[CF-Devel] Re: New races and spells.

[Tim Rightnour]

>>
     
      Per a quick discussion on IRC, I've setup a poll on the Crossfire website
     
     >>
     
      and decided to use this topic to get it going.
     
     >>
     
     
     >>
     
     
      http://crossfire.real-time.com/poll/
      
      
     
If we are going to be adding new spells, races, dieties, whatever.. I think
some thought needs to go into whatever we create.  For example,
yet-another-area-effect-spell isn't all that interesting.  Races are a complex
subject.. as it has to offer something new and unique to the game to be really
useful.  What about a given race would make someone want to play it, vs another
race?  The dragon race is an excellent example, as it is a totally different
gameplay aspect than other races.  I for one would want to know that a new race
had been fully playtested before it went into the game.. but I'm just one of
many developers, don't rely on my word alone.  We often disagree.

There are however, some spells I would find interesting.. and these are just
thoughts, so please comment and discuss.

1) Weather related spells:

Moonbeam: Increase the light level of an entire outdoor map tile by 1 at night.
Forecast: Try and guess the weather.  Perhaps you could code in the locations
        of the major towns, and give current conditions for each town.
humidify: Crank up the humidity in this weather zone.
dryspell: Crank the humidity down
calling storm: lower the atmospheric pressure.
calm: raise the atmospheric pressure.
call lightning: if it's raining, and you are outdoors, call lightning bolts
        down from above to hit things around you.  I would imagine this as the
        bolts coming from above, so the visual would be that in a radius of N,
        there would be individual strikes on monsters all around you.
tornado: like ball lightning, but with a little air-elemental gfx.  It would
        probably need to move slower, but still randomly.  Outdoor only of
        course.  Perhaps it flings items around as it touches piles.
lightball: Dunno how hard this would be to do.  But a floating ball of light,
        that works like ball-lightning, but does no damage.  It would just
        follow you around from map to map, lighting the way.  I'm looking for a
        cross between a pet monster and a ball lightning here.

Perhaps fun effects could be added to the spells we allready have depending on
weather.  Like if it's really stormy, lightning does more damage.  Or if it's
cold out, fire really stings.  Perhaps wind spells would do way more if you
fire them in the direction of the prevailing wind, and nothing if you fire
against it.

2) Other spells:

Guided Missile: Magic Missile meets create bomb.  A missle goes flying, hits,
        and kaboom!
Do we have a chain lightning spell?
Do we have any kick-back spells?  Like prismatic sphere, or aura of fire, where
things take a little damage when they hit you?  Prismatic sphere might be fun,
as it has that random factor.

3) Skills:

Perhaps we can come up with some skills that might make people want to play as
a thief.  Like a backstab skill, where if you are hiding, you can backstab a
nearby monster for mondo-damage.  You would of course need to be using a
stab-weapon.

How about a bezerker rage.. where you go into a wild rage, killing everything
in sight, under computer control, until you can't see any other targets, or
wind up dead.  perhaps you do extra damage while raging.. but the danger is you
can't stop if you are in too deep.

Just some ideas..

---
Tim Rightnour <
     
     root at garbled.net
     
     >
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS 
     
     http://www.netbsd.org/
     
     
NetBSD supported hardware database: 
     
     http://mail-index.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/hw.cgi