[crossfire] Spell proposals

[Mark Wedel]

Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> 
> Here are two proposals for spells. They are not totally incompatible, but 
> well, even only one could fun IMO :)
> 
> The aim is to reduce the number of spells, and also make it more customizable 
> for players;
> 
> I'll use the fireball spell as an example.
> 
> 
> Spells with options.
> --------------------------
> Basic idea: level 1 fireball does x damage for y ticks on z squares.
> Each spell have defined bonus in damage, duration, range for one level.
> 
> When casting a spell, you can add options, like:
> 
> 1) /cast power 20% fireball
> 2) /cast range 15% fireball
> 3) cast damage 90 fireball
> 4) cast range 5% duration 2% fireball
> 
> 1) means "add (20% of levels over 1) * y ticks to duration, the rest split 
> between range and damage"
> 2) means "add (15% of levels over 1) * z to range, the rest split between 
> duration and damage"
> 3) means "add (90 * x) to damage, extra levels above split between duration 
> and range"
> 4) is left as an exercice to the reader :)
> 
> 
> Obviously, you could then have a client-side interface to tweak spells / help 
> define your spells.

  I do agree with James' post that this could result in some level of 
min/maxing.  That said, a lot of crossfire can result in that (best weapon, 
etc), so min/maxing is itself not bad.

  My concern would more be balancing this - I can think of all sorts of 
scenarios which may result in bad gameplay.  2 quick examples off the top of my 
head would be putting all the extra into damage, and now having a spell that one 
shots most monsters (or other players) - probably not good.  Another would be 
putting all the extra into the area of affect, and having a spell that hits 
most/all of a dungeon level, letting you hit/kill monsters which have no way of 
hitting you.

  I'm sure players would come up with many more examples.  One way to limit it 
is to put limits on max damage, area of effect, etc - but the end result may be 
it removes too much flexibility.

  It is also tricky because the importance of certain aspects (range, duration, 
damage) of a spell vary based on the type of spell it is - range and duration 
are fairly meaningless for bullet (non exploding) type spells.  But range (area 
of affect) is also much more important for something like an exploding ball 
spell than say a bolt - increasing blast radius of one on a fireball gets you a 
lot more than increasing the length of a bolt by one.

  One other thought is that I doubt anyone would tweak spells realtime - 
instead, while in town (or sitting in an otherwise safe place) they would tweak 
the spells/set up keybindings (this is really true for any spell proposal, 
including mine at the bottom of this message)

> 
> 
> 
> 
> Player-made spells
> --------------------------
> Basic idea: get a spellbook for a standard level 1 fireball.
> Use alchemy (or other means) to tweak the parameters like range per level, 
> duration, and such.
> 
> Ingredients to customize could be costly, or different for spells, or 
> whatever.
> 
> Once leant, the spell has its own special parameters.

  Like above, balancing that can be tricky - have to be careful what you let 
them tweak to once again not get overpowered stuff.

  Here is an idea I have, which takes some of these ideas into consideration. 
This is sort of an amalgam of the custom spell creation in the elder scrolls 
games as well as a rune idea a friend of mine used for a tabletop game.

----
Each spell is made up of various runes.  Damage type rune (fire, cold, 
physical).  Form of spell (cone, bullet, bolt, exploding ball).

Players basically learn those runes.  So a fireball is a fire + exploding ball 
rune combination.

  However, in addition to those, there are other runes.  There is a base damage 
rune, which determines starting spellpoint cost (eg, 5 damage base may be 3 sp. 
  10 damage base is 8 sp).

  You could also have duration modifier runes (+1 duration).  Because of 
balance, I'm reluctant to have area of affect modifiers (as noted above, +1 area 
to a fireball is much better than +1 range to a bolt).

  The other runes have a modifier, in percentage, to the base SP cost.  Maybe 
most all of the elemental forms are now difference (100%), but because physical 
is weaker, it costs 75%.

  Likewise, the form would have cost.  Bullets would be cheap (100%).  Bolts are 
more costly (200%), cones more so (400%) with exploding balls being the most.

  So you take that base 5 damage rune (3 sp) put on a cone (X4) and do fire 
(X1), so that 5 damage cone (burning hands) cost 12 sp.

  This allows a fair amount of tuning - if cones seem too cheap, increase the 
cost (or reduce the area of effect)

  In terms of learning spells, characters would learn different runes.  So at 
first level, the character may just have fire, 5 damage, bolt, and bullet.  So 
he can do a 5 damage bolt and bullet.  As he gains levels, adventures, etc, 
maybe he finds the small exploding ball rune - now can do small fireballs.  Or 
maybe he finds the 10 damage rune, so does more damage, etc.  Each rune, just 
like the current spells, would have some minimal level, so a level 10 character 
could not use a 50 hp damage rune even if they got it somehow.

  To make life simpler for new players/characters, many of the existing spells 
could basically be aliases for these runes.  So a new player doesn't have to 
know how to set up the runes to cast burning hands, rather, he has a spell known 
to him called burning hands which has the right runes set up.  Perhaps all such 
spells (a spell being a combination of runes) they player sets up are stored in 
this way as a per character attributes, so if he changes clients he still has 
access to these spells.

The number of runes needed is probably considerably less in total than the 
number of spells.  This is because 5 elemental runes + 5 form runes would make 
25 spells, but is only 10 runes (those numbers are just for example), but one 
can see this multiple effect.

The biggest addition to runes in this case would be the damage rune.  Maybe that 
is intrinsic based on level so you don't need runes, but there is just a mapping 
that lists skill level, base damage, base sp cost.  IMO, costs should go up non 
linearly - a 20 damage rune is more than twice as valuable as a 10 damage rune, 
and thus should cost more than twice as much mana.  Reason for this is that time 
is worth something - a massive spell that does huge amounts of damage and kills 
everything in its path is safer for the caster, as he is exposed to danger for 
less time than if he has to cast 10 spells for the same effect.  But under this 
idea, there probably needs to be some way to limit this so you don't always have 
to cast the spell as max efficiency.  In fact, it is entirely conceivable that 
the spell point cost for something like large fireballs is beyond what the 
character can cast, so they have to cast it at a lower base damage.

There are some number of spells that don't really fit well into this system - 
the detection spells, identify, etc come to mind.  Maybe in those cases, they 
are just set up as unique runes which have a flag which says they are not 
combined with other runes, so they are single rune spells.