Random Magickers

[hammie2]

Just thought I'd toss this around.  Is it possible perhaps to tweak the code a bit so that there is let's say a 0.5 % chance that a character will be magickal?

Just thought I'd fling that out there.  Think about the rp possibilities that would exist if a character suddenly found out they could cast a magickal spell.

-Hammie2

[spawnloser]

There are people that have gotten the karma necessary, meaning that the Imms trust them to use their abilities responsibly, to play a magicker and have roleplayed through that.

[Marauder Moe]

My first reaction was this this is a silly idea.  Most sensible people would never cast the spell again for fear of being killed, or gemmed.  I'm not sure the notion of -forcing- something like this on a character is a good idea, though.  

Here's an alternate however: why not have magick subguilds?  Karma required, of course.  It'd be neat to have a warrior who can fight but also cast fireballs on occaision.  Or a merchant that creates his own rocks for stonecarving.  Or an assassin with the Drov subguild... actually maybe this isn's such a good idea afterall.  :shock:

[FiveDisgruntledMonkeysWit]

Moe, to that I have to say... Game balance.

We don't need super l33t warrior magickers who shoot fireballs out their nose while they haxxor up stuff. In general, things such as a Rukkian stonecarver or a Suk-krathi warrior can be acheived by picking the stone cleric guild and the stonecarver sub-guild or the fire cleric guild and the guard or mercenary sub-guild, once you have the karma.

You can then think up IC reasons as to why your character stinks at their profession. Maybe he has a respitory disease, making him weaker and less agile? Maybe the stonecarver puts 'too much' magick into his stones when he's carving them, causing him to frequently fail his attempts at crafting?

Anyways, I understand the idea you guys have. You want to make it possible for magickers to hold a non-magickal proffession, which is a fine idea. But I'm pretty sure they already can, you just got to be a little creative.

Sub-guilds are the key! Man oh man, I love those sub-guilds...

[Rindan]

The reason why there is karma is to make sure that the people who end up becoming magikers are people who can be trusted with the role.  You don't want a random newbie waking up able to burn down half the city.  Further, nothing is stopping you from not discovering your powers.  I know of at least one character then went a few IC years before she 'discovered' her powers.

As to having a normal class with magiker powers, that is something best saved for special apps.  Running into a mul/warrior/rukkian is a good reason to start crying, and such things should be very limited.  Game balance might be one reason to limit such a combination, but simple trust is probably a greater one.  Such a character would be horrificly powerful and far beyond normal magiker karma.  Might as well just make such a combination a special application only.

[John]

Imbalance is in having a badly rp'd noble just jacking people because he feels like it.

Why would people complain if he was good at it?  

[lukie]

We don't need super l33t warrior magickers who shoot fireballs out their nose while they haxxor up stuff.

y3h we d0 d00d u dum n00b!

Seriously, though, if somebody wants a warrior that can shoot fireballs on occasion, well, that just plain doesn't make sense. If you can shoot fireballs at people, you probably won't bother becoming a good warrior. I bet a lot of magickers would've been normal people who eat travel cakes and run off of walls until they found their magickal powers. I know if I could shoot fireballs out my nose I wouldn't be weight training.

NOTICE: If the above doesn't make sense, or there is something horribly wrong with my reasoning, don't blame me, blame the poor bastard who woke me up 2 hours early this morning.

[X-D]

It -is- possible for a warrior to become a defiler, least thats what muk did is it not?

Though I have no idea if a pc has ever done so or if one would ever be aloud to do so.

[Cuusardo]

It's a good idea in theory, but too many people would abuse it.

[Krath]

Just thought I'd toss this around.  Is it possible perhaps to tweak the code a bit so that there is let's say a 0.5 % chance that a character will be magickal?

Just thought I'd fling that out there.  Think about the rp possibilities that would exist if a character suddenly found out they could cast a magickal spell.

-Hammie2

This is not the Wheel of Time. Nah, it would just be overabused and unbalanced

[Zhaira]

I have removed some posts from this thread.

Please do not discuss IC sensitive information, which in this case includes the status of (recent) characters who are living or dead, or what they do, etc.  If in doubt, mail the mud account.

Also, please do not post flames or flame-bait.  Thanks.

[Sanvean]

We talked about doing something similar to this at one point, and felt that some people would do the make characters and kill them off immediately if they didn't get a special talent shuffle. Points made about karma and running magickers are well made - it does take an understanding of the game to run one.

