Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Trade Skills and random thought dumps, magic too
This post is a collection of random thoughts going on in my head right now;
I’ve been thinking about trade skills and other non-combat facets of my game. Trade skills would be really cool. In Ultima you could make bread if you wanted, and they took that further in Ultima Online. Magic Candle let you work in the gem shop etc to make money.
Then I thought, what good is it really, when your part of an overarching storyline where you travel between continents and overcome so much, your part of this huge epic… What part does ‘tailor’ or ‘baker’ really play? Aside from being some kind of money making thing, what impact will having Artisan Pastry Maker level 10 be as opposed to Swordfighting level 10?
RPGS are for better or worse, tilted toward combat. Some more, some less.
I won’t deny combat will be major, its going to be half or more of my game code. Its a tactical combat engine.
I had a brief fleeting thought, that it would really cool to be able to go through the game without fighting and using the diplomacy skills.
The bar on player power only gets raised so much. The player will never attain godlike stuff, raising skills just equates to hitting more often and missing less, but dragons are still dragons and a player with maxed stats should still have a problem fighting them. I don’t want to get into the AD&D situation of power escalation where suddenly players go from average level 7 to being level 15 (We saw what happened in the progression from Pool of Radiance to Azure Bonds to the lamentable Secret of Silver Blades where the beginning game has you fighting red dragons and baby dragonlings!).
One thing I don’t think I have written much, if any of, is about the magic system. More specifically the way it works for the PC.
I had mulled over the idea of doing it like AD&D style, you can learn N 1st level spells and M 2nd level spells etc… But that is too blah, and constrictive and just.. awefull and it forces that whole ‘fix’ situation for healing.
Instead I’ve refined the way in which I tend to implement it in my roguelikes. Every character has mana points, similar to hit points but for magic, and will be combined with a skill for a type of magic (you can have one or more of the primary magic skills), and it will be transferable at half penalty (using a spell for a magic skill you dont have incurs 1/3rd extra mana cost and all results are halved).
The only way to cast spells will be from wands (any of the primary magic skills required), invoked from figurines, read from a scroll or from an imbued item.
The primary way will be from imbuing an item, say a staff. A generic sorcerers staff may hold 5 different kinds of spells, so you will pop in to your local wizards guild or whatnot and hand over the scrolls you want to embed into the staff.
Mana is recouped from wearing the goold old wizards hat. More specifically items are tagged with a mana regen attribute so the wizards hat, robes, rings, etc, will allow you to stack the regeneration buffs. This also means if you have a good mana regen ring or good combination, you can still wear plate armour and carry a shield and wield that wand. Figurines will primarily be used for summoned monsters for combat only (I dont want to have to mess around with dealing with a non humanoid pc in the party, by that i mean say a panther who cant carry gear, speak, read etc, makes code much more complex to deal with it). There will also be vials and potions and such to give us a nice big item list (taking queues from the Bards Tale and Demon’s Winter here). “You see a clay figurine shaped like a wolf with the word ‘INWO’ on it”.
I’ve also been playing with my spell list, and I am trying to come up with some diverse spells like;
mirror shield - defensive spell you can cast on any part member, and an enemy target. When player is hit, the target takes 1/2 damage of the attack (kind of like a selective version of the classical wizard shield spell).
stone wall - Summon a temporary wall up for defense (I think I got this idea from seeing it in action diablo with bone wall/bone prison).
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