[crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills

[Mark Wedel]

  If someone already brought this idea up before, my apologies.

  As has been discussed many times, the current spell skills really are not 
balanced, and there is sort of the problem that the wizard skills as defined may 
be very difficult to balance.

  And idea I had was to change the current spell skills into 4 elemental skills 
- fire, water, air, earth.  The praying skill would not get changed.

  The pyromancy skill sort of corresponds to fire right now, with evocation 
wrapping up the rest.

  I think this is easier to balance - we already have fire/lightning/frost bolts 
(corresponding fore fire, air, water accordingly).  Earth bolt might be a little 
odd, but things like magic bullet would fall into earth, and one could certain 
come up with some other spells (grenade would be like fireball - shoot something 
and it explodes into shards, etc).

  It also incorporates the summon elemental spells pretty nicely, as well as the 
create wall spells.

  Another nice thing is that this system does has conflicting elements - air is 
opposite to earth, water to fire.  So one could see a system along the lines 
that if the character starts with fire, they can learn the air & earth skills 
also, but never the water (and the air & earth should be of lesser 
ability/quality than the fire skill).  My thinking is 4 wizard classes would 
start with one of these skills as a major skill, and the two others and lesser 
quality skills.  So in a sense, the 4 different elements are playable.

  One complication is that some spells should be generic - detect magic comes to 
mind, as well as perhaps identify and some others.  A thought I had on this was 
to expand the skill field, so you could have something like 'skill fire|earth', 
and when it goes to find the skill, it parses that, and uses the best skill of 
the bunch.

  That could be useful in other regards - another thread had the idea of 
breaking weapons down, so the some classes can only use a limit of the weapons 
(so a mage can't pick up the battle axe) - if we followed an example of multiple 
combat skills, something like a dagger could have 'skill simple|complex' type of 
thing, but the battle axe just have 'skill complex'

  It could also be interesting, but harder to do, that some spells use multiple 
skills for the effect.  Something like pool of chaos, which is really creating 
something from multiple elements, should perhaps take a look at the skills and 
adjust it accordingly - if a character is level 50 fire and level 5 earth & air, 
that pool of chaos would really mostly be fire, with a little bit of earth and 
air (things like para elementals are also a mix of two elements)

  Thoughts?  I think such a scheme would make the wizards a bit more different - 
playing a wizard and not being able to cast ice spells could be quite a handicap 
(or fire or lightning and hopefully same for earth).  And it makes some logical 
sense.