[Jacques]

I agree with Sanvean (and not just 'cuz I'm sucking up ). I played on a Wheel of Time MUD for many, many years, and they were ALWAYS having problems with figuring out whether to either make channelers specially granted characters or just tone channeling down so that it wasn't uber-powerful. Game balance - it became a phrase we all hated to hear. They never came up with a good solution to it. Any time they made things random, the powergamers went through dozens of characters to get what they wanted, and when they didn't people were always trying to cheat the system. The karma system here seems to work pretty well - I honestly can't think of a better, more fair yet efficient, way to handle the other classes/races.

[Carnage]

After writing about my mudding experience and remembering SWR muds and then seeing this, I'm reminded of my times on SWR muds. SWR = Star Wars Reality. Basically a codebass that is suited to the Star Wars environment. It has coded support in for spaceships, Star Wars-esque weapons, and so on. One of the things SWR features is the Force. In some MUDs, you had a random chance (upon character generation) to be able to use the Force. This basically meant that, besides your main class's levels, you could get an extra 75 (out of 100) levels in the Force class which gave you basically magic spells. It's not hard to max out your levels in SWR, either. Gimme about a week and I can get a warrior, pilot, or smuggler up to 100. Warriors at level 100 are a force to be reckoned with: they get four (maybe five?) attacks plus dual-wield.

You've got a guy who can attack 8 times a round now with a whole slew of force powers. If he becomes lightside, he can basically augment himself. If he goes darkside, he gets a slew of direct-damage spells. So if you're a pilot, you can essentially go to the darkside and own anybody with either direct damage spells or kill them in space. The whole thing was way overpowered and the last thing I want to see here is an assassin with maxxed out backstab able to cast invisibility on himself.

[hammie2]

I thought about that part San and  what I figured is this:

If the code was implemented, the person would NOT know about it right away.  Take for example the branching system, where perhaps 10 ic years or more down the road, my jeweller is making wagons but never could in the beginning.  This is something that would be coded in with the character but they would not know it until they passed a certain time in life, that being a random period.

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Well, that's my $0.02.  Positive feedback welcome.  Negative feedback tolerated.  Useless feedback makes you look dumb

[Gorobei]

How about any staff member that needs a chuckle can randomly bestow the powers upon our PCs.  That way, we know that only the well-played PCs that have responsible players and will benefit (RPwise) from the magick will get the powers.

I know it would make my day to have my character suddenly shoot fire.  Any of my characters, for that matter.  I can't think of a situation where it wouldn't be exciting.

[DrunkenSalarr]

How about any staff member that needs a chuckle can randomly bestow the powers upon our PCs.  That way, we know that only the well-played PCs that have responsible players and will benefit (RPwise) from the magick will get the powers.

I know it would make my day to have my character suddenly shoot fire.  Any of my characters, for that matter.  I can't think of a situation where it wouldn't be exciting.

Similar has happened in the past, that's all I'm gonna say about that.

[Angela Christine]

I know it would make my day to have my character suddenly shoot fire.  Any of my characters, for that matter.  I can't think of a situation where it wouldn't be exciting.

Heh, yeah, that could be exciting.  I think some of the less "powerful" more quirky spells would be better for this though.  Shooting fireballs or turning yourself invisible is fun and all, but as someone else mentioned an assassin class character that could turn himself invisible would be . . . difficult to balance.  A warrior that could shoot fireballs would also be nasty, since even without weapons warriors are better at defending themselves than other classes.  When you are in a desperate situation and desperately want to escape, why not discover you can magickally teleport?  The first time the imm messing with you could even have you teleport somewhere safe and helpful.  :twisted:  Or find yourself with the ability to conjure something useful (can't be more detailed than that) from another plane.

For bonus fun, since the character's connection to his powers is not as reliable as a full elementalist or sorcerer, have the spell set to occasionally fire without concious will on the part of the caster (or his player).  Anytime the mana bar is full and his hands are empty he might fire off a spell for no reason.  It might only happen once per IC year, just enough to make his life really uncomfortable.  

AC

[Rindan]

If there was to be any random magiking, I think that it shouldn't be a random number given to any one.  I think that it should be an imm doing the choosing, and they should discover their ability at the imms choosing, and of course meet the required levels of trust (and in this case, the level of trust should be damned high).  This leads to three problems though.

First, you could ruin a character's life, and they might be pissed about it.  If suddenly Northern militia man Joe while panicking suddenly unleashes a ball of fire on some villain while his templar is watching, he is in for some serious trouble.  It could be his first and last spell.  Players hate feeling like an imm killed them or destroyed their character concept, and this is how some people would almost undoubtedly feel if they go from being a well accepted member of society with a great job outlook, to an outcast and a freak with a gem (figuratively of course) stuck to their forehead.

