quote:Original post by Voodoo4

We have just get used to it that''s why to most of us it seems totally natural.But if you consider this more clearly you can see for example how naive is a numeric health indicator.You count your health as you count your money.And the most weird of all the hero is acting the same at 1% as he would act in 100%!!.

Yes, you''re right about this one. It isn''t very realistic that one can go on as if nothing had happened with a health on 1%.

A somewhat old gam called Biofoge (Alone in The Dark style game) actually made your character limb when he was hurt. And when the Health was really low he almost crawled along. As far as I recall there where no health meter either. You could only try to gauge the health from how the main characters looked.

Although this worked well in Bioforge, there are some problems with this approach. For example, once you''re character has been hurt it would be very hard to restore his health again. Because he would perform much worse in the next battle the first damage could easily just lead to a evil circle where the character just kept getting worse and worse.

This would might be more realistic, but probaly not as fun. It might even cause the player to just reload the game every time he got hurt and thus destroying the whole idea of the system.

Regards

nicba

quote:Original post by bumagovitch

Get both at www.theunderdogs.org

Isn''t that Illegal?

Regards

nicba

A lot of the concerns people have with these ideas should be taken seriously as warnings and serve as a reminder of the necessity of good game balance: the more complex a system is, the harder it is to achieve the proper balance. One of the things that a component magic system would help change is the power imbalance that most magic users enjoy over the other classes (or playing styles for those of you who don''t like to be limited by stereotyped characters). In general it seems that magic users grow to more powerful beings than fighters can even dream of becoming (unless the game starts giving them "Sword of Planet Cleaving + 2,000"). If we want to maintain a balance (which might be useful for a massive multi-player game so there are not a disproportionate number of mages running amuck), then there are several techniques that I have considered reduce the devastation that a mage causes.

One method is to make it take more time for a magic user to cast a spell that may not have the desired effect. It would require the player to depend upon other players for support. Playing with a mage would be possibly dangerous (due to the unpredictability of a mage) as well as beneficial (because of a mage''s power). In either case it would definetely be interesting.

Another idea I thought of is to make magic more strategic than hitting the monster with the most powerful spell currently available. Make monsters have more weaknesses. Learn from fighting games and make characters have recovery times so that there are magic “combos” that players can discover. Combos are what make fighting games, but they have not yet (as far as I know) been implemented in RPGs. What do you think?

I think this has been a good discussion of how we might be able to free magic from the bonds of modernity and quantification and free it into the unlimited lands of imagination. Thank you LandFish for the good discussions.

One last thought: Just because it is realistic or sounds like a good idea, it must pass the ultimate test for a game: is it fun? I’ve played some games that have been very realistic, but they were not fun because they got too bogged down in realism. Remember KISS (keep it simple stupid).

I was reading over ad CDMag (www.ogr.com) about a new game ''Two Worlds'' that is using psi abilities as opposed to magic.

Now now Landfish,
I''m not a big fan of the psi thing.
But i have to give kudos to the way the
guys over at (the now defunct)TSR put
psionics into the Dark Sun world.
It made SENSE to be there.

But generally, seeing psionics in a world
with wizards and clerics and etc. running
around is just stupid and annoying.


-Run_The_Shadows
-Run_The_Shadows@excite.com