[MUD-Dev] Re: The Best Guy on the Mud Thing

[Adam Wiggins]

On Fri, 17 Sep 1999, Robin Cloutman wrote:
> > On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, Koster, Raph wrote:
> >> The end result during beta testing appears to be that all the spells
> >> suck, because all the combos were disseminated and now everyone has them.
> >> People value the standing of delivering a complete spell FAQ more than
> >> they value the ability to actually cast the spell.
> 
> I'm trying to work out some way of doing a decent spell system, and this
> does seem good, but the beta testing shows that it doesn't work, therefore
> there needs to be something to stop people just "testing" all the
> combinations in order to find something that works, you say that there are
> set spells, and the spells lead to these, so it's not a basic set that you
> can play with (like micropose's old game "Legend"). How about if the char
> has never used the spell, then it can have catastrophic effects, such as
> random explosions, or some other effect (99% detrimental ;-P), but if they
> were actually taught the spell it would bypass this entirely, and if they
> learnt it from a scroll then it would only be a 5% chance of it going
> wrong. You could use skill tables (or whatever) so the pfile can remember
> what someone knows, and if they only have a 1% (or lower) chance of
> getting a spell to work through "spell research" then it's not going to be
> high on their priorities (especially if there's a 10% chance it will kill
> them, or a 5% chance all their stats will be exchanged, or ...). It will
> also mean that although the player may know ooc what are real spells and
> what are not, ic they can't take advantage of it... ;-)

It seems to me that you should be okay if your spell language has enough
variations.  For example, let's say that you're using the normal alphabet;
each letter, A through Z, is a 'rune'.  Strings of these runes together
(ranging from 3 to 10 characters in length) are spells.  Even with only 3
characters, there are 17,576 combinations of spells possible.  As soon as
you go up to, say, 7 characters, there are 8,031,810,176 combinations.
If it takes reasonably long to try a spell, say, one second, it would
take over 250 years to try all the combinations.

I would certainly go for nasty effects when you get a bad combination,
however.  Adds a lot of spice to the game, and makes botting the task
difficult, if not impossible, if you want your character to actually
stay alive.

Adam





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