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Non-combat magic

Alex

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Create Gold: This spell transmutes lead nuggets into gold ones. Unfortunately, the reagents cost as much or more than what you can sell the nugget for. This spell can still be useful if you find the reagents on the wilderness.
Of course it does. If it didn't, the world economy would have collapsed. I would imagine the relative values of gold and said reagents are specifically dictated by this relationship, since if it were not true, mages would create gold until it was.

Even in Britannia, 7th level mages aren't that common. Besides, casting the spell itself is work. That is like having the price of 1kg of flour be the same as 1 kg of toast.

Create Gold: This spell transmutes lead nuggets into gold ones. Unfortunately, the reagents cost as much or more than what you can sell the nugget for. This spell can still be useful if you find the reagents on the wilderness.
Of course it does. If it didn't, the world economy would have collapsed. I would imagine the relative values of gold and said reagents are specifically dictated by this relationship, since if it were not true, mages would create gold until it was.
I remember False Coin in SI being super completely broken though because it was the other way round.

I guess in this case, the resulting product is "fake" but it's not like the game makes a distinction between them and you aren't punished by having guards come after you yelling HALT for using counterfeit money. Lost opportunity?

Well, while it was broken in the economic sense, gamewise it is not like gold even mattered.
 

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That's not a comparable situation though. Normal people can't wrestle fucking gorillas or bears to death either, adventurers can. If I can punch a fucking bear to death, I should certainly be able to make some pissant guards shit themselves when I demand to be let inside the mayor's manor.
There's a bit of a faulty logic here. Adventurers are (demi)humans, and if within a given setting it's possible for a (demi)human to reach such power level, anyone in there right mind and with the right resources should have prepared for that kind of threat. For example, by enlisting, among other measures, (demi)humans of similar power as their guards.
Of course, theres the case of PC being the chosen one (tm), and thus unmatched in power, but that's just lame.
This is a good point, and part of why it's utterly insane for town guards and soldiers to be so fucking weak. However, there is also the side of it that such people are extraordinarily rare and wealthy, so preparing for such a threat is impossible or at the very least impractical. It's not like every 7-11 in the kwa has armed security. They just get robbed from time to time. It happens. And it's not like Donald Trump has anti-aircraft defenses at home in case terrorists want to take him down via helicopter.

The only people that would realistically have the resources to hire mercenaries on par with a powerful adventurer would be other powerful adventurers or people with significant political power (someone who rules over 20 000+ people, not some shithead aristocrat or merchant whose entire net worth couldn't pay for my Magic Boots of Ass Stomping.) And even then, there's the issue of feasibility. Even if you rule over a large city and have enough money to afford really powerful guards, can you afford those guards AND regular guards to handle the commoners? To use real world examples again, it's not like the mayor of even a huge metropolis like New York has secret service guards watching him. You need to be at the highest levels to have that sort of shit. There are MANY examples in your usual murder hobo RPG where the player is trying to get somewhere and has his path barred by people guarding something far less important then the PC.

The PC's power and wealth are all concentrated on his own person, it's unreasonable to expect anything or anyone less valuable/powerful than him to be guarded by people more powerful.
 

V_K

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The PC's power and wealth are all concentrated on his own person, it's unreasonable to expect anything or anyone less valuable/powerful than him to be guarded by people more powerful.
Well, thing is - it's not just the mcguffin that is guarded, it's also about the concepts of propery and safety per se. The broken window theory, if you will. So while it is impractical to guard against some abstract potential adventurer, once someone starts murdering city guards just for fun, retaliation from the powers that do have means to deal with such a threat shouldn't take too long to follow.
 

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The PC's power and wealth are all concentrated on his own person, it's unreasonable to expect anything or anyone less valuable/powerful than him to be guarded by people more powerful.
Well, thing is - it's not just the mcguffin that is guarded, it's also about the concepts of propery and safety per se. The broken window theory, if you will. So while it is impractical to guard against some abstract potential adventurer, once someone starts murdering city guards just for fun, retaliation from the powers that do have means to deal with such a threat shouldn't take too long to follow.
Yeah, that part I'm fine with. Having the Flaming Fist show up in BG1 after your rep has dropped low enough makes perfect sense (maybe a little less so when you're not actually in the city, but whatever) and should be the sort of reaction to breaking into a high profile location. But preventing me from ever drawing their attention in the first place is dumb; especially if I can fuck them up And it's not like the authorities have any means of knowing immediately exactly how powerful you are.

