Magic and the like

Well yeah, not apotheosis levels. King of Worms power rather than God of Worms power, say. I mean eventually a player should feasibly be able to become a necromancer so powerful he can extend his life effectively indefinitely and create a plethora of undead servants, but he shouldn't be unkillable or possess even limited omniscience like the Tribunal. And creating your own realm of Oblivion where you're invincible and omnipotent is right out.

Saint Jiub wrote:Okay, I'm looking at the spell system with fresh eyes (I didn't even look at it before now, so I mean REALLY fresh eyes).

I figure casting difficulty should be based on:
Magnitude
Time
Effect
Number of Effects
Type

I've actually done something along those lines already, but I'm having trouble balancing it so I've kept silent. What I did was create a few basic "units" of spell that have a given cost and difficulty - 1d10 fire damage, for example. This would be the cheapest and simplest damage spell. You want more damage? Add another unit for 2d10 fire damage. Or add 5 ft radius unit to make an AoE spell. This way, it is easy to operate with spell cost and difficulty and making new spells on the spot, because you just slap appropriate amounts of basic units together and add their costs together. And, writing down spells becomes "fire 3 radius 2 duration 2" instead of "3d10 fire damage in a 10 ft. radius for 2 rounds", which the character sheets will be thankful for.

However, I've hit a snag. I can't match the linear increase of cost and difficulty of spells with increase in survivability and damage potential of non-magic combatants. Either the magic users start off like in the game, capable of killing people with two spells with later being unable to kill anything before ending up in melee and with no magicka, or the other way around, being pathetic in the start and later being able to lob targeted fireballs for like 150 average damage. It's probably just a bit of work away, finding a good starting difficulty for basic units and such, but I can't set aside time to actually sit down with a sheet of paper and solve it.

Then, there's the magicka problem. We haven't said an "m" about it yet, apart from my operational assumption that it's going to be int+will. Does it regenerate on its own, and how fast? If not, how available will magicka potions be? Will we be stuck in the stupid d&d routine where the party had to rest after every encounter because the casters run out of spells? This has to be taken into account before making a definite statement about the casting mechanics.

I think constant magicka regeneration is more fun, even if it means a lot of erasing on the character sheet end.

Perhaps we should just take the architecture of the system as it is now, and save the fine tuning for much later in development when we can do stress testing on the system?

I think I've already said this, but maybe we should treat magicka like fatigue - you can use it sparingly all day, but if you cast something big, you get drained and need to rest or face penalties. It would make magic users constantly viable, remove yet another bit of paperwork, and provide punishment for using too powerful effects (teleportation magic, for example, or summoning a daedra, or just casting spells a bit to close to your skill-determined comfort limit) that is integrated into the system.

We will call it... limit break.

We could pirate something from the Deadlands system and, instead of having numbers you scribble scribble erase erase, have sliding scales along the sides of your character sheet for health, fatigue, and magicka. You used paper clips to keep track of all your stuff. This would also reopen the possibility of having Fatigue be an expendable resource rather than just a measure of how tired you are.
I can't believe I didn't have this idea before...

Saint Jiub wrote:We could pirate something from the Deadlands system and, instead of having numbers you scribble scribble erase erase, have sliding scales along the sides of your character sheet for health, fatigue, and magicka. You used paper clips to keep track of all your stuff. This would also reopen the possibility of having Fatigue be an expendable resource rather than just a measure of how tired you are.
I can't believe I didn't have this idea before...

I do like this... in theory. It lessens paperwork, for sure, but we're working with stats that go from 50 to 200. Scribble scribble erase erase will be less annoying to do than counting squares on a long strip of technical paper whenever something happens to you.

I don't think the issue with fatigue was that keeping track of it would add more hassle (only 33% more hassle, to be precise). The issue was that the idea of combat actions fueled by fatigue was instantly met with knee-jerk fightan magic response, the idea of using fatigue just to increase damage dealt went nowhere, and the whole thing pretty much settled on "roll to see if you're tired, and if so how much". We haven't gone very far with fatigue, and it certainly wasn't because it was hard to keep track of.

