from his behavior, or finding ways to manage him.

[silhouette]

some thing are just improbable and WOULD cause way too much dammage to the fort unless its modified so it has a low chance..

e.g. permanent chasms.
familiars shouldnt poop everywhere, should just be like a pet that the wizard summons, and feeds of the wizards magic.

golems would be intresting but only if they fight with other golems and invaders.

raining indoors would be intresting but ild rather not have the 10,000,000 messages of "urist mc crafts cancels make craft: dangerous terrain."
Raising the dead would be intresting... prehaps this would be a GOOD thing... make it not hostile but more like reviving a dead dwarf.
randomly setting things on fire = no, no no no no no, fire imps fill that duty fine enough.

what ild like to see is rolling back or forward the seasons.
a wizard who continuously set the seasons abck each time it changed to winter would be funny, but annoying.

[BlazingDav]

Personally I'd say that wizards reliability and consistency ought to vary with age, i.e. young apprentices would be somewhat reliable and helpful when they aren't being over ambitious

While the older ones (or more experienced as the case may be) have become more eccentric with age and are less considerate when testing that cat dismemberment spell, though ought to be professional still, if you had a small noble system surrounding them, say you have 3 ranks of wizard, apprentice, adventuring and master. In your fort, you eventually become of sufficient interest to acquire a master wizard, you strike a bargain with him, you look after and protect him, supplying him with what he needs for his magic (though simply as a you want this spell? well get me this, no justice intervention needed). While strange to only have one it may seem, depending on the personality a little, wizards of high rank and prestige wouldn't like competition encroaching on their territory and would infact duel one another to earn/keep the right to be in your fort (maybe even to the death if they have severe disagreements on magic).

The adventuring class of wizard would obviously be one you don't see in your fort much, a midway between the dabbling and legendary of a master wizard, they may drop in from time to time to replenish stock (though thats adventurer related stuff I admit), though you'll see them when your apprentices graduate.

Conveniently leading me onto them, taking lessons from the master wizards (may exist as meetings between master and apprentices before apprentices goes off sparing of some sort before education system decided/implemented). The number of apprentices a master wizard would have ought to depend on the wizard themself, but say a minimum of 5 at any one time so you get the benefit of low level magic in sieges and such, naturally you would have to care for apprentices as nobles as the master wizard specifies, you wouldn't be able to control them and they can operate on a whim, though being younger wanting to help out in a siege seems natural especially if the master does.

Either way, in fortress mode you shouldn't control your spellcasters, but have more of a relationship with him, making it unreliable yet useful (personally I wouldn't mind if a master wizard went round my fort vaporising cats on a whim though)

[nenjin]

Well the point is to inject some chaos into the fort akin to what nobles can set off with impossible mandates, or moodies with needs you can't fulfill. On chasms you're probably right. But poop from familiars would essentially just be extra refuse kind of like what the cat bug produces now, and like a lot of the other effects, would only be temporary. Fire doesn't have to be the kind of insane rapidly spreading one...(although underground it would be). It could just maybe burn a 4x4 area of objects. Substitute "destroy something" if fire conjures up too much horrible destruction in your fort. Same thing a tantruming dwarf can do. 

Raining indoors, ideally, wouldn't create so much water that it creates dangerous terrain. Rather it would generate a lot of "caught out in the rain" unhappy thoughts at once, and add cleaning some cleaning duties to clog up your workflow. Maybe only isolated thunderstorms, or a little rain cloud that moves around for a while?

Just another thing to shake up the otherwise predictable fort day-to-day. Most of the variations in it (moods, mandates, general happiness) can all be controlled under decent circumstances. You keep enough materials on hand, you diversify, you provide enough happiness to cushion against bad events. The Wizard would provide some randomness that you can't plan around short of declaring a moratorium on magic in your fort (which is itself a strategy.) Even creature attacks you can hedge your bets against to some degree.

Either way, in fortress mode you shouldn't control your spellcasters, but have more of a relationship with him, making it unreliable yet useful (personally I wouldn't mind if a master wizard went round my fort vaporising cats on a whim though)

Or maybe wizards can be divided into good, neutral and evil alignment. Which they are is something you have to figure out from observing them in game (although with memory dumps that could probably be cheated.) Their alignment would dictate what they end up doing with their free time (making artifacts, annihilating cats, raising your heroes from the dead, making golems, making stinking clouds) that sort of thing. That would, over time, give you a variable incentive whether to support or execute mismanage the current wizard that is in your fortress.