There's also a certain impracticality to sending your best guys after someone who did something relatively unimportant. It's kind of like starting a war over some minor diplomatic incident. Suppose the king of some middle east shithole beats the shit out of the US ambassador and keep him in prison (whether because the dude is a spy or just because the king is a dick doesn't really matter.) Now, the US has the means to destroy that country... but that would mean leaving itself less effective and less protected elsewhere. Even though as a power they dwarf the criminal, the value of the ambassador isn't worth the cost of dealing with an entire country. It might be different if the president was assassinated or something, or maybe even a major part of government like the head of the opposition or a supreme court judge or something. On a much smaller scale, if some guy steals your bicycle or wallet, the cops aren't going to give a fuck. Even if they could catch him, it's not worth their time when they have car thieves to deal with as well.
 

V_K

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There's also a certain impracticality to sending your best guys after someone who did something relatively unimportant.
Sure. It'd be gradual - normal troops, elite troops, heavy artillery, superheroes etc.
Of course, there's also the matter of actual game rules. For example TDE has much less HP bloat than DnD and even minor magical artifacts in its setting are extremely rare - which means the PC never gets to be so powerful that they're able to deal with a whole guard squad on their own.
 

Slow James

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I feel like we keep drifting off into a larger topic of "the hero always becomes powerful enough to curb stomp enemies in combat." It's a topic worth bringing up, for sure.

When we look at ancient legends, myths and stories of monsters and heroes, it is almost categorically about heroes that overcome these impossible odds not with their insane physical strength or fighting ability, but with their brains. Jason defeats Medusa by using a mirrored shield to avoid her stone gaze. Hercules burns the necks of the hydra to prevent it from springing up more heads. Beowulf... well, Beowulf just curb stomps everyone and beats them into submission, so maybe that's not the best example.

Point being, in games we have enemies that, for example, have stone gaze powers. Except the player just takes their attacks full in stride, doing an easy dice roll to save vs. Petrification, where the freeze stuns the character for five seconds before "breaking out" of the stone or where a widely available potion can cure the status for anyone for 5G.

Threats are made minimal in game combat because telling the player "you can't kill anyone and everything easily and then just use a health potion and make everything all better" isn't something games do very often or very well.

A beholder should be a monster completely unable to be killed via direct combat. I'm sorry, it just shouldn't be. The party, even a high level party, should be forced to engage in two dozen levels of shenanigans to even survive an encounter with one, let alone kill it.

It is the result of leveling that takes the player to unheard of levels of power. It's not just learning new skills, but getting exponentially larger health points, higher and higher hit rates and save stats, coupled with zero residual injuries like severed limbs or lost eyes. A player rarely fears going into battle with even some of the most powerful enemies, let alone something piddling like twenty-something city guards. Not even taking into account an errant arrow the player did not expect, despite that this would likely kill any human on the planet. Honestly, combat has become such a huge abstraction that we look at games like Wasteland as being "realistic" because of weight limits and build limitations, completely ignoring the fact that the game is built to ignore the premise that a single bullet wound can kill you, let alone the dozen or so you receive in your average fight.


Thing is, I don't know how you can make a game that represents realistic damage and death that doesn't resort to constant reloads and player frustration or completely removing most combat. Until that type of question is resolved, it will always be a lot of "but thou must" type of design when a developer tries to incorporate non-combat spells and skills. Because otherwise, the PC god character sees no reason to waste time or skill points when the obstacles can just be hacked apart.
 
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Immortal

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In a recent thread a question arose about out of combat uses for magic in CRPGs. To not derail it further I decided to start a new one.
I've compiled a more or less comprehensive list of non-combat spell effects I've seen implemented in various games. Additions are welcome, although I must note that I didn't include healing (because obvious and arguably still combat-related) and "increase skill x"-style buffs (because boring) on purpose.

Transportation:
Waterwalking, waterbreathing, levitation, teleportation. Probably passing through walls, although that overlaps with teleporation a bit. Also, invisibility, because it isn't worth it to add a special "Stealth magic" category for essentially a single effect.

Mind control:
Charm, detect lies, read mind. Probably possession, but it's usually implemented as a combat-only ability. Probably fear/peace spells that let you avoid combat encounters, but that's borderline. Can't think of anything else that doesn't overlap with non-magical diplomacy and thus isn't redundant.

Divination:
Detect enemies/traps/doors/illusions/whatever, Skyrim's clairvoyance (kinda hard to coin a more generic terms for it), magical maps (although those seem to become obsolete), scouting (wizard's eye and such).

Environment interaction:
Light/dark, un/lock, disarm, tekekinesis, creating (and dispelling) magic walls, elemental interactions (freezing water, dousing flames etc), weather changes. Theoretically this category should be the one with most opportunities, but in practice only the first three effects are somewhat common.

