[CF-Devel] The new magic skills

[crossfire-devel-admin at archives.real-time.com]

I am not sure whether this is too late or not. Generally I like the idea of
sorting the magic into categories - summoning a monster is maybe really
quite different to writing a rune. Balancing the different categories would
be hard, but I guess it would be possible.


But I see another problem and that is the 'newbies'. As a newbie who never
played a similiar RPG before, there are many options between he or she has
to
chose. I will try to go through this choices in the order in which they
apear to the newbie. While you read the list, please forget everything you
know about Crossfire ^_~.

(1) Are the stats good or should I re-roll them?
(2) Now I can swap my stats ... which values are important for me anyway?
(3) Ok, done with that, let's pick a race ... quite a lot, which one is
going to be the 'best' for me?
(4) Wow, next choice: which class should I chose?
(5) Done with that, let's beat up some baddies. But should I gather exp for
the one-handed weapons or for the two-handed weapons or for the missle
weapons? I should better pick whatever is still usefull for me at higher
levels...since I don't know the weapons, I have to try and be lucky.
(6) Ok, I got a few HP, now I want to try some magic. Uhm...which 'school'
should I join?
(7) After magic I learned piety...the next choice: which god should I
follow?

The choices enable getting an individual character and this list might apear
harmless to you. But I think we should consider that atleast five of these
decisions have to be made during the first minutes of playing the game, the
decisions (5) and (6) during the early stages of the game.
These decisions influence the possibilities and difficulty for a really long
time and the new player knows nearly nothing about what is going to be
usefull later.

You might (correctly) say that you should look on the webpage for help. But
who wants to read a game documentation for hours when you don't really know
whether you will like the game at all?



My advice would be that instead of splitting the melee weapons skill into
1/2-handed weapons and instead of splitting the wizardry skill into magic
school skills, simplify things.
Now I don't advise to remove 90% of the races and 80% of the classes, but
pick a few "newbie-friendly" races and classes, and make the others
available through an "advanced" option.

My idea is somewhere along this lines:
(1) There is a room where you can select your race. There is one balanced
race (human), one magic race (elves?), one priest race (gnomes?) and one
physical race (dwarves?). There are stairs going down into a room with all
the other races.
(2) Next is a room with classes. Same organization as above.
(3) Following this you can modify your stats. Prior to this you just had the
average starting stats of the selected race/class!
My idea of the stat selection is that you can modify each stat to be one
point higher or lower than the average value (15, but modified depending on
race/class).
For this you get seven "holy coins" which you can spend into stats. (Maybe
there are seven wizards with a potion in front of them. Drinking a potion
costs you one "holy coin" each time. You can drink a potion only two times).

I think that would simplify things a bit. There would still be the choice
(4) whether to use a missle or a melee weapon and (5) which cult to join.

But at least you could be quite sure the player does not get too confused
(ok, joining a cult can confuse you a bit), and that you get a playable
character (except when he picks a dwarven warrior and prays to Gaea...). Or
go even further and let only the newbie-friendly cults stay in Scorn.

I hope my thoughts are clear.

 "Dravonk"


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