Angband Philosophy II: Magic

[Derakon]

If we did have separate "INT mana" ("willpower"?) and "WIS mana" ("mana"?), then you could have most spells cost varying amounts of the two, giving the player an extra resource pool to worry about.

[Nick]

Quality of discussion here never ceases to amaze me.

Here are a few more random thoughts to further confuse the issue:

• debo's comment about the number of books set me thinking. We tend to talk about Angband as a game of inventory management a lot, but is it? Having unlimited inventory slots would certainly make the game easier, but how much? Maybe freeing up slots by needing less books would just leave space for more marginal items to be carried, and make the game more interesting.
• The idea of things being better left to variants is one that often comes up, and one I've probably used in the past. I now think, though, that arguments of what should go in Vanilla should be made without reference to variants. I would certainly like V to be amenable to varying (in fact that was one of my big motivations), but I think that needs to come after. The only consideration that should be used as to whether to make a change is whether it improves the game - by which I mean it moves it closer to some shared ideal we have of what Angband is. My experience so far is that this tends to emerge from discussion - although I will certainly get it wrong sometimes, and not everyone will agree with every change.
• I really like the way song is done in Sil, and I think it's worth thinking about doing something similar at some point, but I think that one needs a lot of discussion
• The spiritual/physical approach is in some ways just another way of looking at the game as it is. Expanding as I suggested to include opposite realms to the Arcane and the Holy seems like a fairly natural (!) way to expand that, but it's not the only way - the O/FA/NPP approach is just to have new realms with no particular relationship to the old ones. If we were to go ahead with such an expansion, I think we would need one of two approaches to spellcasting stats and mana:
  1. Replace INT and WIS with a single stat which determines fail rates and mana or
  2. Have one stat controlling the physical axis and one the spiritual axis, and have two separate mana pools (named, say, spirit and mana)
  
  I like the second one better, in conjunction with making those stats more important elsewhere (an expansion on what WIS currently does for saving throws)
• I've had a look over the spell lists, and they're IMHO not too bad. A couple of notable features: the most spells per class is 57 for mages, but rangers get 54; there are 13 spells that every spellcasting class gets.
• With the way classes are defined in 4.x, it's really easy to have the same book being completely different for different classes
• I think the current classes do a pretty good job of feeling different from each other, and I'd like to maintain that with any new classes.
• It would be good to have an NPP druid comp

OK, enough blathering, I need to try and fix some bugs and get 4.0 out the door.

[Cold_Heart]

I'd prefer cleaning up first the existing books. There are spells that are NOT used -ever- due to class due to uselessneess.

Candidate #1 from me: Annihilation. 60 mana? and can not target demon/undead/golems, seriously?

Clean it out and once the two simple holy-arcane lines are proper (is that an english word?) again you should expand, not before

I think it's usually been called divine and arcane, not holy and arcane.

[AnonymousHero]

proper (is that an english word?)

Yes, it's a proper word. Or, perfectly cromulent as some would say.

[desstorm]

I think there is some work to do (especially rogue was dumb magic-wise. having books that were not worth carrying or keeping)

I'd prefer cleaning up first the existing books. There are spells that are NOT used -ever- due to class due to uselessneess.

Clean it out and once the two simple holy-arcane lines are proper (is that an english word?) again you should expand, not before.

A lean and mean magic system HurrayHurray

[Cold_Heart]

I would like to have a magic user class that can have access to every magic school.


PS: nature is good.

[MattB]

Also, if we are going to have a death/necromancy realm, I hope we can come up with something better than 'necromancy' as the realm title

Rocketry?...

[nppangband]

So how would a druid's spells differ from that of a mage or a priest?

Please consider looking at NPP's druid class as a start. I think we did a decent job with it All spells are nature based. It does genuinely play differently than the other classes in the game.

Just as a minor example, the mage has detect monsters, the priest has detect evil. The druid has detect life. So they get to detect a lot of annoying invisible monsters, but the undead are a bit of a pain to them.

[AnonymousHero]

(I promise I'll go read back the thread when I'm more lucid, but...)

It turns out that these have very strong representation in Middle Earth. Gandalf - representing the will of the Valar - was the enemy of Sauron, the Necromancer. In a similar way, the Ents represented Nature in its purest form in Middle Earth, and were opposed to Saruman, with his "mind full of wheels". So there's a spiritual spectrum from Holy to Necromancy, and a physical spectrum from Arcane (technology) to Nature.