Inventory interaction:
Identifying and uncursing items, creating food/water, transmuting metals. Wouldn't put item enchantment here as it's basically crafting.

Communication:
Spirit/demon summoning (for communication purposes only), talking to animals etc. Very rarely seen as a mechanic and not a plot point, and even more rare as spells rather than skills. Lots of wasted potential, could be extremely fun if done right.

Shapeshifting:
Mostly used for combat, if not - than as transportation means (see Lands of Lore 2). Although it could be pretty interesting to use shapeshifting in social situations (i.e. appearing as someone else), but the only game I can think of that does something similar is Star Trail, and only on one or two occasions.

Summoning:
It's possible to have non-combat uses for summons also (see U8). Although this is a tricky mechanic, because if you can have the same abilities as your summons, they become redundant, and if you don't - that limits an already limited spell list. There might be a use for summons without special abilities though, for situations like needing to pull a couple of switches simultaneously or to just set off traps with them.


So these are the non-combat effects I've already seen in different games. Why is it so then that no single game has more than a handful of them? Or maybe I'm just the minority here and non-combat magic simply isn't fun? Would you personally want to play a wizard in a game that has no combat spells at all?

This is a really important topic.. I think the fact that non-combat magic has disappeared from games (outside of maybe a few cutscenes here and there) is a HUGE reason magic has lost it's... magic in video games today.

in 2nd and 3rd addition DnD.. Mages were cool, powerful, more rare then not and when you saw an old man with a long beard and a elaborate robes, you knew you were dealing with someone not to be trifled with. Compare that today where for example in Dragon Age Inquisition you are doing karate chops with your staff flinging spells like a harry potter movie.

What the fuck happened?

Games need to bring back magic in a less "Numbers and Crits" type of way. To make it feel like it affects the world and isn't just the fantasy RPG version of a gun firing lasers.

EDIT:
That said. almost every spell you listed takes HUGE effort to implement.. The talk to dead spell in Arcanum being an example. It largely became useless because they never had time to really flesh that spell out.. it would take months to write all that dialogue and figure out all the places that spell could be used.. and that's only ONE spell..

Non-combat spells require way more effort then just looking a different color or doing more numbers.. they change fundamentally how the world works..

So I understand why they seem under used or are slowly less and less implemented but they can be great.
 

Slow James

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Sure. It'd be gradual - normal troops, elite troops, heavy artillery, superheroes etc.
Of course, there's also the matter of actual game rules. For example TDE has much less HP bloat than DnD and even minor magical artifacts in its setting are extremely rare - which means the PC never gets to be so powerful that they're able to deal with a whole guard squad on their own.

I haven't played Dark Eye before - how does it handle the fact that players are squishy (relative to other game types) and easier to kill when doing the encounter design?
 

V_K

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Sure. It'd be gradual - normal troops, elite troops, heavy artillery, superheroes etc.
Of course, there's also the matter of actual game rules. For example TDE has much less HP bloat than DnD and even minor magical artifacts in its setting are extremely rare - which means the PC never gets to be so powerful that they're able to deal with a whole guard squad on their own.

I haven't played Dark Eye before - how does it handle the fact that players are squishy (relative to other game types) and easier to kill when doing the encounter design?
TDE is a PnP system (that I haven't played), its CRPG implementations (Realms of Arkania, Drakensang, Blackguards) are all fairly different. But as a general rule encounters are kept low-key, you never get to fight hordes of dragons like in Goldboxes. I think there was one minor water dragon in RoA 3, and it was a late-game boss encounter.
 

baturinsky

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I feel like we keep drifting off into a larger topic of "the hero always becomes powerful enough to curb stomp enemies in combat." It's a topic worth bringing up, for sure.

When we look at ancient legends, myths and stories of monsters and heroes, it is almost categorically about heroes that overcome these impossible odds not with their insane physical strength or fighting ability, but with their brains. Jason defeats Medusa by using a mirrored shield to avoid her stone gaze. Hercules burns the necks of the hydra to prevent it from springing up more heads. Beowulf... well, Beowulf just curb stomps everyone and beats them into submission, so maybe that's not the best example.

Medusa and Hydra are bosses in game therms. Nearly-invincible, but with a weak spot and maybe an artefact you need to have to kill them.
 

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DnD combat is incredibly abstracted too; the saving throw vs stone gaze for example, is probably meant to represent the character avoiding making eye contact. In that context, it makes sense. Likewise something like a reflex save to reduce (or ignore) damage from a fireball filling the entire room your in might mean you dove behind an overturned table or something, as opposed to simply dodging it.

