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[NW_Kohaku]

OK, Tristan requires a more complicated post, and I'm not sure how much time I have, so I'm answering LW first.

And the caverns are clearly getting their energy from aquifer turtles.

You're forgetting the rivers, man.  The mussels are infinite.  You dig in those river tiles, and it's mussels all the way down!

But anyway, while I generally agree with what jseah said, and it's largely what this thread put out as its original thesis, I do think there are places for player actions to have influence, if only for good storytelling purposes.

Take, for instance, how unburied dead create ghosts.  This could be related to some unhappy dead sphere, and the rate of ghosts and hauntings and their severity (I.E. frequency of murderous ghosts, and how frequently they attempt to kill,) could be upped the more an unhappy dead sphere is in ascendancy. 

Likewise, music-related spheres could obviously be more related to how much above and beyond the norm players will encourage musical arts. 

Players that create temples and make sacrifices and overtly work towards that sphere's goals could also generate sphere energy, just the same as sphere energy is generated by accident. 

Again, I think it best to have a spectrum of effects in these sphere-biomes.  Some are subtle, with just some new plants occasionally springing up.  Then you get to animals being generated or turned. (Possibly from eating all the sunberries or whip vines that are infused with xenoenergeia...)  Finally, you get to the "power run amok" stage when you've really, truly tipped the scales and overturned the natural balance.  That's when you have, say, magma rain or other really, really Fun stuff unless you can immediately neutralize the sphere. 

That's in part why I like having the opposing spheres (practicing healing and memorializing the unknown soldiers of the ancient war on your lands drains away a lingering unquiet dead) and sphere-draining plants that let you drain your sphere levels at a slow and steady rate.  It's setting up a system where it's in the player's hand to manage a balance, and as always with DF, there's more than adequate room to hang yourself. 

Additionally, it sets up the possibility of dwarves not going to an evil region just because they want to declare "LOL, eat it, endless hoards of the undead, this place is ours, now!", but to declare that they're going to set right what once went wrong, and turn the zombie raven-infested blood-raining forest into a dwarven paradise full of giant bronze battle axe statues and marble-and-glass apartment complexes where everything menaces with spikes of copper or silver.  Basically, it would give you a chance to "beat" an evil biome.  (Or create one where none existed before...)

[NW_Kohaku]

I can't approach the spheres without making the distinction between wilderness and civilization.  There are a lot of spheres I can't apply to a wild animal without turning it into some type or variant of animal person (and therefore no longer really an animal) in the process: Dance, Gambling, Rumors, and Writing, just off the top of my head.

So you think animals can't dance?

But anyway, look at what spheres we have now.  Animal people exist only in sphere-aligned territory. (Savage spheres, to be specific.) Skeletons and zombies and such all exist because of evil-aligned energies. 

So if you have a dance or song or writing sphere controlling a region, that just means that ordinary animals are altered into dancing or singing or literate animals.  (The boar Napoleon has written a masterwork propaganda slogan: "All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others!") 

That's just what spheres DO.  They are, by nature, arbitrary and magical.

A sphere that causes animals to all sing like it's a Disney film or something is just as unnatural as the "good" or "evil" spheres we have now, where unicorns and trees made of feathers or grass made of eyeballs and zombie hordes are common, or the "savage" biomes that exist to create giant animals and a bunch of furries.


And the rest of this post is going to be long and I have to go, so I'll cut it off here, and respond to the rest a bit later...

[NW_Kohaku]

I wound up with a total of 9 Wilderness major spheres, and 13 Civilization major spheres. 
> The Wilderness major spheres are Caverns, Darkness, Death, Fire, Moon, Nature, Sun, Water, and Weather.
> The Civilization major spheres are Agriculture, Art, Chaos, Crafts, Family, Festivals, Happiness, Misery, Order, Peace, Scholarship, Travelers, and War.

[etc. etc. etc. long post]

Due to the fact that this is basically a direct port of the topic of the Organizing the Spheres thread in the first place, (including outright quoting portions of that thread,) and you're intending to continue posting even more on the topic, I'll just answer the rest of this post in that thread, instead. 

[Tristan Alkai]

I can't approach the spheres without making the distinction between wilderness and civilization.  There are a lot of spheres I can't apply to a wild animal without turning it into some type or variant of animal person (and therefore no longer really an animal) in the process: Dance, Gambling, Rumors, and Writing, just off the top of my head.

So you think animals can't dance?

