Re: Skills!

[d91-jda@nada.kth.se]

Reply to Peter Mardahl:

> Holy Avenger, Defender, Darkblade, Demonbane, Dragonslayer,
> Stormbringer, Mournblade....  These are the best, and these are all
> swords.

This problem is easily solved.

> [stuff about the Long Lost Tome of Abysmal Icemagic deleted]
> 
>   I happen to think that learning the spell of Small fireball should make
> it easier to learn and be effective with Medium Fireball, and Large Fireball,
> and might even help with Burning Hands, and other missile spells like
> Comet, large bullet, magic bullet.  I think dividing magic skills by spell
> is bad.  Dividing by path is better, but I think the whole field of channeling
> mana to produce effects is so inter-related that learning in any one area
> should enhance all the rest.

And:

> >I'd like there to be a possibility to learn a spell very good and
> >perhaps not to be equally good at another spell.
> 
>   This is already sort of in the code.  The level dependencies on spells
> address this issue.  A spell you've just learned (it's level is near yours)
> is cast more weakly than you learn how to do it later when you've gained
> some more experience.  And i don't see why a great mage couldn't learn
> say, burning hands for the first time, smack his head, and say, 'oh, i
> see, how trivial' and really blast out awesome burning hands spells right
> off.  Also, rgg (Rupert) has added spell-paths, so broad areas of spells
> can have different effectiveness for different players.


One solution to this is to group the spells into classes. In Crossfire
and most muds, a spell is a spell and doesn't have anything to do with
other spells. 
In fact (or was that fiction) all of the fireball spells
really *are* the same, they just differ in power put into them and,
IMO, if you want to make a *really* big nice fire, you should be able
to cast a 500 sp fireball. 
And then you might be able to combine different lines of spells, like
hmm, I don't think I can think of any right now, maybe it wasn't such
a good idea :-)
If you do the spell system this way, you both get fewer spells, in the
sence of skills, and more spells, in the sence of power. 

The way I imagine magic works, there really isn't any limit to what
you can do, but the casters imagination. A nice thing would be if
there were some kind of spell-description-language, SDL, that let you
design your own spells, with some kind of automatic
cost-calculation-system, so you can't create a
major-nuclear-war-kill'em-all spell with a cost of 1 sp.


[Debate over what is harder to implement]

Yes, quite obviously, a simpler system will take less time to
implement. A skill system could be made without much effort (*grin*),
but a major revision to the game (v2.0?), could implement the other
things mentioned by Bj|rn Ludvigsen and others.  And while Im on the
subject, are there any plans of tidying up the code? You have to
admit, and this is not a criticism, that it really isn't very pretty,
lots of code that doesn't do anything, and code that occur on more
than one place, etc, etc. And yes I do realize that this will take
some time

/JoDa (Who really isn't that familiar with the code.)

| d91-jda@nada.kth.se   | Everything's cool and froody.
| Johan Danielsson      |                          -ZB