Gah! What's it with you people and all that text! It's not like I've been flooding you with that muc-- oh... right...
... repeatedly grinding for wolf tongues will get old if it's poorly implemented.
I guess that I mostly look at it from a game design perspective, rather than a flavorful one, and tend to dislike expendable items. In terms of balance, expendable items must be more powerful/versatile than the alternatives (otherwise no one would use them.) It's not as big an issue in DF as in other games (since a procedurally generated world will not guarantee a constant difficulty level) but still should be noted.
In response to this, I have to say (didn't I already say it? I thought I already responded to something like this...) that I'm somewhat influenced by the Gust Corporation in how I invision this, and that the way that games like Mana Khemia handle resources can be a good reference for how to deal with "grinding for items".
Basically, consumable items are, exactly as you say, something of a last resort in the minds of most RPG players. There's no reason to use them if they can get away with not using them, and it's sort of ingrained in the soul of the RPG gamer to avoid using scrolls and potions if MP is an easily replinished alternative.
However, if magic is
entirely composed of consumables, then there simply isn't a choice in the matter.
The other thing is to simply make consumables appropriately plentiful. Things like the spinacherbs of Mana Khemia are literally more common than dirt. (Dirt is an item you can collect, too, and since you can't buy dirt, you can actually run out of it if you go out of your way to use up quite a bit of it.) Spinacherbs are used in making your basic healing potions or cloth, and are found almost anywhere (often getting in the way of rarer things).
Of course, the thing about the Gust games was that everything respawned when you left, so you could just farm more of it. (It's hard to say why, but I always just enjoyed picking herbs in games like that or Oblivion - I often found myself getting completely lost in Oblivion because I would deviate from my path to pick every random flower I found.) I haven't put all that much time into exploring Adventure Mode yet, but there should be at least some way for animals to breed and plants to regrow off-screen for this sort of magic system, so that you can't run out of magic components without literally killing every living thing on the planet. Also, of course, there are many common components one should just be able to buy in the kinds of bulk quantities that enable serious consumption.
About illusions, I'd be rather leery of interface screws like false orders because they can be very frustrating for the player. A savvy player will be constantly encouraged to pause, recheck all his orders to make sure nothing is out of the ordinary, and unpause. New players will wonder what the hell is happening and get frustrated. Neither one is particularly fun, especially when the only thing it takes to counter it is excessively reissuing orders. Dwarf behavior is something I'd far prefer to mess with, with maybe some descriptions like " wanders around in confusion" to make sure that the player knows that something else other than a poor UI is causing the problem.
Fair enough, I do know that "annoyance" is practically the definition of "Interface Screw", consider it just a suggestion from the scrambled imaginations of someone who had spent the last 7 hours typing something, and really should have gone to bed.
I'd be tempted to tie the probability of spawning ghosts to the intelligence/emotional state of the victim when he died. Necromantic magic might be able to force a specific one to spawn, but I don't think that a working butcher shop should spawn hordes of ethereal cows under normal circumstances. Maybe have unusual deaths be more likely to spawn ghosts as well.
I was thinking of just having a rather low probability of any kind of ghost occuring, such that it was only likely that you would have hauntings in either very unlucky circumstances, or in places of great death.
... I wonder if a ghost cow would make a good pet? I wonder if people would like them for their "haunting haunting moos"?
According to the book of Exodus, manna is white, like Coriander seed. (Just to crib a little from wiki)
Well, mana pools may be suitable for certain types of magic if you want to take it in that direction. I am not so bothered by that. I was more bothered because you seemed to be looking in your special effects box for explanations of how the world works..
Although DF does have a pretty impressive special effects budget, maybe it should dangle in rings, or menace as spikes.
Hmm... I'm vaguely remembering a History Channel show on the Bible, where they had some expert talking about manna from the Bible potentially being a bread-like substance of a flowering (or something, the memory gets a little hazy) desert tree that, in large numbers, could literally make a small blizzard of bread-like plant-stuff that would cover the ground.
Of course, that's just edible plant-stuff, not a source of magic.
We have been talking about exorcists already. I would presume that would not involve mana pools, so much as a battle of wills between the priest and the evil spirit. Of course a priest has his faith in god to back him up. Maybe you could give them magical "hit points" or something to help simulate the conflict, but I would rather keep the mechanics in the background and have what happens described in words.
Naturally, exorcism power should be measured in "armpits"... (Sorry, Touhou joke.)
Anyway, yes, I would see it as something like that. Maybe a "willpower" attribute will come down the pipe at some point, and help with that. Or maybe religiosity could become a useful trait, with faith in whatever deity you have manifesting in terms of exorcism power.
I was also thinking that the most common magic would arise from people just being really very good at what they do. This does't apply to everything, but there are some jobs that already have an air of ritual or mystery about them. (eg Celtic bards, metalsmiths, certain types of warrior, some others I can't think of right now). You might want to class this as magic, or you might not. You might want to give these people special powers or spells, but I don't see a mana pool being essential to this.
Yes, it's part of what I had in mind when writing this: If artifacts are going to be magic, then it means that dwarves have some latent magic in them that they can sometimes channel.
It's not the same as a "Dwarven Wizard", but rather it's something like that "norse dwarf" thing Dvergar was talking about, where enchantment may be the only sort of magic a dwarf can really work, but it is still a magical part of their being, as opposed to the sort of Steampunk dwarves that some people seem to prefer.