But anyway, look at what spheres we have now.  Animal people exist only in sphere-aligned territory. (Savage spheres, to be specific.) Skeletons and zombies and such all exist because of evil-aligned energies. 

So if you have a dance or song or writing sphere controlling a region, that just means that ordinary animals are altered into dancing or singing or literate animals.  (The boar Napoleon has written a masterwork propaganda slogan: "All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others!") 

That's just what spheres DO.  They are, by nature, arbitrary and magical.

A sphere that causes animals to all sing like it's a Disney film or something is just as unnatural as the "good" or "evil" spheres we have now, where unicorns and trees made of feathers or grass made of eyeballs and zombie hordes are common, or the "savage" biomes that exist to create giant animals and a bunch of furries.

Okay, after watching that video, I will concede Dance, and I suppose Rumors might work too. 

However, the key phrase on my end was "without turning it into some type or variant of animal person (and therefore no longer really an animal) in the process." 

Animal Farm is a good example, as is Charlotte's Web.  All of the various so-called farm animals in both stories (and, in the latter, a few non-farm animals to boot, starting with Charlotte herself) are anthropomorphized well past the point of unrecognizability.  Informed Species is certainly in effect, possibly Informed Attribute as well.  The characters may be officially labeled as animals, but ALL other indicators point to human-equivalent intellect and human-equivalent speech.  What more do you want before you simply call them humans, or at least humanoids like elves? 

Animal people are PEOPLE, not wildlife.  Even if we don't call them civilized, they are at least on the same level as a human barbarian tribe.  In the contrast between Wilderness and Civilization, even a barbarian tribe represents Civilization. 

If an animal starts singing (Song sphere), or learns to read and write (Writing sphere), it has ceased to be an animal and moved into a different category.  I can't approach the topic without that distinction.  I therefore found it extremely jarring to see hamster men and women labeled as "wild animal"s when I embarked in an Untamed Wilds region. 

Unicorns, and even zombies, are magical, but I can see "magical" and "wildlife" as independent categories, referring to orthogonal axes.  "Wildlife" and "Civilized" are different categories along the same axis.  Trying to apply Civilization spheres to wild animals would seem to result in a lot more animal people than we have now, and I am already confused by the inconsistent treatment they get.  Either they're people (in which case they should form entities just like everyone else) or they're not (in which case they shouldn't have protections like dwarves considering them sentient and refusing to butcher them). 

[NW_Kohaku]

Okay, after watching that video, I will concede Dance, and I suppose Rumors might work too. 

However, the key phrase on my end was "without turning it into some type or variant of animal person (and therefore no longer really an animal) in the process." 

Animal Farm is a good example, as is Charlotte's Web.  All of the various so-called farm animals in both stories (and, in the latter, a few non-farm animals to boot, starting with Charlotte herself) are anthropomorphized well past the point of unrecognizability.  Informed Species is certainly in effect, possibly Informed Attribute as well.  The characters may be officially labeled as animals, but ALL other indicators point to human-equivalent intellect and human-equivalent speech.  What more do you want before you simply call them humans, or at least humanoids like elves? 

Animal people are PEOPLE, not wildlife.  Even if we don't call them civilized, they are at least on the same level as a human barbarian tribe.  In the contrast between Wilderness and Civilization, even a barbarian tribe represents Civilization. 

If an animal starts singing (Song sphere), or learns to read and write (Writing sphere), it has ceased to be an animal and moved into a different category.  I can't approach the topic without that distinction.  I therefore found it extremely jarring to see hamster men and women labeled as "wild animal"s when I embarked in an Untamed Wilds region. 

Unicorns, and even zombies, are magical, but I can see "magical" and "wildlife" as independent categories, referring to orthogonal axes.  "Wildlife" and "Civilized" are different categories along the same axis.  Trying to apply Civilization spheres to wild animals would seem to result in a lot more animal people than we have now, and I am already confused by the inconsistent treatment they get.  Either they're people (in which case they should form entities just like everyone else) or they're not (in which case they shouldn't have protections like dwarves considering them sentient and refusing to butcher them).

I'm still not sure exactly where the problem is, here. 

Animal people are supposed to be "uncivilized" humanoids, and it's just that they are using more "animal" behaviors for now because they haven't gotten enough Toady coding time to have fully-fleshed-out AI.  In the next update, you're going to be able to invite random armadillo men into your fort population, supposedly. 

If anything, it just creates a, "Whoops! Can't butcher this pig Urist, he just asked me not to eat him!" situation.

