Re: [Adonthell-devel] Battle System

[Kai Sterker]

Joseph Toscano wrote

> Taking everything into account, I'll try to make another consolidation:

> There are three types of items magically imbued with a spell: Rings,
> Amulets, and Staffs. The Rings are the weakest of the items, the Amulets are
> medium-potency, and the Staves are the strongest. Therefore, if you have a
> Fire Ring, your Fire spell will be the weakest. A Fire Amulet will have more
> power, and a Fire Staff will have the most power.
> 
> You can obtain these magical items from many sources, which we can determine
> later. But, as an example: you defeat a boss monster, a big fire-breathing
> dragon, in the beginning of the game. He'll be hard-coded to drop a Fire
> Ring for your magicians' use.

I agree with everything so far, but I'd like to detail how you can obtain the 
magical items, 'cause that is the place where the fiddling with reagents 
would come in too.

But don't worry, any players that do not want to do this will find enough 
magic items in hidden areas, when fighting boss monsters, or even in shops.
Nobody should be forced to make their own stuff if they don't want it.

For the novice players, there would be recipes that could be aquired the same 
way then complete magic items, but would of course require them to find the 
necessary reagents.

All the others could just pick up reagents, rings/amulets/staffs without 
enchantment, and then experiment to their heart's content. As I said in my 
mail about combinations, the nature of the enchantment (i.e. the spell) would 
depend on the final mixture of the four elements.

For the strength, I could imagine that rings don't modify the quality 
resulting of the combination, whereas amulets could double and staffs 
quadrouple it. That way, a strong amulet might still be better than a weak 
staff, but overall staffs are strongest, then amulets, then rings.

A further extension to this system would be that Humans could use the same 
reagents for their alchemy. We only had to use another table to look up the 
results. (We also had to take care that good magic recipes result not 
necessarily in good alchemical results.) As what the humans do would be 
mainly creating potions (be it healing, protective, poisonous or explosive) 
there could be three different fluids as a base for dissolving the reagents, 
resulting in weak, medium or strong potions. Depending on the perused 
reagents, of course.

And, as Nezumi suggested, Dwarfs could use the reagents to improve the 
qualities of armour and weapons. Again, if you don't want to do it yourself, 
you could still pay a visit to the local Dwarf enclave, etc.

As Nezumi further suggested, the reagents could also feature in that mini 
game of his.



> I think that's a system we can all agree on. Now, the part that remains
> subjective is the part where you have to "focus" the magical items by
> applying them to ingredients and stuff. Myself, I think this is a great
> idea, but it *has* to be done in a way that's clever and fun. I've played a
> few games with this system, and it's always been a painful bore. Such as in
> Asheron's Call. It's such a pain to have to find all of these ingredients,
> and have the payoff be really stupid.
> 
> So, in my opinion, I think the "gathering ingredients" scheme should be
> simple if you want it to be simple, but complex if you want it to be. What I
> mean is: you should be able to progress through the game normally without
> doing much mucking around with the "focus" system. The magical items, when
> you first locate them, will have enough power by themselves to be useful.
> 
> But if you really want to augment the power, then you can do some alchemy.

Yeah, that's what above suggestion would basically achieve. However, I never 
played anything with such a system (I know Diablo 2 has something similar), 
so I don't know how to make sure that it will be real fun. Any ideas and 
suggestions, or mistakes that have been made are welcome.

Kai