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Erryn's World RPG: Magic
🕑 Added 2023-11-21 06:51:33 +0000 UTCMagic is something that doesn't feature heavily in character creation, on account of needing to switch class before you can learn any spells. Unless you cheat, of course:
Speed dressing with [Minor Speed]. The short snippet goes to show that balance is going to be a big problem; that example was with the spell at level 10, and yet it almost instantly wore off. At the moment, almost every action takes 10 seconds, including combat base rounds, so [Minor Speed] is currently completely useless in combat using the in-book stats of 5 seconds per level. It just wears off before you can get a single hit in.
I suppose it is a rank 1 spell. They aren't supposed to do too much. Besides, it's not as big a problem as working out levelling, and when a skill use is 'meaningful'...
During character creation, you can get [Mana Sense], which doesn't do much more than inform you that certain items you look at are magical. Affinities are random, and your little character creation village doesn't have anyone with [Eye Of Judgement] to tell you what yours are. There is an earth mage who does at least have magic tools that will tell you if you have fire or ice, that you get to use as part of learning [Mana Sense]. (A human character will always get one of the two)
Alternatively, using the point-buy version of character creation, you do get to choose your affinities, with rarer affinities for your race costing more points. Anyone who tried the point-buy thing will spot that you don't have very many points. I intend some sort of achievement scheme, where achievements award bonus points, so that after a few play-throughs characters created through point-buy grow stronger than those created through regular character creation, or create weird character builds that wouldn't otherwise be possible.
Comments
Christopher Durham
> working out when a skill use is 'meaningful'... If you want to make a MUDish, make a MUDish; as a gamedev, the most important advice I've ever received is to prioritize making *something* first, and that the best way to do so is to do something that a. has visible results and b. that interests you. But the designer in me sees an "obvious" potential solution — pivot to a GM mediated system, so the GM can make those calls. Most tabletop RPGs use pen & paper & dice to adjudicate, but a computer assisted system would be interesting to enable a more intricate system. My one worry would be that offloading "too much" to the system would make the GM role too uninteresting. Again: make what you're excited about making. But the setting will require adaptation when moving from prose to interactive, so it'll benefit from thinking through what that means, and the format that best fits what you want.