Beyond that, animals are generally capable of song, anyway.  Note that the power of an evil biome that animates the undead is not the undead's will, but the will of the evil bioime.  A song biome might make capybaras start whistling more intelligible tunes, or even having parrots start making out intelligible lyrics to a cry with a backup of songbirds going a cappella, without them being intelligent enough to actually recognize the significance of what they are doing.

I mean, many of Toady's original creatures tend to be either jokes or references to fantasy creatures of other games (I.E. flying heads as vargoyles, floating guts as Dragon Quest slimes) or they tend to be chimeric creatures of the most literal sort.  (I.E. Feather trees turned out to literally have feathers.  Blizzard Man is not a yukionna knockoff, but a literal humanoid-shaped ice thing.  Molemarian is a mole-rat centaur.  And this is why Gorlaks look like.  I'm sure if we ever get a detailed look at a plump helmet, it will look exactly like a helmet.)

(Note, Gorlaks are "good" creatures that appear in random caverns away from good surroundings, as well.  It's just that the current caverns have many more "evil" creatures, so they're more prominent.)

"Animal Farming" some animals would be actually far more subtle than current surroundings. 

Likewise, how is making a creature behave less like an animal necessarily a disqualifier?  Again, a savage biome still spits out mostly normal animals, some giants, and only the occasional animal-person.  Having the rare talking pig that can have a philosophic discussion before agreeing that it would, in fact, like to be eaten, would be perfectly in keeping with DF standards.  (Then again, so would a talking pig becoming citizen, being elected mayor, then mandating more pearl production...)

Beyond that, surroundings tend to involve a bunch of mythic animals that are appropriate to that specific sphere.  Song spheres might create sirens or mermaids, for example, but the normal animals may well just be normal animals that grunt to the tune and tap their feet unconsciously to the rhythm, just like good regions are filled with utterly mundane yaks that munch on the bubble grass. 

[Untrustedlife]

Revving thread!

Thanks for that link in the fotf just thought I'd say generating "sphere energy" based on actions would be pretty cool though hard for toady to implement ( it would take time anyway to write code that distinguishes actions by sphere)

But it is a cool idea, I'll write a more substantial reply when my classes are over.

[NW_Kohaku]

Thanks for that link in the fotf just thought I'd say generating "sphere energy" based on actions would be pretty cool though hard for toady to implement ( it would take time anyway to write code that distinguishes actions by sphere)

For actions, maybe not so much.  I suspect it could be done similarly to how attributes and skills are handled, just applied to a regional integer, rather than an individual one.  A sacrifice to a sphere power might give +100 regional xenoenergeia, while some creatures simply living might be -1 or +1 every some-odd ticks of the game.  That said, setting up the code for handling xenoenergeia and whatever happens when it hits saturation point would possibly be time-consuming, but then, so would any magic system. 

The point of this system is really to provide some way of making magic a "science" that can have a rational set of cause and effect, while also taking it out of the direct hands of dwarves to avoid that "factory" idea. It also avoids a blind randomness "Wild Magic Table" system that would make any interaction with magic unpalatable while simultaneously, by putting magic into "nature" removing any real chance of "hiding" from magic by simply "burning the witch" whenever you find someone who is a practitioner of magic.

[NW_Kohaku]

Transplanting this from the FotF thread...

Spoiler: long quote (click to show/hide)

And once again, the example of what "wild magic" means comes down to "it has a 20% chance of killing everyone nearby."  Whenever I ask what "wild magic" means in terms of something that can actually be in a game, it always comes down to "it kills your dwarves if you use it". This isn't complex behavior, it's just a random game over if you're stupid enough to use the system.

Again, DF is fundamentally a game of managed risk. ...

Let me try and give a different sort of example.  Let's assume for the moment that future!DF has a sliding "chaosity of magic" parameter; and that it can reasonably be condensed into a simple parameter of small integers.  (Given the "fantasy level" parameter for the mythology generator shown in the GDC talk which works exactly like that, I think it's a decent starting point at least.)

Due to whatever combination of origin myths (which seem to frequently involve cosmic eggs, and commonly animal deities), let's say there is a spell that creates turkey eggs; as this is nominally for your breakfast omelette (Turkey Egg Stew: Expertly Diced Turkey Eggs x3), the simplest version creates 3.  (The costs, difficulty in researching or learning, etc. would be set elsewhere in the generator.)