As for what kind of characters the heroes should be... thats just a matter of taste. Legends run the gamut, Hercules certainly had his share of fights he just muscled through, or if he did do something clever it still required insane strength (like killing the nemean lion with it's own claws.) The thing is, a lot of stories or games start out at the low end and work their way to the epic end... but nobody remembers the stuff at the beginning because who gives a shit about how some street urchin stole some guy's coinpurse and evaded the guards?

Thinking back to my time playing Morrowind, I recall running through some cave after stealing an artifact, eventually escaping (narrowly) by leaping over a pit of lava. But thats about the only thing I recall doing at a low level. I have lots of memories of cool shit I did later, like murdering Vivec, becoming permanently invisible and chasing imperial guards around, or flying around the island with insanely potent levitation potions. Or wiping out the mage guild in Aldrhun so I could use it as my personal house.

Low key fantasy adventures tend to just be really forgettable. You're not risking much as a character that can be easily replaced by any other character that can do basically the same shit. And the rewards are obviously shit. So you have small risks and rewards... rather dull.
 

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Didn't the original story of Medusa involve Perseus (who got magical shit straight from a god to fight her with?)
 

V_K

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Didn't the original story of Medusa involve Perseus (who got magical shit straight from a god to fight her with?)
Although it's worth noting that Perseus, like all Greek heroes is a demigod.
Same with all epic heroes, actually - originally they were only part humans and had their origins in the supernatural world (although later epics and later written copies of earlier epics sometimes omit that fact).
 

Norfleet

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The notion of "combat magic" at all is fairly recent, really. Mythical heroes that use magic to defeat their foes never simply fling fireballs at their enemies until they die. Magic was never that overt. The notion of wizards that can ONLY use magic, also pretty much created whole-cloth by D&D. All mythological wizards, and even the base source material of modern fantasy, Lord of the Rings, has wizards that are fully capable of physical exertion. In fact, in mythology, people who can't use some kind of magic are nobodies.
 
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The notion of "combat magic" at all is fairly recent, really. Mythical heroes that use magic to defeat their foes never simply fling fireballs at their enemies until they die. Magic was never that overt. The notion of wizards that can ONLY use magic, also pretty much created whole-cloth by D&D. All mythological wizards, and even the base source material of modern fantasy, Lord of the Rings, has wizards that are fully capable of physical exertion. In fact, in mythology, people who can't use some kind of magic are nobodies.
Well, thats not exactly true. Most of them are women of course, but there are definitely examples of scholarly sorcerers. And there's nothing stopping you from having an 18 str wizard that can kick doors down in DnD, but they'd generally make for less interesting characters than ones with actual flaws. Raistlin makes for a more interesting character than Gandalf, if you actually have to develop the character at all beyond 'spooky mystery guy'.

A lot of people seem to be equating 'average male strength' with 'useless bookworm coughing blood up when he jogs'. Which is just retarded. Sure, a diablo mage can't run around and smash face as well as the warrior can, but that's the other extreme. Not all wizards in mythology were fucking Conan. Not even all warriors were fucking Conan. There's a huge gap between smashing rocks with your bare hands, and being unable to lift a sword.

I think a lot of it comes also from wanting to make male equivalents of the old hag/witch trope. There weren't really any male versions of Baba Yaga, the closest you'd get is someone like Merlin. More variety is a good thing, it's not like videogames never had any warrior mages in them.

Lastly, a lot of wizards in videogames don't bother with a sword because they already have insanely strong magic. It only makes sense for Gandalf to pull out a sword because his magic is limited to shitty fireworks. Luke Skywalker might be shit enough to need a lightsaber, but the emperor can just fry your ass. A guy who can explode demons with his magic shouldn't bother with a melee weapon, it'd be like having him light a camp fire with a firedrill.
 

Norfleet

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A lot of people seem to be equating 'average male strength' with 'useless bookworm coughing blood up when he jogs'. Which is just retarded. Sure, a diablo mage can't run around and smash face as well as the warrior can, but that's the other extreme.
He actually could in Diablo 1, but they sort of took that away.

Lastly, a lot of wizards in videogames don't bother with a sword because they already have insanely strong magic. It only makes sense for Gandalf to pull out a sword because his magic is limited to shitty fireworks. Luke Skywalker might be shit enough to need a lightsaber, but the emperor can just fry your ass. A guy who can explode demons with his magic shouldn't bother with a melee weapon, it'd be like having him light a camp fire with a firedrill.
That's certainly part of it, yes. But it's not even that the magic is strong, it's that the magic is really unsubtle. Mages fling fireballs like candy and explode demons. Rather than being magical, they're just ersatz bazookas and artillery.
 

