I'd though of a similar system, though abit more complex and hardly infinite. Having Seed-Spells can be fun since there are no combinations that don't do anything cool so more combinations could be seen as useful and entertaining, with static spell systems you end up with alot of empty combinations that you have to boringly sift through to find a working combination (IE: Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, etc). But other than entertaining the player and balancing the spells out, the systems are virtually identical, simply because the constraints on seed-spells eventually yields a limited amount of "useful" spells anyway.

Infinite combination spell systems also have extremely limited uses outside hardcore gamer circles and MMO's, simply because most casual gamers will move on after only trying a couple dozen or so combinations, you'll get a "wow thats neat" and then they'll shelve it. Even in MMO's the community will eventually establish common variations of spells anyway, the only difference being that their defined by the user base and not the developer.

Expanding on the circuit board idea, I guess you could do this. You could assign each node a certain effect, such as elemental damage, shapeshifting, transportation, statistics boosting, or whatever. Then define a set of rules that govern the "flow" of magical energy through the "magic circuit" that you design. Then, perhapse when you cast the spell, you specify a certain amount of magical energy to put through your circuit, like how you can choose how much energy to put into a spell in, say, the text based adventure game phantasia. If you don't put in enough, then the spell fizzles. If you put in too much, maybe the circuit overloads and does something random, but maybe related to the original spell (i.e. it randomly adds to the circuit, I guess to give the energy somewhere to go, and then determines the effect based on that). The actual effect depends on the number and location of "wires". This would naturally allow itself to organize into spell levels, if you made each wire take a certain amount of energy, although this wouldn't neccessarily be linear.

So perhaps the caster, when devising a new spell, would be presented with his "magic circuit board" and be allowed to connect up his circuits. Maybe he can research/find new nodes to connect wires to. Maybe he can upgrade his circuit board.

Maybe each caster has a unique board with randomly placed circuits, so that he cannot merely straight-up copy spells from other wizards, but must learn to modify them himself, although the basic principals would remain the same for all casters. That way, magic would truely be a unique and personal thing for each player. Think of DnD, if anyone plays it. You cannot just copy other wizard's spells from their spellbook - you have to research how to convert it, since magic language is different for each wizard. Same principal here.

Expanding on that last thought, what if each caster could choose some basic spells to have pre-learned at the start of the game. The game would auto-generate the "spell boards" for the caster, so that he can examine them to see how they are connected together. This way, he would have some basis for experimentation. And as the player became more experienced, he would be able to figure out how to make spells more easily, and may be able to help other wizards. A whole in-game industry might develop out of this.

Also, what if the caster could find new nodes for his board. His "board" isn't infinite in size, and doesn't start with more than a few basic nodes. He chooses to start as an "elemental wizard", so his board starts with the fire, water, earth, and air nodes, as well as a "ray attack" node, and a "touch attack" node. If he wants to be able to cast a heal spell, he needs to get the life node, and the "affect self" node. He might get these nodes by doing quests for the Lord High Priest.

Additionally, each node might have an opposite that would negate its effect - if you combine the death node with the life node, their opposing energies cancel each other out. Same for earth and air, water and fire. Also, maybe some effects would help or hinder others - combining fire with heal doesn't really make sense, does it? Maybe this would cause some strange effect to happen, like a heal spell that only works on creatures of the fire subtype, like a fire elemental. This could lead to an interesting chart of how all the elements interact.

Finally, this system would be self-limiting. If the player tries for an effect with too much power, then either the spell creates some harmful effect to him. Maybe he can increase the amount of power of the spell by, say, linking together several fire nodes if he wants a very powerful fire spell. Also, the caster might be able to increase his power level and gain more control over his board, allowing him to pump more energy through each node without having to increase the number of nodes on the board.

Obviously, under this system, nodes would be quite difficult to obtain, and probably shouldn't be able to be bought or sold. Maybe the amount that would fit on the board is limited by the character's level, so he has to pick and choose his nodes, like how wizards in other games must pick what spells they will learn.


I like this idea.

A couple more things.

First off, what if you modeled it as two things? Not just a circuit board, but also as "magical atoms". Some "atoms" like to bond in certain ways, to form "molecules". In real life, some atoms/molecules like to bond to each other in certain ways. In organic chemistry, hydrogen bonds are often used to bond molecules together. Maybe in our magical chemistry, certain magical elements are good for bonding certain others together, forming big chains of magic atoms as charted on the circuit board. You could just write a table lookup to see what elements bond with each other, and what effect happens. If the wizard created a spell where all the elements didn't bond, then perhaps the spell would just fail, or maybe this would be an occasion for the game to make some effect out of the elements that do bond. Maybe in our game, water is tightly bonded with life/healing. So if you wished to make a cure spell, then you bond the life node to an "affect self" node, using a water bond.

Of course, that could just be way too complex.

Also, if you determined the "value" of the spell (i.e. how much damage it does) when making the spell, then you could make a gesture system such as the one used in Black and White to cast the spell, after you had saved it in your repertory. Hell, they even have an article on it on this site. This would make it even more fun to cast, and help the immersion - come on. Would you rather cast a gigantic fireball by making a cool gesture on the screen, reproducing that powerful gesture that you spent so long perfecting, or by clicking a button on a panel? I think the answer is obvious. More work for the coder of course, but if you implemented this, I think it would have to be a major part of the game anyway - who wants to be a fighter if you could be doing this instead? Of course, if you had some sort of melee combat-oriented gesturing system as well, where you determined what kind of stroke the warrior was using by how the user moved the sword, that might be fun. Or it might suck. I don't know.