Chaos 0: Spell creates 3 turkey eggs (3-3, avg. 3)
Chaos 1: Spell creates 1d3+1 turkey eggs (2-4, avg. 3)
Chaos 2: Spell creates 1d5 turkey eggs (1-5, avg. 3)
Chaos 3: Spell creates 1d6-1 turkey eggs, with the dice exploding on 6 (0 to infinite, or maxint at least; but still avg. 3)
Chaos 4: Spell creates 1d6-1 items, with the dice exploding on 6 (0 to infinite, or maxint at least; but still avg. 3); plus an additional d6 is rolled... 1: a random sort of egg; 2-5, turkey egg(s) as expected; 6: a random turkey product (varying the kind and the type at the two ends; a spell to create gold ingots might have a chance of random ingots, or random gold things)
Chaos 5: mostly as above, but the additional die is 1: random source or predecessor; 2: random egg; 3-4: turkey egg; 5: random turkey product; 6: random target or successor.  You might end up with a live turkey, a ready to eat 3x Turkey Egg Stew (omelette, more or less), or something along those lines.  The gold ingots spell might give gold ore, or gold figurines. 
Chaos 6: adds another die, which on a 6 gives a random modifier or state to the result so far... eggs might be fertile or rotten or boiling, nominally-live turkeys might be giant or starving or husked.  Gold ingots might arrive molten, or as masterwork studding on everything in the workshop. 

All of the above are based on fairly straightforward algorithmic modifications of the initial "predictable" result (3 turkey eggs), plus trawling around in pre-existing relationships in the raws.  No one would argue that even the Chaos 3 version *can* be a lot less predictable; but really you've got less than 0.5% chance of more than a dozen eggs, the *average* remains 3, and if some fort somewhere generates four dozen eggs from a single casting, that's amusing while also being one in a million. 

Even stepping up to Chaos 5... getting several live turkeys when you asked for 3 eggs is certainly a bit surprising, but in the general scheme of fort (or adventurer) life is more likely to cause an amusing anecdote than the fall of civilization. 

Only when you turn it all the way up to Chaos 6 does there become any real potential for disaster, and the odds are very low.  Even most of the weird results are annoying and/or humorous; ending up with 11 rotting Turkey Egg Stew in your magic workshop, with attendant miasma until cleaned up, is unlikely to end any reasonably prepared fortress.  There's a tiny chance of ending up with a few angry zombie turkeys, or were-turkeys; this could cause a moderate amount of damage to a good fort or end a teetering one, but the chances for this sort of ending are down there with "embarked someplace with undead eagles and rain that stuns the living".  And remember that this is a *voluntary* parameter turned (in this example) up as far as it could go. 

While the example is a bit contrived, hopefully it helps explain how a simple spell "creates about 3 turkey eggs" can become gradually more chaotic, via entirely procedural means that can readily be programmed within the existing structures.

This really doesn't address the fundamental problem I'm trying to point out.

The problem isn't the exact probability of death, it's that it's a really simple, boring cost-benefit analysis to make.

Once again, the thing people want is some magic system totally different from other RPGs and like what occurs in fantasy novels, where it seems mysterious.  When asked how to make it, they say the exact same "wizard spends MP and gets an exactly measured, predictable output" concept as exists in those RPGs it's supposed to be different from.  When told this, the inevitable next step to try to "fix" that problem is to append the exact same Wild Magic Table that just makes the numbers of the effect larger or smaller. 

Let me use an example... I remember Zero Punctuation's take on Assassin's Creed Unity, which said

Spoiler: quotting of the relevant bits of video (click to show/hide)

Let's focus on the new mechanics, or rather, gimmicks.

A gimmick is a new mechanic that lets us achieve something we could already do with already-established mechanics, but easier... or harder, in the latter case instantly rendering itself as vestigial as an armless chimpanzee's bellend. 

Syndicate has examples of both:

The new hookshot merely replaces all the traditional climbing gameplay with one button press, and when things go corset-up, you can instantly escape pursuers with a smoke bomb and hookshot out; AKA the Batman bye-bye.  And while it was occasionally annoying to watch Ezio or Altair bounce his little tushy up and down internally debating whether a 2mm crack constitutes a handhold, this is taking out gameplay and not replacing it with anything - unless you count trying to figure out which square foot of rooftop to stand in to make the game recognize the opposite building as hookshot-able.

[...]

Also, there's drivable carriages in the sandbox [...] but it's slightly faster than parkour and slightly slower than hookshotting, making it a gimmick that is introduced and made obsolete within the same sodding game.

