In Magic the Gathering you play land cards. IN a game called Poxnora you have "Factions" which you build decks with. In Immortal Kingdoms you have spell spheres and sphere affinity.

There are 12 spell spheres. These are Energy, Summoning, Mind, Meta, Illusion, Nature, Life, Death, Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.

So, when building a rune deck (or Brigade) I wanted the players to have freedom to choose the various runes they liked but to also kind of "encourage" themes (like Magic the GAthering has red decks, blue decks, etc).

Like other games the different spheres have certain types of runes (red has a lot of damage spells, life has healing, etc). So I wanted to kind of restrict players and make them want to play more theme decks then circus decks (a little of everything with no cohesive style or theme) but without having them feel "restricted".

So I came up with Sphere Affinity. With Sphere Affinity you have an affinity SCORE with each spell sphere. This starts at 100. 100 Fire Affinity, 100 Energy Affinity, etc.

Each time you play a rune from that sphere your affinity goes up in that sphere and down in all 11 other spheres. It goes down by 5% of the cost of the mana cost of the rune.

For example, if you played a 100 mana cost fire rune it would increase your fire affinity by 5 (from 100 to 105). It would decrease all other sphere affinities to 95.

So what does affinity do? Well, every time you play a rune there is a chance the cost of the rune will be either 10% more or 10% less. The chances of this are based on a percentage check of your sphere affinity being either over or under 100.

Take the example above. If your fire affinity is now 105 then you are 5 OVER 100 for your fire affinity. So you now have a 5% chance that the mana cost of your next fire rune played will cost 10% less.

Now if you are at 95 Air Affinity (for example) then there is a 5% chance that your next air rune played will cost 10% more.

My hope is that this will be something you need to be aware of but still give players that opportunity to build the Rune Brigades they want. Also, there are bonuses and loses so it will make players consider the strategic implications of using all one deck and having the chance to get additional mana or trying to go with a deck with a lot of variety and taking a chance of paying more mana.

I didn't want anything to severe basically. There are also runes that will increase sphere affinity.

I am currently working on implementing this into the game so any problems anybody sees with this would help. Or any ideas to make it better.