[crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills

[Juha Jäykkä]

Hi!

I will just chime in my own ideas about this topic, without directly
replying to any of the myriad postings on the topic.

The idea of elemental magic is a good one, but I am not quite sure it's
worth while: we already have two divisions within the mana-magic: the
division of summoning, sorcery, evocation and pyromancy plus the
path-division. I think we would be better off using the existing
division, just rebalancing them.

Mark's notion of every elemental-skill having its own bolt (fire, frost
etc - btw. lightning is decidedly different from other bolts, I would not
count it here) can equally well be used with either current skill or path
division: every current skill/path would have its own bolt: firebolt for
pyro, frostbolt for evo, manabolt would naturally fall into sorcery I
think (summoning is a rather difficult thing here, though) or different
paths would have different bolts: fire and cold paths are obvious, but
I'm sure we would figure out the rest as well.

The main problem with paths is that they apply (at least now) to praying
as well, so it might not be a good idea to make them skills instead of
what they are now. Also, there are quite many paths, which equates to
very many spells, which may not be an easy job to do.

The main problem with current spell skills is that they are really very
different from each other; they are not all meant to be used similarly.
Evocation and pyromancy are the really offensive skills, while sorcery is
a kind of general-purpose and summoning is basically non-offensive
(directly, that is) in nature. Their balancing is thus quite difficult -
unless we make them similar in nature, but then we run into questions
like what is the summoning equivalent of fireball?

Returning to elemental skills, then. What's the problem there? Well,
judging from all the postings, the main concern is those spells that
don't quite have anything to do with elements, like detect magic. Other
than that, they would be quite easy to balance. I am not quite sure,
though: there are currently quite a lot of monsters with high fire and
cold resistance but not so many with high "air" resistance (thinking of
air as lightning here). [A side note: would these spells, like current
spells, do fire AND magical damage, so if there is high magic resistance,
it's used instead of fire? I think this is a little confusing system, but
this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.]

My idea about general-purpose spell skill would be sorcery, as has
already been suggested, but we can (again?) learn from [A]D&D here: it
has "specialist" wizards and "general" wizards, with specialists given
something extra for their speciality and denied some (arbitrary) opposing
"school" of magic while generalists can learn everything but do not get
any bonus either. Note that in the D&D system some specialists are denied
even detect magic!

We could do something similar, though. We could make sorcery a totally
different type of magic: there is "old magic" (I'll call it sorcery for
now) and newer "elemental magic". This old magic would be able to access
all the elemental spells, but at a lower level, say half (round up for
1st level's sake?) the sorcery level and elementalists could use sorcery
spells similarly. This is *much* bigger restriction than current
"repelled" (which might be quite ok for fire and cold if you are an earth
elementalist), but on the other hand, it gives us the possibility of
putting some real offensive spells into sorcery as well - thus making it
worthwhile as your primary skill. The kind of offensive spells that would
go to sorcery would be manabolts and such; plus I'd put *all* spells that
do weaponmagic damage to sorcery. On the other hand, I would give
elementalist spells the advantage that they do not do magic damage at
all! Fire elemental spells do fire damage, period. So beholder's magic
resistance would be useless.

This non-magic damage could also be easily incorporated into lore to
explain the existence of elemental magic (and weaponmagic spells, too):

The High Wizards of old were disturbed with some creatures being immune to
their magic. They knew, however, that a dragon's breath - be it fire or
frost - was magical but those same creatures were not immune to a
dragon's breath, so they concluded that the dragons knew a way of using
magic to create "real" things (i.e. the fire was real fire, not magical
fire). They embarked on a quest to learn the ways of the dragons and
eventually discovered elemental magic - and its limitation that anyone
taking up the elemental skills forever foregoes the opposing elemental
type (this could involve some kind of initiation rite where one's spirit
is tied to the element in question, for example). Most of the High
Wizards were happy with this, but some of them detested the binding of
one's spirit, they wanted to keep their freedom and so they continued the
quest and finally figured out a way of tapping into elemental magic
without binding their spirits (although it was less powerful this way).
They also figured out that the "magic element" also could be used to
bring about non-magical things: the weaponmagic-spells.

Hm.. perhaps we could even make that rite part of the game: every
mana-caster starts as an unbound sorcerer, but later on they can do the
rite if they wish. Similar to a dragon eating an ancient elemental
residue. One thing that must be given a careful though here is that there
must be some reason to focus on an element instead of staying a
generalist. One reason would be to make *some* spells inaccessible to
generalists (and even different-type elementalists?). This would be very
easy if we made some spells level above 50th (if we use my idea of a
sorcerer casting elemental spells at half level), but that might result
in changing the type only after 50th level (which may not be bad, though:
the rite may be so demanding that no low-level character can do it).
Other solutions exist, too, I believe.

Last thing I want to say is that I really think some generalist (i.e.
capable of learning every spell, although at significantly lower level
than specialists) wizard type is required.

-Juha

-- 
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		| Juha Jäykkä, juolja at utu.fi			|
		| home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/		|
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