I hate magic.

[Shadenuat]

Why do you have to have 50 spells? Why not make a game with ten meaningful utility -ike spells? I have been thinking about having only the following in mine:

Because magic is part of fundament of Fantasy genre narrative. Your spells do not evoke any feeling of magical or romantic, and with so little spells, there is little to look up for or discover.

The spells effects are only part of it. It's how you gain magic, whats its highest potential, what people say about it, and much more.

To base magic on what effects you need in your banalced tacticool combat is fruitless if you want magic to have the actual effect its supposed to: to mystify and impress. You need to begin from the ground: whats its role in the world, not from the top.

Most of these I plan to have as just different color higlights/glows of characters.

Well if you're limited with resources sure, but otherwise it's kinda shit. Presentation is as important (actually even more important, because we are creatures that look with eyeballs) as effect itself.

Why casting a ice spear, a lightning bolt and a fireball needs to have different animations?

well gotta be something different between 3 spells, that usually in games just do same thing ie [damage number]

 

[Shadenuat]

btw i don't disagree we could use more low magic games; it would allow developers to finally work a bit on fighting with weapons. although at this point, developers usually just use same magical effects for fighters as they do for mages instead of implementing separate systems. i am still waiting for someone to pick up on "codex martialis" or some such, with engagement ranges and fighters getting their own tacticool resource pools or something.

 

[Alex]

I like complicated, situational use spells with complicated systems that can be used together to obtain unexpected effects this much.

 

[gurugeorge]

Why do you have to have 50 spells? Why not make a game with ten meaningful utility -ike spells? I have been thinking about having only the following in mine:

Because magic is part of fundament of Fantasy genre narrative. Your spells do not evoke any feeling of magical or romantic, and with so little spells, there is little to look up for or discover.

The spells effects are only part of it. It's how you gain magic, whats its highest potential, what people say about it, and much more.

To base magic on what effects you need in your banalced tacticool combat is fruitless if you want magic to have the actual effect its supposed to: to mystify and impress. You need to begin from the ground: whats its role in the world, not from the top.

Most of these I plan to have as just different color higlights/glows of characters.

Well if you're limited with resources sure, but otherwise it's kinda shit. Presentation is as important (actually even more important, because we are creatures that look with eyeballs) as effect itself.

Why casting a ice spear, a lightning bolt and a fireball needs to have different animations?

well gotta be something different between 3 spells, that usually in games just do same thing ie [damage number]

Yep. Magic is what makes the difference between mediaeval sim and fantasy. It expands the range of possible-things-that-can-happen, which expands the range of possible-responses-to-the-world-characters-can-have.

The big problem with fantasy is often that it doesn't treat magic seriously enough in terms of thinking through the world-building - at one extreme, if everyone and their mother could do magic (like in Bethesda games) that would seriously change the nature of ordinary, everyday life, but it's not often thought-through (like in Bethesda games - although the lore is better than the games in that regard). To prevent things getting out of hand, it does have to be rare and difficult to attain, if you want to depict a world that's realistic (but with magic).

 

[BING XI LAO]

Consider making magic spells all be very powerful, but come from limited-use items. That way you don't need to bother with a wizard class, you don't need to bother with a massive number of spells but the ones that do exist can still be very cool and hard to acquire.
Also you don't need to have much AI around it, because it would come down to whether a given NPC has a wand for a specific spell or not.

 

[J1M]

Sounds as likely to work as a game that doesn't encourage consumable hoarding.

 

[BING XI LAO]

Sounds as likely to work as a game that doesn't encourage consumable hoarding.

Could be limited-use in the sense of once per rest, or single-use and then has to be recharged by visiting a node of arcane power, or something.