[crossfire] Spellcasting skills definition

[David Hurst]

To try and make some progress on this front I created a visualisation to
see what these changes might look like. Take a look here
<https://public.tableau.com/profile/david.hurst6129#!/vizhome/CrossfireSpellsVisualisation/Spellassignmentdashboard?publish=yes>
.
I focused on only the spells that can provide exp, I can load the other
skills if there is a strong desire to see the impact. As mentioned I don't
think there is a particularly significant effect by using consistent spell
schools definitions but i'm open to your feedback.
The data i'm using is available here
<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OIq3cIOpQoU9EZLkq8njLqY9GXqsVJ4TkYzUe_5IpKg/edit?usp=sharing>
.

As a reminder the proposed schools are:
Evocation - Spells that create things (physical damage, food, strengthening)
Sorcery - Spells that remove energy (cold spells, poison, draining?,
depletion?)
Pyromancy - Spells that add energy (fire, lightning, light)
Summoning - Spells that call and control monsters (golems, pets, etc)
Praying - Spells gifted by channeling your gods wishes through prayer

On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 2:29 PM, Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:

> On 08/21/2017 05:49 PM, David Hurst wrote:
>
>> As stated, i'm trying to enhance the messages that players receive when
>> learning spells. To make this more engaging I wanted to have a clear
>> picture of what we all think these spellcasting skills represent. As a
>> starting point I presented this list as a definition of what is *currently
>> *in place:
>>
>> Evocation <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:evocation>- Spells
>> that remove energy (cold spells, poison, draining?, depletion?)
>> Sorcery <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:sorcery>- Spells
>> that create things (physical damage, food, strengthening)
>> Pyromancy <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:pyromancy>- Spells
>> that add energy (fire, lightning, light)
>> Summoning <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:summoning>- Spells
>> that call and control monsters (golems, pets, etc)
>> Praying <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:praying>- Spells
>> gifted by channeling your gods wishes through prayer
>>
>> You can check the above links to see what spells are currently available
>> for each skill. I don't think the spells that are in the wrong place are
>> not even remotely going to cause balance issues. Large bullet moving to
>> sorcery is not going to break evocation which currently has all of the cold
>> spells to level with including icestorm at level 1. Ball lightning moving
>> to pyromancy isn't going to wreck evocation.
>>
>> Having said that, I had this thought as I was writing the text for
>> evocation and it dawned on me that I have no idea what evocation actually
>> is. Ruben pointed out (and I agree with him) that the current spells don't
>> line up very well with historical definitions of evocation <
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evocation>and sorcery <
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery>. As far as I can tell it would be
>> straightforward to flip all the spells in the two skills over so that we
>> have:
>>
>> Evocation - Spells that create things (physical damage, food,
>> strengthening)
>> Sorcery - Spells that remove energy (cold spells, poison, draining?,
>> depletion?)
>> Pyromancy - Spells that add energy (fire, lightning, light)
>> Summoning - Spells that call and control monsters (golems, pets, etc)
>> Praying - Spells gifted by channeling your gods wishes through prayer
>>
>
>  The definitions can be hard to map, because in dungeons of dragons,
> things like fireball, lightning bolt, and almost all damage spells are in
> the 'evocation' school (they have different and more schools, so there
> isn't a 1:1 mapping)
>
>  As Leaf noted, in the past, there was some issues with balance in schools
> - sorcery didn't have enough damage spells, so was hard to level.  Note
> that there also isn't any reason that there can't be some overlap in those
> skills - certainly the reason that there was pyromancy in addition to
> evocation is all the fire spells got put in evocation, it would have been
> an overly good skill. And in some cases, I think there is basically the
> same spell (with slightly different name) in multiple skills.
>
>   I'm not sure if you are looking for definition only, or if you plan to
> move some spells to different skills.  If the former, it will probably be
> hard to really come up with too good a definition that covers everything
> for the reasons above (this spell matches pyromancy definiton, why is it in
> evocation, etc).
>
>  If you are going to move spells around, you could also rename the skills
> if so desired at that point to have better mapping (not that I necessary
> have better ideas for new names).  I think summoning is the most well
> defined and clear cut.  But there are also some spells which got dumped
> into sorcery as it was basically the catchall for anything that did not fit
> evocation, pyromancy, or summoning.
>
>
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