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Well yeah, but how else are you going to put a mage into something like Diablo or a sidescrolling beatemup like Dragon's Crown or Shadows over Mystara? (Actually, the melee attacks used by the wizard in the latter are pretty necessary for play, and come across as fairly ridiculous alongside the characters with real weapons doing slightly less damage.) Action games are built around a certain pace, and that pace needs to be one all the classes can follow. You can't really have 4 characters that plow through and massacre people, and then the wizard who can craftily disable them very slowly through utility spells like creating walls or causing confusion. Even for something like a roguelike, if the mage can't belt out a half dozen magic missiles/fireballs in a row (depending on the stage of the game) how is he supposed to deal with the same hordes of enemies the archers or warriors do? A rune covered doorway that causes temporary insanity is certainly more inventive and colourful than a lightning bolt, but it's not very practical for dealing with a Mimic, a gelatinous cube, a pile of undead, or a hive of giant insects.

And something really subtle, like polymorphing into a rock eating mole or breathing under water or disguising yourself as a shrub, is basically not relevant 90% of the time in a game focused on combat. Hell, it's usually not relevant even in a game not focused on combat. It's only by having a wide variety of really versatile spells that wizards become truly useful in that regard. All the crap you can do in an elderscrolls game is fairly lame, for example. Most of it duplicates another skill or two, often in inferior fashion. Illusion sort of covers stealth and persuasion, for example. But it's not much of a 2 for 1 when you consider that stealth isn't really useful without pickpocketing, and persuasion is far easier to train than illusion magic. It's really only relevant if you have a huge pile of mana anyways because you use all the other spell schools as well. Oh sure, there's some shitty berserk or confusion spells to use in combat too, but they're basically worthless compared to any other means of fighting.

If you don't want wizards to be grenade launchers, you either need a game with no combat so they don't need any combat ability, or you need them to be non descript jack of all trades characters that can fight just as well as warriors (in which case there presumably won't be any other characters to play as.)
 

Norfleet

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Well yeah, but how else are you going to put a mage into something like Diablo or a sidescrolling beatemup like Dragon's Crown or Shadows over Mystara? (Actually, the melee attacks used by the wizard in the latter are pretty necessary for play, and come across as fairly ridiculous alongside the characters with real weapons doing slightly less damage.)
Same way that they do in myth: Give him a weapon. It's not as if your very examples don't include a fair quantity of physically whooping ass.

If you don't want wizards to be grenade launchers, you either need a game with no combat so they don't need any combat ability, or you need them to be non descript jack of all trades characters that can fight just as well as warriors (in which case there presumably won't be any other characters to play as.)
The wizards/warriors dichotomy is a false one, anyway. If you're creating a game where character represent what are essentially heroes of myth and legend, then everyone should basically be a wizard. Everyone has some kind of magical power from somewhere, otherwise you're just a regular dude and a nobody. That's how it works in myth. If you're creating a more realistic setting, then nobody NEEDS to be a wizard. So there's plenty of room for everyone to be a wizard, and just as much room for no one to be a wizard. Having magic that functions essentially as a grenade launcher is the entire source of this "combat vs. non-combat" magic argument. Magic was never really supposed to be for combat in the first place. If you find a way to directly apply your magic to combat, you've done something creative.
 

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Well, personally I think that whenever you can have clearly distinguished combat/non-combat spells, you have failed at game design.
It's also better to make stuff with its own quirks and drawbacks than clear and universal utility, so instead of having spells tailored for specific purposes you should have spells doing specific things.



Transportation:
Waterwalking, waterbreathing, levitation, teleportation. Probably passing through walls, although that overlaps with teleporation a bit.
Seems like you have all the TES stuff I'd add covered.

Oh well:
Passing through obstacles has different sorts of limitations than Teleportation. For teleportation you need to have some way of determining destination, so it often has limitations like needing line of sight or needing to have an "anchor" in place which means having to have visited the place, or having to get an object you marked there. Passing through obstacles, OTOH, is inherently short range, but allows you to pretty much go anywhere (limitations could be placed on the nature of obstacles that can be phased through), may confer unique risks (effect/mana running out when you're embedded in solid matter) and has use as stealth mechanics (hiding in a wall while guards pass by).

You can also have freaky modes of locomotion/teleportation - for example being able to teleport only between places with special environmental conditions (like shadows), between specific types objects (like mirrors) and so on.
The magic has to operate on *some* sort of logic, but not necessarily our everyday one. If you manage to come up with something that is easy to formalize and easy to explain using everyday terms, but strikingly different from everyday experience or simple, universal utility, you have an interesting mechanics influencing gameplay in interesting ways.