HOLY SHIT INSPIRATION

Okay. So we want to represent Magicka regen, but we don't want to cast Magicka ALL THE FUCK TIME. Right?
So here's what I propose:
Inside of combat, you keep track of Magicka like normal, (Int+WP)/2. Spells cost whatever to cast, once you're out of magicka for that fight, you're out. So mages can't just go around casting their best spells all the time. You also have a mana "allowance" each combat round, say 10% of your maximum magicka, that is subtracted from all spell costs. So you've got magicka of 50. You want to cast Minor Spark. It's a 4 mana spell, deals 3d5 damage, whatever. You'll end up spending no mana. Then, next round, you want to cast Poison Blast. 1d5 damage per round for 5 rounds, 10-foot radius. That will cost you 15 mana to cast. Subtract your allowance of 5 and you're left with a spell that costs 10 mana. You subtract 10 mana from your pool, and you have 40 left to spend for the rest of the fight. Even if your mana hits 0, your allowance lets you cast some spells.

That way, we've still got mana regeneration going on, but at the same time we don't have mages casting Bigby's Violating Fist every round while the fighter takes another swing with his Iron Club.

Outside of combat, we can maybe change the mana allowance to something higher, since you're not under so much pressure.

Questions, comments? I know it's finals time, so maybe we can kick this off on a better note once summer rolls around, but I've been popping my head in to look at this every once in a while.

Bigby's Violating Fist

FUCK YEAH, TRAINSPOTTING.

Also, I have to say I love that idea. It allows mages to not resort to being useless once their mana is depleted like they do in D&D. This allows a mage to do his thing but depending on skill-level he can cast more and more easily and some spells become free due to their "simplicity" in your hands.

I've been checking every day really. I ain't American so I have no idea when uni stuff happens for everyone. I sometimes assume people just... quit. But good to know everybody's just super-busy, though I wish everyone luck for their exams and work.

Do we want spell allowance to be 10% of total magicka or 10% of current magicka? I'm thinking 10% of current, rounded up, might be better.

The example of last post under this new system:
At 50 magicka you'd have an allowance of 5. After casting Poison Blast, you're down to 40 Magicka, so your allowance drops to 4. This represents the strain of casting big spells, and encourages you not to blow all your magicka in the first three rounds, then spend the rest of the fight spamming "Saint Jiub's 5-mana Cliff Racer Exterminator" the whole fight - if you blow your load early, you won't have much left to cast with later on. However, if you take it nice and easy, you'll be able to cast reasonably strong spells the whole fight.

10% of current should be good yes, as per your example. If we put it at 10% of max, we'd end up with a lot of allowance too early I think and it would only get worse from there. It's be more realistic mind you, as higher level mages would find magic so intuitive that spells just fly off on their own, making a large magicka allowance make sense.

But then again, we need a balance as this is a game.

How do we treat multidisciplinary spells?

If my mage is an asshole and creates a spell that absorbs 10 pts of health and magicka AND makes him invisible for 5 seconds, how much of mysticism and how much of illusion is that?

Slotha Sil wrote:How do we treat multidisciplinary spells?

If my mage is an asshole and creates a spell that absorbs 10 pts of health and magicka AND makes him invisible for 5 seconds, how much of mysticism and how much of illusion is that?

Two ways we can do this. Roll against the school the caster is best in, or roll against the school that has the highest contribution to the spell's cost. In the case of your sample spell, it looks like there's more Mysticism than Illusion.

[addendum]
Do we want to impose an additional difficulty penalty for interdisciplinary spells?

Saint Jiub wrote:

Slotha Sil wrote:How do we treat multidisciplinary spells?

If my mage is an asshole and creates a spell that absorbs 10 pts of health and magicka AND makes him invisible for 5 seconds, how much of mysticism and how much of illusion is that?

Two ways we can do this. Roll against the school the caster is best in, or roll against the school that has the highest contribution to the spell's cost. In the case of your sample spell, it looks like there's more Mysticism than Illusion.

But this way you could sneak in effects from schools you're technically not good enough at. It would make for ungainly expensive spells to join two significant effects together, but I can see battlemages splicing healing into their combat spells while conveniently not taking restoration as any of their favored skills.

Well, maybe for each additional school you add to the spell, its difficulty goes up by 10? That way even a caster with a skill of 100 casting a minor 2-school self target spell isn't guaranteed to get it.

Maybe do it like this - join difficulties of effects, and add all related schools to the spell roll. If you're sufficiently proficient with everything, it works just like a single powerful spell. If you try to smuggle in something, your chance of casting drops sharply down because one of your school proficiencies will be lacking.

Slotha Sil wrote:Maybe do it like this - join difficulties of effects, and add all related schools to the spell roll. If you're sufficiently proficient with everything, it works just like a single powerful spell. If you try to smuggle in something, your chance of casting drops sharply down because one of your school proficiencies will be lacking.