I always imagined the Valar/Gandalf more as representing "Law" or "Order" (in society). If we were to drink the Narrativium which suggests that the Valar were always 100% right about morality and ethics (in an absolute sense), then I guess you could translate that to "Good" or "Holy" (which are not synonyms, btw!). However, I think Angband might be more interesting (story-wise) if the player weren't sure if he/she was the good guy or the bad guy. If popular movies and books are to be believed, odds are that you're actually the bad guy AFAICT: @ kills a lot of enemies, but usually gets killed before/when confronting the "ultimate" enemy. That's almost the defining trait of being a bad guy!

[fizzix]

I have yet to see a roguelike with good coaligned monsters, let alone a roguelike with good classes based on use of coaligned monsters. It always ends up being more tedious than fun.

tome4 is ok. DCSS is passable.

Maybe it's not worth it. I don't know.

[debo]

Here's a crazy proposition, using Nick's orthogonal system where nature opposes arcane and holy opposes necromancy.

Here's a crazier proposition -- make 'holy' and 'necromancy' the song realms (songs of good and evil), and then make nature and arcane the more traditional spell realms.

[Derakon]

Personally, I like the idea of different realms and more creative spells. Tome4 makes really great use of buffs and debuffs, which took me a while to get used to. Angband does really poorly at this and there's a lot of room here. Personally, I'd like holy to be a buff/debuff realm with limited healing, arcane to be a pure damage realm in the glass cannon way of things, nature would have strong healing and limited summons, necromancy would have mass summons (of undead) and some limited offense. That's if I had to choose those schools. I think all realms should have some basic detection abilities and utility spells.

I have yet to see a roguelike with good coaligned monsters, let alone a roguelike with good classes based on use of coaligned monsters. It always ends up being more tedious than fun.

Re: ZAngband, keep in mind that in that game most pure casters get two realms to play with, so they still have 8 books.

[fizzix]

Personally, I like the idea of different realms and more creative spells. Tome4 makes really great use of buffs and debuffs, which took me a while to get used to. Angband does really poorly at this and there's a lot of room here. Personally, I'd like holy to be a buff/debuff realm with limited healing, arcane to be a pure damage realm in the glass cannon way of things, nature would have strong healing and limited summons, necromancy would have mass summons (of undead) and some limited offense. That's if I had to choose those schools. I think all realms should have some basic detection abilities and utility spells.

Are there any thoughts on restructuring how we handle actual spellcasting? The current system never really struck me as that great. Here's a crazy proposition, using Nick's orthogonal system where nature opposes arcane and holy opposes necromancy. The utility/detection spells can even be separated out into another realm of generic magic. Players can learn all the spells (eventually) from the major realm and about half of the spells from the minor realm. You can also have hybrids that either get everything from one realm but no minor realm, or can have two minor realms.

I also would like to remove the need to carry a book to cast the spell. You learn the spell from the book and its there in your memory. This requires some fundamental changes to inventory handling also.

[Nomad]

I'm not sure how much current Angband can really do in the way of a Nature realm that feels particularly nature-themed, given limited terrain and no existing mechanism for non-hostile monsters. Same problem applies to Necromancy, really: you've got Drain Life, maybe add some sort of nether blast, but what else is there? And how many new spells can we really even add that are more than renamed variations on ones that already exist?

I feel like rather than considering which new spell realms would be cool and thematic to add, it might be a better approach to consider the existing list of spells and what categories they can be subdivided into, and then figure out what kind of thematically coherent realms/classes can be built from what we've already got. As Carnivean says, Vanilla is ethos-wise the straightforward base game that variants go on to add bells and whistles to, so I'm not sure it's necessarily a good thing to be inventing new classes or spell realms if it's going to require adding new mechanics or game elements to make them work.

[wobbly]

In regards to the spell stats is there much point to the Int/Wis split in the 1st place, other then copying D&D. I'm not much of a fan of dump stats in the 1st place & it seems a combined device/resist stat (Will?) is a bit more useful for the non-casters too. The only real reason I can see to keep them separate is dwarves.

Other then that I'd be happy to see Rangers switched over to nature. I'm not familiar with the Oangband's Nature realm but the poscheng/z-band has in the first book basic detects/basic heal & element resists (no phase door, though I think it gets a teleport in a later book) which seems a more suitable set for rangers anyways.