Also, invisibility, because it isn't worth it to add a special "Stealth magic" category for essentially a single effect.
It's more along the lines of entire set of effects. You can have one for pretty much any sense/means of detection you want to fool. In line with my previous comments, you could make natural drawbacks - for example muffling spell could also silence its target preventing verbal communication and casting, invisibility would leave your eyeballs visible (Quake style), while full invisibility would require some magical perception to allow seeing anything, etc.

You could also have magical disguise, all sorts of illusions and ability to put illusions on objects.

Mind control:
Charm, detect lies, read mind. Probably possession, but it's usually implemented as a combat-only ability. Probably fear/peace spells that let you avoid combat encounters, but that's borderline. Can't think of anything else that doesn't overlap with non-magical diplomacy and thus isn't redundant.
Diplomacy that allows you to do everything mind control does is badly designed diplomacy.
For example you shouldn't be able to ever convince a character to do something that would be obviously detrimental to their goals and against they desires. You shouldn't be able to get them to do something that would undermine whatever pretense you used to make them consider you a friend. With mind control you can get them to do everything.
With mind control you can also have direct control over a character, so for example you could enter an area that would be off-limits to your party and perform all sorts of complex tasks you'd be able to perform yourself if you were there, without the need to actually script the particulars of such interaction.

You could also have ability to create a sleeper ally by mind control - a character that would go about their behavior normally, as driven by their AI and game's scripting, and not recognized as allied with the PC/party up to the point you "wake" them and assume control, then start doing something hostile.

Lastly, you could have partial versions - how about not being able to control someone, but being able to look through their eyes? It gets especially interesting if you implement spells requiring caster to see the target, not necessarily to have unobstructed line of sight between target and their own body, even more interesting if this spell itself worked this way - you could have interesting ways of doing something somewhere you're not supposed to, and equally interesting potential countermeasures.

Divination:
Detect enemies/traps/doors/illusions/whatever, Skyrim's clairvoyance (kinda hard to coin a more generic terms for it), magical maps (although those seem to become obsolete), scouting (wizard's eye and such).
You also have stuff like Skyrim's detect life and detect dead. You can have a lot of different things you might want to detect and it can get interesting if you keep them doing specific things rather than being tailored for specific purposes. For example instead of spell showing up all NPCs or, worse, just the hostile ones, you could have a life detecting spell failing to show undead and all sorts of constructs, dead showing spells showing *all* dead - good luck using it fend off zombies at cemetery and so on.

Environment interaction:
Light/dark, un/lock, disarm, tekekinesis, creating (and dispelling) magic walls, elemental interactions (freezing water, dousing flames etc), weather changes. Theoretically this category should be the one with most opportunities, but in practice only the first three effects are somewhat common.
Stuff like freezing water is a pretty natural non-combat extension of combat magic (it was pretty impressive in old Lands of Lore, BTW).
If your spells generally focus on manipulating properties of objects and forces acting on them it becomes very interesting - for example you can have levitation not as an effect of its own but as negating gravity in either an area or acting upon specific object. From there you could use it as load lightening spell (to the point of even being able to just push massive objects through the air - they'd still have inertia, though) levitation spell (you'd need some magical or physical propulsion, though), disabling spell (just hang a guy in the air), protective spell (rocks fall- NOPE.) and so forth. You could have an opposite spell usable both in combat, when you need something weighted down and so on.
You could have spells changing interaction of an object or character with all sorts of substances, for example make water behave as solid surface (waterwalking) or air (you can run around on the bottom, but you can also fall to your death and can't ascend or descend easily).

In general it's a good idea to cram as much environmental interaction into your magic as you can. You can, for example have, combat or non-combat elemental spells depending on channeling power from a nearby elemental source, you could animate golems (not necessarily ones useful in combat) from all sorts of materials, you could disintegrate certain materials and so on.

Inventory interaction:
Identifying and uncursing items, creating food/water, transmuting metals. Wouldn't put item enchantment here as it's basically crafting.
I'm generally opposed to magically creating anything permanent, because it's just pure, undisguised gamebreaker.

Communication:
Spirit/demon summoning (for communication purposes only), talking to animals etc. Very rarely seen as a mechanic and not a plot point, and even more rare as spells rather than skills. Lots of wasted potential, could be extremely fun if done right.
Communication could also be extremely useful if forced as mechanics for controlling the party while split. For example, imagine that you travel more or less as blob (either actual or at least close enough for the purpose of discussion). Imagine that you can split-off sub-parties and have some planning system that allows you some hands-off control over what characters will be doing.
Now, for actually ordering the sub-party around you either need to approach or auto alert everything that watches or listens in the area - with magical communication you can maintain stealthy link (as long as someone doesn't detect it magically) across great distances. Hell you could even have a variant of see through other's eyes spell working across telepathic link.