But then you can actually improve your chance to cast by a lot just by including a one-point crap effect from a school that you're good in. "I'll never get off a 50-point fireball... ooh, I know, I'll make it heal me for 1 and add my very high Restoration skill to the total!" Gets broken real quick. It's the same "splash of color" problem as using your highest casting skill.

How about this:
Base difficulty on the highest school. Each additional school of magicka adds some points to the difficulty (somewhere between 10 and 20). Then you reduce the difficulty based on your other spell schools. So a mage with 100% in all three schools will barely break a sweat, but someone with minimal skill in the additional schools will find himself stressed to the limit.

Casting difficulty should be calculated when you make a spell, not when you cast it - then it's a fixed number that stacks against you. Hence, we can't use skills to reduce cost or difficulty of casting spells (else it would require recalculation every time the spell is cast). We need a way to come up with a single fixed number used in a single standardized roll that encompasses all needed elements.

Just have the spells require targeting one object or one area at a time. A guy can't cast invisibility-fireball because the guy he just shot with the combined spell would become invisible in addition to the fire damage.

Dagoth Durr wrote:Just have the spells require targeting one object or one area at a time. A guy can't cast invisibility-fireball because the guy he just shot with the combined spell would become invisible in addition to the fire damage.

Uh, yes. Never though of that, actually.

Though, talk about targeting spells reminded me of another evil thingy - will armor and shield stop spell damage? I had this idea about spells not targeting a single spot but the whole body, dealing damage to all locations. A properly armored character is effectively wearing a HEV suit, but if you lack cover somewhere that will hurt. However, all those helmetless guys with long flowing hair would object to that. If spells have to hit like normal weapons, mages will need some sort of attack skill. If armor doesn't help against magic, then we'd have to bring in touch AC, and wearing heavy armor will become a death sentence against a caster.

Maybe... as you can't actually parry spells, on the defense side of attack formula we'll have spell difficulty instead of weapon skill and willpower instead of strength, and on the offense side your magic school skill and willpower instead of strength. This way, spells are likely to always hit for at least some damage, but a tank is still a tank.

Also yes, I've made a small revision to our attack formula. I've decided to just use ALL physical attributes on all sides (except for endurance, unless you've got a spear). Strength needs to be there because it always increases damage, even with non-STR weapons, and because being strong helps you defend even if you're fighting a finesse battle. Everything else is the same, so the formula is still balanced.

I'd think armor effecting spells would vary based on the effect. Nothing but a Dwemer gas mask is going to stop poison damage. I don't care how thick your helm is, you still have to breathe.

Flame could be bad too after awhile. Baked in your armor.

Dagoth Durr wrote:I don't care how thick your helm is, you still have to breathe.

Air at 500 degrees Celsius in your lungs is going to kill you faster than most known poisons, and it takes the same amount of time to inhale them. At the same time, you can simply keep your breath for a few seconds and the magic poison cloud will disappear. We can't rely on reasoning like that, it will take years and will get us nowhere. We need to decide how magic spells work in the game world, the put it in rules. For the sake of simplicity, these rules should be intuitive and simple, and run off what we already have instead of relying on an outside system. Don't rationalize it, just keep tossing ideas until something brilliant comes out.

And I'd also wait to see what our most respected St. Jiub comes up with. I'd be willing to swallow whatever magic principle you want as long as it requires some intelligence to pull off, for once... If we're going to revolutionize RPG combat, we might just as well go for both might and magic.

I really can't think of any parallel to the guard/stance system for combat outside of actual spellmaking, which would all happen pre-battle....

General spell elements that you combine following certain rules, and with health and magicka instead of health and fatigue. Of course, with the number of magick effects we have the field would be very broad and varied, but the same spirit would be there. The hard part will be making it both easy and somehow connected the the spirit of the game.

Spellmaking is just a mechanical crutch for adding new spells to the game, we shouldn't care too much about that. And TES magic, as seen in in-game books, is a pretty mystical and sublime thing, not fire-and-forget generic RPG thingies we saw in the actual game.

Was that respect I just read?

It'll be the weekend in three hours, at which point I'll sit down with three pencils and eight erasers and see what I can work out with the magic system, given these new factors.

Saint Jiub wrote:Was that respect I just read?

Well you've got the most posts, that means you're the biggest and the greenest.