I like the idea of wizard duels too...but that begs the kind of wide spread destruction that, like creating chasms, is probably going overboard on how much impact it would have on your fort. Still, it would be funny to watch two dwarven wizards squaring off, and have a pack of goblins ambush them and get obliterated.

I think bottomline though, being that this is DF, wizards should introduce a measure of danger to fort life. And the scope of their affects should be more dangerous the stronger they become, even as they become more useful. Wizards aren't pets after all and tame wizards aren't that much fun, and they kind of devalue the interest of magic and lead it back towards flinging fireballs.

[BlazingDav]

I can see what you're getting at, with nobles being the double edged sword they are, magicians shouldn't entirely be subservient, though rather more self serving, pursuing their own agenda, but they still ought to please the fort to avoid being hounded by the locals (we forget that dwarves enventually ought to behave more like emotional beings, so vaporising their cat, family, booze etc.) as an emotional response, sure spells can go wrong for them, but they should also have a cautious respect for the magic they are mastering (or an overbearing confidence founded on a high success rate), in the pursuit of their own goals depending on their personality they might suck up to your other nobles in order to acquire resources to try new spells. In the legends there could even be great tales of magical disaster that having bearing on this.

Alot of this depends on the motive of wizard, alignments would help like you said, but some wizards would ultimately be industrious pushing the boundaires of magic and creating all sorts of spells, while other are lazy and just do what is necessary for you to let them have a warm safe roof over their heads in your fort. Some would be crazed with the death of a loved one and seek to bring them back from the dead, lots of potential.

[nenjin]

Personality then could have a huge impact on what a given wizard does.

"Likes to help people+" = More work based tasks like levitation (moving multiple stacks at once)
"Likes to help people -"   = Fewer work-based tasks, more self-interested jobs
"Is very friendly+" = Throws "magical" parties that generate higher than normal happiness, or increases a social trait for party goers slightly above what would be normal.
"Is very friendly-" = Frees up time for more self-interested tasks
"Is open to new experiences+" = Wild card for any behavior type
"Is open to new experiences-" = Further restricts behavior options
"Risk and excitement +" = Improves odds of more dramatic/dangerous spells
"Risk and excitement -" = Reduces odds of more dramatic/dangerous spells

And on.

Self-interested behavior could be research, crafting personal objects of high value that contribute to Fortress wealth but can't be traded or taken by others, creation of pets, magical pursuits (experimentation/random spell casting) and on.

The personalities of nobles currently only have so much impact on whether or not they become "problems" and the return value on several of them is pretty much zero. (Tax Collector, Consort, ect...) I think the Wizard would be a great noble that you actually have to pay attention to and make decisions about the fate of regularly, who can give back to your fortress as much as they can take away. 

[Aquillion]

Ack, not this again.

Magic is not solely for dwarf mode.  The game isn't just supposed to be Dwarf Mode, either, and magic in particular shouldn't be designed solely with fortress mode in mind.  The real crowning achievement of the magic arc is going to be 'wizard tower' mode, which shouldn't be anything like you describe.

I would be fine with dwarves just having no wizards, period.  But crippling magic so it can be just a silly noble-like thing is a bad idea.  Wizards should be as terrible and as powerful as entire factions in their own right, able to raise mountains or level forests.  That will make them fun to use as opponents or allies in Fortress mode, and will make them fun to play in an entirely different way when you're playing in Wizard mode.

[nenjin]

The real crowning achievement of the magic arc is going to be 'wizard tower' mode, which shouldn't be anything like you describe.

Wizard Tower mode, or whatever, is probably in the distant future. There's no reason to avoid trying to do something cool in DF because it might impinge on something years down the road.

In terms of Dwarf Mode, which is all I'm currently interested in atm, it makes sense to have the wizard as a noble. Seriously, a dwarf you command like a soldier, who shoots the equivalent of a piercing arrow or a multi-tile attack is about as vanilla and boring as you can make it. It also feeds the power gamer who just wants a bigger and badder way to crush goblins. Snore. Give me a wizard who actually has impact on my fortress life. I have enough bashers and killers running around already.