Second, you have the potential to make people feel cheated.  If for instance you chase your opponent to the ends of the earth, and dismount him, steal his water, and he is certainly going to die before he makes it back, you might be pissed if he saunters into town one day as an annoyingly living water elementalist.  One might suddenly want to accuse the imms of favoring said person and just wanting to save them, despite your hard work to kill them.

Thirdly, people are going to see favoritism in it.  That guy who turned out to be a Krathi just got it because he was an imm pet and had mud sex with some imms character.  It can't be helped.  People already complain enough about karma, this would be karma a dozen times over.  We accept karma a let better today, but I remember when it was first put in.  The riot over it was amazing.  It is only in the past year or two that a thread complaining about karma doesn't come up monthly.

I think the concept of being a magiker who suddenly discovers his powers part way through his life is great.  It provides a lot of room for people to live suddenly contradicted lives.  A northern militia man whose job it is to hunt down and kill magikers would suddenly be faced with a terrible dilemma if he found out suddenly that he was one.  I like the idea of a Byn grunt that always seems to find an excuse to vanish before battle so that he can cast a few subtle armor spells.  The concept of a thief who has odd things happen around him, like lights suddenly go out and occasionally can see through darkness is a neat idea.  And yes, even the magikly invisible assassin teleporting assassin of pure death who can shoot fireballs out of his ass would be neat too.

For such concept, I think that it should be special application only.  The potential for an uber deadly character is too great to throw it around.  If you really still want the shock value, when you special application the character, you could always ask for the imms to randomly dump your powers on you.  It would just take attaching a note to a character in explanation and a bored imm deciding that today is the day you realize that you can blast a fiery swath of death through your enemies.

[X-D]

I'm pretty much replying to rindan here.

I do not feel like going back and looking but I think most of the problems that you addressed in your last post were addressed on the matter.

First, random happening such as magicker would need to be toggled on char creation, which is even better then an imm doing it later cause you know you toggled it, if it did happen later and ruined the chars life, no ones fault but yours.

Second, such a toggle on creation would not even be available to somebody not having the proper karma, Me I'd make it around karma five.

Third, you could make a simple script to run on that char (I have one that does something like this) the script would run for a certain time, make a roll to check, if the check "hit" then the script would run a random number to see what was gotten then edit the char then cease to exist. If it did not hit, it would cease to exist, making it a one shot deal, you would never know if it went off unless you suddenly had some spells.

Keeping balance would be easy, simply make up a bunch of spellsets, magick subs if you will, nothing too powerful, no branching and a max ability, say 3 to 4 spells from an element, 2-4 spellsets per element.

Now, I'm not sure if such a thing would be worth the work to imp, no matter how fitting I think it would be to the game simply because it would be -very- rare, A limit of karma five drasticly cuts the number of people who could toggle it, and not all of them would I think, I know I've made chars where I would not have toggled it, I my last one would have never used the spells if they had showed up on his skill list, then the script would "roll" on say a d100 to hit a preselected number, meaning a karma5 char who toggled it on has a 1% one time chance.

To summerize, I love the idea of -very- rare random magick ability happening to a char, IMO it would add to the game and the world, But I also think it is not currently not worth the work to make such a thing coded, there is just way to much in front of it, hell, I think making -existing- items craftable is around 10,000 times more important. :wink:

[hammie2]

I started this thread for one real reason.  You see every character using the way.  Personally I don't care for the skill since as far as I am concerned, it is very unrealistic for everyone to have psionic powers.  I think it should be the domain of only the psis.  I hate the idea that someone in one city could develop a hatred for another character and try to kill them and the person got away, yet the initial character makes a psionic 800 collect call to his buddy in another city to waylay the other person.  I find it extremely crappy for something like that to happen.  So I figured I'd let ppl ramble on and hoping that someone would hit on my thinking, which noone appears to have done.

anyway, just my $0.02

[X-D]

This is your first post of the thread Hammie2 Wrote:

Just thought I'd toss this around. Is it possible perhaps to tweak the code a bit so that there is let's say a 0.5 % chance that a character will be magickal?

Just thought I'd fling that out there. Think about the rp possibilities that would exist if a character suddenly found out they could cast a magickal spell.

