[MUD-Dev] Striving for originality

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Damion Schubert [mailto:damion at ninjaneering.com]
> From Travis Casey
 
>> The end result is that magicians start to make other character
>> types superfluous.  One way to fix that is to de-power magic --
>> but there are other ways.
  
>>  - Make magic rare -- design things so that not just anyone can
>>  be a magician.  The minus side here is that players are going to
>>  hate it -- no one's going to want to be told that they're not
>>  one of the lucky few who get to play a magician, just because of
>>  the roll of the dice.

> On Ultima Online 2, we gave each spell it's own mana pool.  This
> created some neat side effects, such as we could create incredibly
> devastating spells that could only be used once a week.  This was
> us trying to get towards what we felt was the real balancing
> factor of D&D: a magician's spellcasting ability is very finite,
> and he has to make good decisions about when and where to cast his
> money spells.

I like that, although how did you deal with mage stacking? I'm
making some assumptions here that the big spells would do a lot of
dmg, but then with multiple mages in the same encounter, if they'd
all saved up for the big spell, they'd almost negate the value of
the melee?

Every week you'd see troupes of mages wondering around killing the
big mobs!

Dan

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