So, remember how bees were introduced, and they had these really complex mechanics, but everything you could achieve with bees could be achieved with much, much simpler means through things we already had?  Or how ceramics were introduced, but they didn't do anything we couldn't already do with the much more prevalent and generally useful stone or wood?

The problem is that people are talking about magic as solely being a "make your wizard wave their hand and pay MP to do something we could already do, but with a percentage chance to have horrible things happen to you that wouldn't happen if you just did the things you could already do."

There is no reason to cast a spell for turkey eggs, we can already just bring turkeys on embark and be neck-deep in turkey eggs by two years in.  Yes, that's just a silly, arbitrary example, but every other use people come up with tends to be the same: Attack magic that's just a "magic" version of a crossbow or dumping magma on something with "hilarious" drawbacks the existing methods of shooting enemies don't have. 

Even if it were a "better" way of doing something we can already do, then you've just made some other, generally better-developed part of the game obsolete. 

Or to put it far more bluntly, if you try to make magic into a way of doing something we could already do, you've already failed.  You've reduced magic to a gimmick that is either an easy mode way of doing something we could do before with a system that had more depth, or it's not only a giant timewaster, but it's also suicidally stupid to use.  You aren't making meaningful choices, you're making simple cost-benefit calculations.

I started creating the Class Warfare thread because I originally wanted to join the chorus asking for ceramics, (before, you know, they were in the game,) but then realized that they would serve no real purpose unless some problem existed that they could solve.  I realized a lot of dwarven crafts generally already fell into that same trap of worthlessness. Hence, I started writing up a system of dwarves having growing demands for luxury goods and entertainment as a method of providing the problem that crafts could actually solve.  Toady ultimately introduced ceramics without mechanics to make them useful, so they were useless.  He is, however, eventually getting around to the concepts of designing a problem for the new mechanics to solve through making the Stress system more dependent upon having Taverns that entertain dwarves critical to preventing dwarven unhappiness with a boring life.  He also made goblets finally useful, so hopefully, ceramics in general can eventually get in on that.

The basic hurdle the Wild Magic Table system that keeps coming up fails to clear is that you cannot make a magic system that isn't just "industrialized magic" with a system that fundamentally revolves around industrialized fulfillment of a few basic needs, and the rest being fluff.  You need to make a whole new problem for what magic players can control players can use as the solution.

This is exactly why, so far, Toady has only introduced magic that players cannot directly control.  Because then, magic is the problem that players have to solve, and it requires that players try to use the existing systems in more creative ways to solve these new problems.  That is, it enhances the value of existing mechanics, rather than competing with or rendering obsolete those existing mechanics. 

Even in these existing instances, however, the magic we have now is notably not terribly capable of that sort of "mystery" that you can't know and predict everything about how a vampire or necromancer will act.  This is a largely a problem of a system that just isn't capable of generating seriously emergent behaviors.

Emergent behaviors (for which DF is famous) arise because individual systems are capable of interacting within a shared gamespace. Magma is only so useful and iconic in DF because it is something you can indirectly control through fortress layout, and it can interact with most other aspects of the game's mechanics (or occupants).  Magma is its own system, but it also operates on the temperature system, the world-shaping system (digging), the mechanics system on both ends (triggering pressure plates or being moved by pumps or released with floodgates), creatures (dumping magma on creatures), combat (dumping magma on creatures), garbage disposal, resource creation (obsidian), industry (magma forges), and possibly some others I forgot.  As is said in Bay12, magma is the solution to every problem, and that's specifically because its interactivity with every other system is precisely what makes it so capable of emergent gameplay.

Magic needs to be capable of creating that kind of emergent behavior, and that's not done when you make magic a system that simply tries to replace some already-existing system, where you either use the existing farming system or the magic system's "create food" spells.  Inevitably, one will be better than the other, probably the existing farming, because it's doubtful you'd ever be able to have enough wizards to summon eggs for everyone, and even if you could, it seems even more doubtful it wouldn't be far more effective to just keep our current ludicrously scalable tribbles egg-making machines.

This is, ultimately, why I wind up with this Xenosynthesis thread.  It's meant to make "magic" a part of the environment that can interact with all the other systems in DF.  It's meant to make magic a problem that takes understanding and manipulating magic its own solution.  It gives magic to dwarves, but more in the way that magma is available to dwarves: It's a dangerous tiger to try to ride, but it isn't completely arbitrary and unfair.  Magma doesn't just cause blindly random Wild Magma Table rolls that kill random dwarves, it's dangerous when you don't prepare for it, but tame and predictable if you have the foresight to manage the myriad issues related to its use.