-Hammie2

I simply see no mention of psi there at all, and since I doubt anybody on this board actually has the ability to read minds IRL, kinda hard to hit on your dislike of all chars having psi ability.

Matter of fact the thread topic name is Random Magickers not Random Mindbenders.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't see the corralation between psionics and magick, they're very different things. The docs state that all sentient life on Zalanthas has evolved psionic ability. Everyone has it, and it's not very destructive, sort of like a hand, or a nose.

Magick on the other hand is much more rare, and when it does come to light, it's usually in a destructive manner.

[crymerci]

I started this thread for one real reason.  You see every character using the way.  Personally I don't care for the skill since as far as I am concerned, it is very unrealistic for everyone to have psionic powers.  I think it should be the domain of only the psis.  I hate the idea that someone in one city could develop a hatred for another character and try to kill them and the person got away, yet the initial character makes a psionic 800 collect call to his buddy in another city to waylay the other person.  I find it extremely crappy for something like that to happen.  So I figured I'd let ppl ramble on and hoping that someone would hit on my thinking, which noone appears to have done.

anyway, just my $0.02

Regardless of whether or not you think it's realistic, it's a part of the game world.  It's explained that it's just something that has developed since various cataclysmic events in the past.  Perhaps you'd like to offer some suggestions about the psionics system rather than merely being negative?

[JollyGreenGiant]

Also, given that Zalanthas is pretty closely based on Dark Sun, where literally everyone has, at the least, random psionic talent, I think just giving everyone limited telepathy is pretty tame.  It's been a while since I've looked at it, but if I remember correctly, if a power had pre-requisites, you got all of those too.  Not sure what psionic powers are coded in the game, but about the last thing you want is a half-giant with ultrablast.  Egads.

The confused, cross-eyed half-giant says in sirihish, "Well, the nice man told me to think about his offer, but when I tried, suddenly everyone fell over twitching."   :shock:  :shock:

[Hoodwink]

You can always make your own "random" spellcaster.  Select one of the mage options and pick a profession for your character, preferably something that doesn't require a lot of hard-code such as a painter or musician.  Play that character out, join a clan, forget that you even selected an elementalist for your coded guild.  Then, several IC years later, when you've OOCly waited for the most suitable catastrophic incident to occur, manifest.  You don't have to become a disciple whose life is bent on studying their spellcraft just because that is your guild.  You don't have to branch skills even.  Pick a spell or two that you've decided to be your "gift", and let that be enough.  Then go on living as what you are and what you've become.  Voila.  The only differen between this and the original proposed idea is that you don't have the opportunity to have a complete non-magick guild set along with the addition of a spell or two.

[spawnloser]

I started this thread for one real reason.  You see every character using the way.  Personally I don't care for the skill since as far as I am concerned, it is very unrealistic for everyone to have psionic powers.

Perhaps your intent should have been voiced at the beginning...

Also, perhaps you didn't know but Armageddon was based off of Dark Sun for AD&D 2nd Ed...in which everyone has psionic powers.  The only difference being that on Armageddon, everyone has limited telepathy...in Dark Sun, you had the possible chance of teleportation or maybe the ability to disintegrate people with but a thought.  Now, which do you think would lend itself to possible abuse?

[hammie2]

Read them all,  cover to cover a few times.

[creeper386]

Yeah... Didn't see the slightest mention of psionics in hammie2's posts... Only the thing about characters having random magick skills...

As for the proposed idea... I think it could be cool, but not completely random... Also... If someone doesn't want to play a magicker, an imm shouldn't probably force it on them, so how could it be random? Maybe an option in the account menu someplace? I don't know. I'm sure there are more things like this that could fit in there, giving staff members permission to do this or that. But I could see that going awry as well...


SHRUG... Don't see it working.


Creeper

[Anonymous]

Going back to the original topic, something about people randomly becoming magickers, I don't see what the problem with this would be, really, if done a certain way.

Every 1 out of 100 characters made has latent magickal powers.  After 10 days of playtime, a check is run on the account to see if it has sufficient karma.  If it does the latent magickal powers kick in at some random time after that.

This way you don't have people rerolling their characters until they get a magick spell and you also don't have people without the karma to play a magicker running around with a magicker with buff ass warrior skills.

I think the real problem, however, is whether or not it would be worth it to code this.  And considering the chances of that 1 in 100th character making it to 10 days *and* having the karma are slim, maybe only one or two people a year would get the benifit of this code, if that.

So, I guess I see ways it could be done to mitigate concerns, but in the process of doing so it would make the coding effort futile in my mind.