I will try to keep this post making as much sense as possible but unfortunately ideas kinda stream out of my head without much planning so bear with me a little. I play a lot of RPG games, and I always like to be a mage or some kind of derivative therin. I spend all my time levelling up and, in most games, 'purchasing' new spells or spell upgrades. Often when describing my character to someone else I find myself saying things like I'm a lvl 28 mage with FireBall spell 9. Without sounding amazingly picky and pedantic, in a way that kinda takes the mystery out of being a mage. Its just a little depressing that my character's knowledge of the arcane forces can be summed up with a name and a number. Often I think to myself this spell that throws lightning is very nice but what I really want is something that errupts from the skies to my enemies. No okay I know this is starting to seem pointless and vague and probably annoying too but, I was thinking the other day and came up with something that I'd like some opinion on. What if the player decided how his spells worked, how they damaged, the range, the power etc... Of course this needs to be regulated to save everyone having a spell that costs 1 mana and annihlates the entire universe. So how about this: Instead of leveling up and 'purchasing' a spell, you purchase a spell type for instance fire projectile or fire radial, lightning rain anything you can think of really and also a 'school of study' such as projectile speed. Then the character can create a new spell of whatever type (fire projectile for example) and call it whatever they like. Then the player can choose to start studying attributes of the spell like the speed of the projectile which might have the effect of stunning an enemy. if you set yourself to study this particular school then as you use the spell the speed of the projectile gradually increases, thus increasing the stun effect of the spell. However to keep the play balanced you give the school of study a side effect. e.g. as the projectile gets quicker it uses more mana. the player may study that for a while and get a stun effect on his spell of 3.9 seconds and then the player decides I want to increase the damage, so he starts to study projectile size. See now you can even use inter dependencies and say that as the size of the projectile gets bigger the speed gets slower (not too much though so the player can still customize exaclty how they want the spell even though it would take alot of time and much studying) and uses more mana. You could even have more schools of study such as mana consumption, impact explosion etc.... As you go through the game you may even learn how to study two schools on one spell at the same time. I understand that this would be an absolute nightmare to play balance. I have no intention of implementing it in any games I am currently involved in as I don't have the experience, and to be honest with my first few projects I am trying to start out small. But I would like the opinion of any one who has anything to say about this - good or bad (I won't even take offence if you flame me down) And finally thank you for reading through this drivel - A coherent writer I most seriously am not :)

Geeks[lol] The only real magic is Magic: the Gathering[grin]. Ok back on topic now. Have you every played Diablo 2 1.10+? I never got around to it, but from playing 1.09, I know that they started to work on a quite complex magic system in which everything was related. You might wanna look into how they did that. Also take a look into Arcanum for more magic ideas. YOu can mix and match a lot of stuff. I have the game, but never really played it. Then there's Baulder's Gate. In that one you have to 'learn' the spells from scrolls and such.

Now on to the question of customizing your spells. I think you really need to look into the game Warzone 2100. It is a militaristic RTS game that has the most intresting unit system I have ever seen. You basically 'build' your army from plans that you recover. That and you must research all the upgrades. However, you get to mix and match to your liking. For example, if you have 2 types of tires and 2 types of turets, you can have 4 different vehicles. Now that is over simplified, but in the game there are thousands of possiblilities from mixing and matching.

The way they balance it is that you can make a uber powerful unit, but it takes a lot of resources and a lot of time to build. For your spells, you should be able to get them quite powerful, but the side effects is that the cool down time is really high and the mana costs are also high. You can even have other spells cast as side effects as well, such as 'slow' or 'health leech' that is proportional to how powerful the spell is. However, these effects are neglibible until a spell reaches a certain power level. So anyone just using it will not be at a disadvantage, but anyone who want's to really abuse the power, will have to suffer some.

I'm sure there are lots of possibilities for you to consider. Those are just a few ideas of mine. I would like to see a mgic system similar to FF7 as well, having the magic you could attach to your weapons. That is a great idea in limiting what you are doing as well and it something else you should look into.

- Drew