[crossfire] More general spells, was Re: Spell idea: Elemental skills

[Mark Wedel]

  a while back, it was mentioned that it would be nice to reduce the number of 
spells to some extent (why have small/medium/large fireball?  small & large 
lightning bolt, etc).

  I agree that cleaning that up would be nice, and that there should perhaps be 
certain points in the spell progression where things change more drastically.

  For example, one reason right now small & large lightning bolt exist is 
because the large one has higher damage & longer ranger, and the expense of 
higher mana cost.  The incremental increase that is done by normal level 
progression can't do those large jumps, but they sort of need to be allowed.

  Another thought I had on this was exploding ball/bullet spells.  Right now, 
there is a magic bullet spell, and also a fireball spell - for the first part of 
the spell, they use the same code/type (magic bullet), there is just the link 
that the bullet explodes for fireball.

  It could in fact be interesting to abstract - a first level fire magic doesn't 
get small fireball, they get fire bullet.  At some point (level 5?), it now 
starts to explode, with that explosion getting bigger.  But at the same time, if 
the character wants to cast a firebullet and not a fireball (save mana, and 
maybe only a single target), they should be allowed to.

  This allows the spells to be generalized, so not quite as many.  Perhaps via 
key value in the objects or something, these notable adjustments can be made 
(eg, for bolts, it could be something that sort of states at level 5, the spell 
can do 10 more points of damage at the expense of 5 more mana points).

  The trickier part is how to interface this to the user.  You could certainly 
allow things like 'cast firebullet mana=10 explosion=0' type of thing - that 
gets messy, but is doable.  A better solution is probably for the client to 
provide some form of better interface and write those rules for them.  But not 
sure if maybe this is more complication than there is benefit.  But it does seem 
that if spells are redone so that the level range is greater, and one gets small 
lightning at 1, one probably shouldn't ge medium lighting until maybe level 20, 
and large until level 40 or something, but one may want to see bigger jumps 
between those points.