[PatrikLundell]

Firstly, I have to apologize for not reading the posts between the first and the last one, jumping in from the FoTF thread, but it's quite a volume to wade through.
I believe there are several potential flavors of magic that are not necessarily mutually exclusive (such as "field" ones as well as "do this-get that effect" one, which might potentially contain both "industrial/war" effect and things like opening and maintaining portals), but let's keep to fields.

When it comes to fields, I would think there are at least two kinds of fields:
- Powered, i.e. some kind of power source maintains the field, and that source will deplete and disappear over time ("magic crystals", both stationary and portable. They may or may not be possible to recharge (blood sacrifice is a classic method, but the method ought to be in line with the fields itself).
- "Permanent", akin to black smokers in that they provide a more or less variable constant power output. "Permanent" sources may be destroyed/shut down, both via natural fluctuations and through intervention, and their sources might not be truly unlimited, but they are over the time scale of fortresses.

As far as I'm concerned, DF already have fields in the form of the various cavern biomes, as well as the good/evil ones, plus well known everyday ones in the form of temperature, precipitations, etc. (Additional) magic fields would, in themselves, basically result in new biomes (with different combinations of new fields and levels of existing ones leading to various new biomes). This, in itself is interesting, but it becomes even more so if you (and other agents) have means and motivations for changing/manipulating fields.
One could e.g. imagine sapient magma creatures who wanted to expand their domain upwards (by melting non magma safe rock, layer by layer). Firstly, they'd want to prevent the main source from being weakened (resulting in lower magma levels) or shut down (resulting in obsizianization or draining of the magma sea), but it ought to be incredibly difficult, or even impossible, to achieve that. To expand the domain, they'd either have to increase the output of power from the source (removing blockage to restore or achieve maximum output, probably), or, usually, through artificial means, such as rituals (short term effect, so they'd have to be repeated again and again), opening conduits to the plane of magma (that would require effort to keep open), deployment of magma field "crystals" (which would have to be "manufactured" at a considerable cost (in various currencies appropriate to the fields) and would deplete over time), etc. When the efforts to depart from the "normal" state cease, the field would ease back.
Underlying this, there may be natural processes that shift the fields around (think tectonic plate movement or erosion), that may or may not operate on DF fortress level time scales. You could also have manipulative gods in the mix...
If you used this kind of logic, it would make sense to be able to affect the local temperature, precipitation, or other "non magical" fields through magical means.
Shifting the good/evil field could give you sun berries/glumprong, and critters appropriate to those biomes (provided they had anywhere to migrate from, which they probably would, or you'd be too weak to modify the field sufficiently). Evil weather could be a side effect of increasing the evil in an area.
If we were to imagine an electricity magic field, electric versions of more or less mundane critters could migrate in (thunder birds, shocker sheep,...) as well as electric weather (risk of being hit by lightning), and ball lightning zooming around. I could even imagine there being liquid lightning (whatever that would do, which could only be created in a sufficiently strong lightning magic field, but might be stable elsewhere, or might decay into e.g. ordinary water or contaminated water), or harvestable lightning hail stones.
However, any harvestable resource supported by particular field strengths would probably have to be either "organic", i.e. grow, or be some kind of condensation/precipitation/... on top of the surface of the area (which may be cavern floors or walls, not limited to the above ground surface), rather than messing with the underlying geology (increasing the magic X field inducing magic X gems to form in rock, and have those gems disappear when the field is reduced gets messy).
Apart from magic field strength manipulation, you might have "conventional" magic that requires the presence of the fields to work, but then you move over towards the "cause-effect" type of magic.

[Untrustedlife]

did you read the link I gave in the fotf?

I'm more for magic having an effect on the narrative.

And we can't forget the other half of the game, adventure mode.

[vjmdhzgr]

I think the kind of stuff Toady One is planning is already good enough. Did you watch http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023372/Practices-in-Procedural ? Just skip to the myth generator part and you'll get to see some examples of the magic planned. Stuff like being able to become full of the force permeating the world at the cost of getting a touch nauseated and a drop of blood, but allowing for additional spells. They could then turn into a plant by singing after becoming full of the force, or change their smell, or move water. Or with a different magic system they could shoot lightning at the cost of some flesh and becoming a bit more faded, or start a snowstorm with similar costs, or fall slower at the cost of becoming a bit more faded. All these sound like exactly what I wanted out of a Dwarf Fortress magic system. They all have some form of cost, a sometimes difficult, sometimes complicated procedure to perform them, and it's all mostly interesting effects, that aren't just combat abilities.