Shapeshifting:
Mostly used for combat, if not - than as transportation means (see Lands of Lore 2). Although it could be pretty interesting to use shapeshifting in social situations (i.e. appearing as someone else), but the only game I can think of that does something similar is Star Trail, and only on one or two occasions.
Shapeshifting in general is a useful way of acquiring traits and abilities you don't have.
You can also have spells giving you particular abilities, for example enhancing your senses.

Summoning:
It's possible to have non-combat uses for summons also (see U8). Although this is a tricky mechanic, because if you can have the same abilities as your summons, they become redundant, and if you don't - that limits an already limited spell list.
Well, not exactly. There are natural abilities and traits you generally won't have. A summon other than mindless variety undead or golem should also be, first and foremost an NPC, even if magically coerced to do your bidding. Basically they should be subjected to faction/reputation mechanics, have dialogue and, if coerced to do something strongly against their will continuously rolling will saves to break out of enchantment.

Would you personally want to play a wizard in a game that has no combat spells at all?
Morrowind, System Shock 2. Ok, both have combat spells, and even some quite powerful ones, but they also have a lot of incredibly useful utility stuff.
Also Arcanum, but I haven't played it enough.
 

DraQ

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Part of the problem with non combat magic is that it makes creating obstacles without giant glaring plotholes rather difficult. It's already bad enough when you need to surrender to the guards you could kill, find the keys to a door you can break, and pass through a checkpoint because your character can't navigate a 1 foot ditch on the side of the road. Throw in things like invisibility, levitation, and so forth, and it becomes trivially easy to circumvent almost any challenge. Wizards aren't top tier in DnD just because they can kill shit. They can also replicate all the skills the ranger, thief and bard have and then some.

Consider how many quests in an elder scrolls game you ought to be able to trivialize with a charm person spell (or how stupid a game like Diablo is when you can teleport through an entire floor in about 5 seconds).

Of course, in a game built around wizards you could compensate for this sort of thing, but most games features wizards alongside the plebian warriors and rogues, and non combat magic would just make them terribly useless.


Emergent gameplay. If game supports various systems amd ton of tags then no longer designer is constrained to creation of ton of different "what if" cases but to find failed "what if" scenarios in which player brakes game. The more systemic game is layered the less player can brake and the harder is to make use of that system to deliver story other than kill x guy.

Basically the more game is sandbox based on underlying systems for everything the more ways of doing things you have at your disposal to create for game.

The more focused game is the less stuff you can do with magic outside of battle as you need player to fallow some story in "linear" way and with things like superjump player would simply jump in siege over walls instead of triggering events or some crucial story arc.
This.

Control freak director wannabes should go fuck themselves. We need worlds, not scripted rollercoasters.

In general a good way to build such game would be to establish magic and object property system early, then let people fuck around with it experimenting, setting up situations and circumventing them. Then build content based on their experience and don't script or assume anything unless you absolutely must - if player finds a way to circumvent your clevelry laid out obstacle or trap - good, that's the game.

A game like Morrowind might have been cheesy with clever application of magic, even setting aside exploits, but it was also awesome. Why?
Because what other game lets you caomplete an assassination quest by walking the dominated target out and tdrowning them in a river as a generic quest solution?

If I wanted to experience writer's vison of awesome, I would have read a fucking book or watched a movie. In game I'm the fucking protagonist and I'm making my decisions.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
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Would you have wanted to play a mage in Morrowind if you had no direct damage spells at all though? If you HAD to kill all your targets by drowning them in rivers? That'd suck balls.

Most of the spells in morrowind were useless anyways. The only time I'd ever use a levitation spell is specifically the one room in the game where you need to levitate to get up the mushroom house. So why not use a potion and avoid wasting space in your spell menu? Oh, or you can enchant a weapon to cast 1 point levitation on striking and have it be functionally equivalent to paralysis that nothing is immune to. Cause that makes sense. Water walking? What purpose did that ever serve? It's marginally faster than swimming, but then you have to recover your mana anyways, so you've actually wasted time or resources. I can't even think of any places where you need to cross a body of water anyways. Water breathing is laughable as well, camouflage was relatively pointless unless you had 100%, invisibility was pointless, telekinesis was useful for stealing a handful of things in the entire game.

Pretty much any situation where these things were really useful had to be hand crafted specifically to make them useful, it wasn't 'emergent' at all, except for the exploits. Using slow fall or levitation to avoid splattering when you use an icarian flight scroll isn't emergent gameplay, it's the only thing you could have done which the devs specifically designed the scenario to make you use. It feels incredibly contrived and even worse than an outright scripted event.
 