If we have legendaries and semi-artifact masterpieces, then it makes sense that you could make magical masterpieces, even if it might take extra steps to enchant them, and that's part of what I was trying to work up to in what I was talking about.
A quick answer to the components problem would possibly be to preserve the item say you got that wolf tongue, if you pickled it and kept it in a jar not only do you not have a slimy tongue swimming in your inventory but it is preserved and reusable, why? Because simply if you are using it as a component to cast a spell (in a non-potion brewing sense) then all you need to do is recharge mana stored in it like any other magical weapon and you can make use of it again. In forts you could even make use of zoos in this way and contain animals, hook them up to your magic pool and unleash dragon fire upon your foes =D
I would think it best to simply have your adventurers be able to "process" spell components into a preserved, easily portable, ready-to-use condition that won't rot or take up an unreasonable amount of room.
Still, I guess a good wizard would need quite a bit of strength to carry all the spell components he would need, wouldn't he? Unless we have Bags of Holding or something, that is.
Also I'd say that all things should have some sort of native storage of mana, just some more than others and dwarves significantly less than other magical races, why? To avoid contraption solutions for dwarves stuck out far from a fort with a mana pool and none of the locals being friendly.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but if I do have a grasp on it, then I think that is what we're getting, anyway.
You could even assign similar values to the environment and dwarven mages would just carry wands or something that extract mana from the immeadiate environment to cast spells and when they are gone the mana regenerates over time from natural elements (such as sunshine)
I think the current "genpower" tags imply we're looking at getting a natural regenerating pool of energy for magic as things stand now.
Associating a magic-user with spheres is an interesting idea... but if someone's sphere is, say, "marriage", do you have to stand around married people to get your energy back? And how would you go about getting the game to know when you should be drawing energy from, say, "compassion"?
----------------------------
Since the last three posts touched on the same thing, I'll address them all simultaniously...
I think the best definition of magic is "any sufficiently advanced technology". That is, magic is just science that runs on things you can't understand.
I can (grudgingly) agree with random failure chances or maybe winding up with a random end result that gives you another spell entirely when you are preparing a spell, or trying to enchant a piece of equipment, so that you wind up with unfortunate cursed items you probably want to get rid of.
It's entirely another to have a sort of "Harry Potter" magic where you have stairwells that randomly rearrange themselves so as to occasionally send essentially untrained apprentices into the lairs of dangerous beasts you leave roaming your academy, jelly beans that may taste good or be filled with vomit or turn you into a frog, or toilet paper that will giggle and jump off the spindle and leave you while you are on the restroom just to spite you. While maybe it makes a reader chortle, that is the type of magic that only the most utterly insane of people would invite into their lives. (I mean, seriously, you can pretty much die by eating the wrong fruit in the cafeteria in Hogwarts, how has that place not been shut down by Wizarding OSHA?!)
As was said in that reaction to the Nenjin post, where wizards could randomly start mass fires in your fort... nobody would want a creature that is essentially a roulette wheel that is constantly spinning, where several of the panels are clearly marked "INSTANT DEATH", and none of the prizes are particularly nice, either.
It is the nature of Dwarf Fortress that there are, certainly, some random aspects to the game, but at its core, it is a game of planning, engineering, and forsight. Even orc hordes or HFS, while devastating and deadly, are things you can prepare for and contain. Magic, if people are going to want to associate with it, must have some sort of way of mitigating the hazards, if only to make it worth even considering any sort of benefit magic might grant worthwhile.
To that end, it would certainly be fine if golems you made could be created hostile and destructive (just post guards around them when you activate them), or if enchanted items could be made cursed (provided you either could look them over before they were picked up, or had some kind of automatable testing), or if spells you prepare might not be the spell you wanted, or even blew up in an incautious apprentice's face... but it's not fine if you have utterly no idea what you'll wind up with, or if your fireball spells are as likely to kill you as your enemies. (That's why we don't have wizards NOW, I'll point out.) Adventurers already die on their first encounter with a child... why make them flip inside-out trying to make their first healing potion?
(I am, in fact, reminded of a game where a person has to roll a twenty-sided die for everything they do, including each individual beat of their heart, breathing, standing up, etc... until you critically fail by rolling a 1 several times in a row, and forget to breathe or have a heart attack or something and die before managing to get out of bed.)
I mean, consider something like a Rod of Wonder... other than for shits and giggles, how many people seriously use that? It's an inevitability that it will blow up in your face. It is the essence of throwing away all sense of strategy or control over what you are playing - and that is the total opposite of what Dwarf Fortress is about. And magic in DF should be molded to fit DF, not the other way around.
------------
On Nivm's sphere magic:
Maybe it's what we're heading towards, but I hope our path can be diverted.
Besides, do we REALLY want "Fertility Magic" and "Marriage Magic"? Especially with random/misfiring magic? ("Sorry, your Highness, but, erm... I believe I just impregnated you... we might want to work on getting a hole you could give birth through, your Kingship. Ah, and I think we just entered into a polygamous 5-way relationship with that door and a chipmunk, as well.")
-----
Kilo just posted, I'll have to read it over before I respond to that, but I'm just hitting "post" now.
Author
Topic: Kohaku's Yet Another Magic / Wizard Rant! (Read 8338 times)