[Untrustedlife]

First off, I recommend you listen to the df talk on artifacts.

What toady WANTS in artifacts is magic that can be "reliable" and extremely useful but if you screw up with using it (and you will be told what you cannot do, or given warnings that you ave to sleuth out ) it could destroy your fortress.

Chaotic magic doesn't have to be unfair and arbitrary. And perhaps chaotic is as bad word for it.

I'll explain.
remember we will keep the "how common is magic" slider, and the "chaos" slider is seperate.

RIght now we have the mists in evil biomes that do horrible things to anyone who walks in them right?


A low chaos world would have magic that is perfectly reliable, (this is your magic is science type world), you would probably not have to worry about miscasts (or the punishment for a miscast is minimal (a harry potter style world with less miscasts, and less punishment for screwing with magic to do bad things) ) at best , and the cost of magic would be very numbers based, very minimal,  and very industrializable. A mage workshop pushing out flame swords and runestones at regular intervals from various herbs? Why the heck not.  No mystery at all about how magic works, it is perfectly understood fine (toady really doesnt want this as a default by the way. in fact he complained about it in the df talk I mentioned, he really wants it to be mysterious), but some players want this sort of thing.
this is level 0.


Level 1, would probably be more in line with harry potter, we have miscast potential and newbie mages would do it sometimes, luckily the punishments for miscasts is still minimal, but the magic would very occasionally be unpredictable (eg accidentally summoning a venomous snake instead of a rabbit, since you pushed the wrong block of time and space into the wrong position, newbie mistake), in this world since magic is slightly more dangerous (and therefore more powerful) you would probabbly get more dark mages hanging around making books that steal souls and such. (since the cost is still low on the caster they can get away with this)


Level 2,( the default) would be essentially what the magical system generator pushes out right now , magic has a defined cost, and there is the obvious potential for miscast and a few really powerful artifacts (like the loom that controls fate) hanging out. It is essentially sometimes slightly more chaotic with magical dew lakes and such lofting about occassionly. (see the talk he did at GDC), your dwarves would still create artifacts, they wouldn't be as powerful as the loom that controls fate, of course)

Level 3, this is a higher chaos then medium, the cost/potential; for miscast would be greater and magic would sometimes be a bit more unreliable (Potential for the spell to do something slightly different then what you expected, instead of just failing, for example if you animate furniture and usually it is your minion, it would work but the minion would sometimes instead attack you), and you probably less rarely have raw magical power wafting about in clouds in magic biomes(since magic is slightly more "raw" in this universe) (more common then the current evil biomes, and slightly more common/slightlyt more powerful artifacts, and your fort would get these kinds of artifacts from dwarves aswell.

AT the highest level of chaotic magic (like the highest level of magic, which completely randomizes everything or the lowest, where only humans and a fake god exist)  You would probably end up with magic in its "raw" form wafting about the world in mists alot more often, in the specific "magical" biomes with weird creatures (the amount of those that exist would be dependent on the "how magical is your world slider)  there would be people who can utilize it (reliably for the most part) but they would be rare and dangerous(because the spells would be very powerful/dangerous at this level) (and a good asset for defending a fort, despite the danger) , we would have artifacts that are effectively wmds about the world, with people seeking them out to perhaps, hide or even destroy them. (artifact seakers and artifact seaking quests will be in the next version of dwarf fortress regardless , that is part of the plan already, so the potential is there)  (as would all other features of a chaotic magical world, for example at low magic high chaos, you probably wouldn't even have the magical mists, but only a small amount of the aforementioned wmd(if used improperly) artifacts around that people are seeking out, in order to hide or destroy or use them, this is a narrative function (by the way all artifacts at this level are as powerful as the most powerful artifacts at level 3) , an adventurer could start working for one of these organizations, for example, and if your fort somehow acquires one of the artifacts, it could probably be used reliably, to help your fort, and of course you would be punished for misuse, and people would start coming to your fort to try and take the artifact from you, perhaps even using armies.  ) , which again is a narrative function",  the level to which this exists would be dependent on the magical slider obviously.
this is level 4



Watch that GDC talk to see what I am talking about, that slider that's already there has extremes that not many people like either (on the two lowest settings and you dont even get dwarves!) (and on the highest)