DraQ

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1) Reagants. As part of the AD&D system that Ultima closely followed, reagents being required for magic seemed like a great idea. However, it results in hording and being stingy with magic instead of feeling like you had it as a powerful tool.
Hoarding is easily remediated by severely limiting inventory space.

Limited inventory shouldn't be just an obligatory cRPG annoyance to check off the list, but a meaningful gameplay mechanics.

It can also shift balance from finding reagents existing in limited quantities and using them only when necessary, to having the right reagents on you when needed and balancing the costs of getting new ones with the gains.

Well that's true, Cthulhu would be omnipotent if not for Old Man Henderson.
Or that one dude who rode a boat through his its ITZ head.
:M
I bet he would still die pretty quickly to entire police department firing at him.

That's a terrible example. The guy wasn't even using the weapons and was only stopped because he didn't know how to drive the fucking thing and got hung up on a concrete barrier. The city sure as hell didn't stop him, and if he had instead driven to city hall and fired some shells into the building, they couldn't have done anything about it. I'd also argue the power difference between a high level adventurer and the town guards they often surrender to is more akin to someone in a military helicopter vs a police squad out in the sticks whose biggest piece of equipment is an unarmoured van.

Even if the guards could theoretically bring down an adventurer through sheer numbers, the difference in power would break their morale far too quickly. It doesn't matter if 1000 6 year olds could exhaust a tiger and then bury it with their corpses, all they're going to do is flee in terror while they get picked off.

Finally, the actual issue isn't who would win in a caged deathmatch, but whether or not the guards can stop you from doing whatever you're trying to do. Which is usually something along the lines of 'go through a door'. Which they clearly couldn't stop you from doing, since there's like 2 of them and the PC could probably kill 20 before reinforcements show up.
Shit design is shit design is shit design.

Caged deathmatch is where your high level adventurer would wipe the floor about any single guardsman.
Get him surrounded by your average guards and he should go down every single time with maybe 1-3 guards dead or incapacitated.
High level character shouldn't be powerful by the virtue of being a fucking superman, but by the virtue of being unstoppable by any lower level character given even playing field and same specialization.
For example a high level fighter (that would quickly get down surrounded by by low to mid level guards) should be fucking scary if positioned in a chokepoint without a way to pick him off from distance, because he would just cut down pretty much arbitrary number of attackers, unless you send so many that you manage to tire him out.

Have that guy positioned in a doorway and you have a problem you won't solve by just throwing meat at him - you'll have to set the building aflame or blow it up, make another entry point, make some gas cloud or wait him out, because you just won't get him otherwise whether you have 10, 100 or 1000 guardsmen at your disposal.

Have that guy attack your guards in the middle of the street and he dies stupid to any more than about 3.

And that should be what levels and other measures of relative powers are all about - ability to fuck up about everything else provided you're smart enough to arrange for your advantage to mean anything, not just roflstomp your way through anything the world throws at you. Unconditional roflstomping is boring, therefore the power levels measured by unconditional roflstomping are boring.
 

Declinator

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Most of the spells in morrowind were useless anyways. The only time I'd ever use a levitation spell is specifically the one room in the game where you need to levitate to get up the mushroom house. So why not use a potion and avoid wasting space in your spell menu? Oh, or you can enchant a weapon to cast 1 point levitation on striking and have it be functionally equivalent to paralysis that nothing is immune to. Cause that makes sense. Water walking? What purpose did that ever serve? It's marginally faster than swimming, but then you have to recover your mana anyways, so you've actually wasted time or resources. I can't even think of any places where you need to cross a body of water anyways. Water breathing is laughable as well, camouflage was relatively pointless unless you had 100%, invisibility was pointless, telekinesis was useful for stealing a handful of things in the entire game.

Levitate is one of my most used spells in Morrowind. You may not strictly need it all that many times but it is very nice to be able to go over a mountain instead of around it, go straight to the top floor if there is an opening inside or a door on the roof, or simply levitate above a melee character's reach.

I'm also pretty sure I've used Water Walking at least some 40 times on my current playthrough as not only is it faster than swimming, it also makes it possible to avoid those annoying little fishes that come biting. It also uses very little mana (practically nothing) so that point is moot. I do not know how exhaustively you've player Morrowind or how enthusiastic a boat-user you are but I have had to cross water many times.

Invisibility is useful when you don't want to kill anyone in a particular place (e.g. the floating prison above Vivec.) It is also a relatively cheap spell (at least in comparison to Chameleon.)
 

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