As far as the split between modes, there's no reason Toady can't take what he's planning for Adventure mode and abstract/automate it for Dwarf mode, saving the minutiae and detail for a different mode. I'm not interested in playing a fully fleshed out wizard in Dwarf mode. That's not what it's about. I'm interested in having an autonomous troublemaker/miracle worker who will inject some 'fun' into the routine. There's little reason to worry about which mode gets magic first. They're going to be play out differently anyways.

[Eric Blank]

I think they ought to have a decent degree of usefulness, though as was said by Nenjin they shouldn't exactly be player-controllable. It could depend on who their friends are, and they'll occasionally accompany those dwarves to work, helping by increasing work rates or mining out some sections of stone and destroying/constructing a building when designated, and patrolling with soldiers, revealing thieves/ambushes, healing wounds, providing food, and killing something of course. They'd use telekinesis to move goods to stockpiles and clear a cluttered workshop, or just putting them all off to the side in a single stack on a near-by non-building tile. (maybe even if they just happen to walk by and see how cluttered it is, especially if they're a very organized person) They may perform as healers to the wounded, conjure food and water, and entertain unhappy dwarves. helping make items of higher quality ought to happen occasionally. In addition, with the planned (or is it just suggested?) procedural generation, they could once or twice create a new plant or animal, it's usefulness/potential for mayhem determined by mood and personality.

Conversely, a wizard with a poor personality, or who is in a particularly bad mood, would be inclined to do strange things, maybe if they see someone who's very organized, perhaps another wizard, they'll take all their things and fling them a certain distance, irritating the victim considerably. if someone hates frogs, and there are frogs in a nearby pond, they'll teleport/move the frogs to their bedroom. They could just ruff up your stockpiles or strike down an animal (like kittens, adorable exploding kittens.)

Of course this is all on top of the other suggestions for behavior, including randomness and potential for their own insanity, and their overall effectiveness could be capped by some pre-existing attribute if not a 'mana', like hunger, thirst and drowsiness, so after casting a particularly impressive spell they could be in a bad, even fatal position. Letting it be a noble, they could demand an apprentice or two as well.

As for how they're played and placed in game, they really should be possible in dwarf mode, adventure mode, for the player, with extensive training, and the full range of dwarf mode abilities, and as party members.
Even a wizard mode but only if they have, individually, the same potential for mayhem. I'd imagine it would be hilarious and worth the time, or otherwise it'd become fairly boring.

[DarthCloakedDwarf]

I could imagine a wizard in a fell mood butchering dozens of dwarves to make a giant flesh golem. I am terrified by the thought.

However, wizards should not EVER "randomly set things on fire". Ever. Especially when one single !!thing!! can kill an entire fortress.

[nenjin]

I don't see it as being so different from a tantruming dwarf smashing a priceless work. A wizard just wouldn't need to be provoked. And it doesn't have to be "magma" fire. Just mundane fire that burns wood, cloth, leather. So he might target a lot of things that his magic wouldn't have an effect on. Or have a minimal effect, like torching one garden plot out of the five you have, so it doesn't produce that season.

Again, I don't see the risk of him doing stuff like that being much different from the other risks you already run. Putting a priceless artifact in your meeting area yields a lot of benefits...but it also puts it in an area where there are more likely to be pissed off dwarves at some point, and it could get smashed. Same theory with the wizard. Behavior like randomly casting dangerous magic might only fall on one extreme end of wizard personality combinations.

Also...

Spell Lists

I think it would be awesome if, by the time your wizard has maxed out, they have only a small selection of the possible spells. Say they get x slots, unlocking at every other y level. What they learn is based on personality, "alignment" for lack of a better term, and a dash of random luck and/or another x factor.

So if you have 40 spells total...each wizard ends up being fairly unique, both in personality and loadout. Some might get mostly helper spells, some might get mostly combat spells, and some might end up with one too many "fun" spells...and the player decides whether or not to run a wizard out of his fortress, or if they're exactly the kind of wizard they want.

[Toastergargletop]

*love* the idea of a wizard noble, helping out with magic etc.

however i also like the idea of dwarven rune wizards.  improving items by inscribing them with runes (like the decorate function), the ability to improve rooms by inscribing runes (such as a -rune of restful sleep- in a bedroom, a <<rune of merriment>> in a dining hall and so on.

This is a Steel Warhammer.  It is inscribed with runes of war.  It menaces with spikes of obsidian.

[darkflagrance]

We could have a class of worker that works with magic and does magical improvements, like Artificers or Runeworkers.

They could be separate from noble-like wizards who are more independent.