[Untrustedlife]

I think the kind of stuff Toady One is planning is already good enough. Did you watch http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023372/Practices-in-Procedural ? Just skip to the myth generator part and you'll get to see some examples of the magic planned. Stuff like being able to become full of the force permeating the world at the cost of getting a touch nauseated and a drop of blood, but allowing for additional spells. They could then turn into a plant by singing after becoming full of the force, or change their smell, or move water. Or with a different magic system they could shoot lightning at the cost of some flesh and becoming a bit more faded, or start a snowstorm with similar costs, or fall slower at the cost of becoming a bit more faded. All these sound like exactly what I wanted out of a Dwarf Fortress magic system. They all have some form of cost, a sometimes difficult, sometimes complicated procedure to perform them, and it's all mostly interesting effects, that aren't just combat abilities.

(it also says in the gdc talk that   if you miscast you could become ethereal or lose your identity entirely) (or whatever the system comes up with), but it all stays within a theme, like one magic system he showed involved using "memories"  to cast spells (so like, lets say you became a legendary swords dwarf last week, well now you arn't legendary) , and if you miscast you lose your entire identity.  so you get like amnesia.
I agree I like that, but it could be more varied.  too bad he didn't talk much about magical artifacts (which are  a big part of the next version aswell)

[JesterHell696]

-snip-

First forgive me for not reading the entire thread but I followed the fotf link.


Now on to the topic at hand, I think that part of the problem from what I've read is that you think of magic with only concern of how it can benefit and improve society e.g. fortress mode with question of its use and utility for the overseer where as I think of magic for how it can benefit and improve the individual e.g. adventure mode with question of how much chaos I can sow and rules I can break.

You see a spell to conjure food as a gimmick and in fortress mode it would be but in adventure mode it could save you from starvation or remove the need to carry food supplies all together which is a great boon in my eyes.

As one of the people who would like to see more adventure mode focused development I can only reinforce what Untrustedlife has said, don't forget that adventure mode is half of the game and that magic's use and utility in fortress mode is not the only concern.

[PatrikLundell]

-snip-

First forgive me for not reading the entire thread but I followed the fotf link.


Now on to the topic at hand, I think that part of the problem from what I've read is that you think of magic with only concern of how it can benefit and improve society e.g. fortress mode with question of its use and utility for the overseer where as I think of magic for how it can benefit and improve the individual e.g. adventure mode with question of how much chaos I can sow and rules I can break.

You see a spell to conjure food as a gimmick and in fortress mode it would be but in adventure mode it could save you from starvation or remove the need to carry food supplies all together which is a great boon in my eyes.

As one of the people who would like to see more adventure mode focused development I can only reinforce what Untrustedlife has said, don't forget that adventure mode is half of the game and that magic's use and utility in fortress mode is not the only concern.

As I stated above (but after the FotF redirect), I believe there to be several flavors of magic, with utility magic falling outside of the scope of field magic, which I think is the topic of this thread.
Fields aren't just something to be used and harnessed in fortress mode, but also a potential threat (or source of threats) to adapt to (and they would affect adventurers the same way). I personally don't care about adventure mode, but for DF to be consistent, things have to work in a reasonable way in both modes.
Now, if you can just wave your hand and get food, why would anyone bother to learn to hunt or gather food? If it could be used as an emergency measure at some considerable cost if you run out of food I wouldn't object, but if it's easier and cheaper than going about it the normal way there is no reason for the normal way to be used at all by anyone (essentially the argument against industrialized magic). As far as I understand you can already make yourself food independent through undeath in adventure mode (and I think DFHack provides means to create arbitrary items, such as food, which you can think of as magic conjuration, if you like).
I wouldn't object to the the creation of summoning pebbles (or tokens, or whatever) that, when activated would summon an existing prepared item, provided these pebbles had a higher cost associated with them than just lugging stuff with you (such as having to prepare the food/item at home and then connect and freeze a summoning spell between the food and the pebble, where the magic costs more than just the time to wave your hands about and mutter a bit. On activation of this summoning, you'd again have to pay somehow. The costs would probably have to scale with weight, or there's no reason for caravans to use (costly) draft animals. Just send the caravan master (with optional guards) to the destination, summon the items, trade, and magic the things back again (minor logistic exercise for the reader to figure out how).
Such summoning magic could have some use in fortress mode for rapid correspondence (instead of, or in parallel with telepathic comms). It can obviously be weaponized as well.