So here's a rather half-baked idea I had, but it caused a huge argument with my friends, so there must be SOMETHING interesting to it... Essentially, I wanted to make a game where "magic" wasn't just a bunch of half-arbitrary spells and powers, but where it really meant having power over the world. I wanted to come up with a magic system that really sort of let the player decide what was going to happen when a spell was cast. The game setting for this would probably be 3rd-person action-adventure. Being a programmer, of course, I naturally thought of a programming language as a tool that allows infinate customizability, if you put enough work into it. This led me to the thought of making what is, essentially, an in-game scripting language for magic. You would have certain "functions", which could do things like create heat, or matter, or otherwise manipulate the world around you, and can compose them to make spells. For instance, you wouldn't start with a "Fireball" spell, but could do something vaguely like this:

(PushTowards 'whatever-target (ShapeEnergy 'sphere (CreateFire)))

Of course, in the actual game I'd probably have a nice pretty icon-based editor where you can put spell-pieces together like a puzzle, but it'd sum up to a programming language under the hood. Now you can't have your character being all-powerful, at least not at first, so there'd be some limitations. You would only have a limited amount of power to actually shove into a spell, to start. If you are going to cast a bunch of buffs or traps or something, you need enough mana to hang on to them all at once. And then the time it would take to cast a spell would increase with its complexity; so as you become a better spell-caster, or learn a certain spell-function better, or learn an optimized version of it, you can cast things faster. I'm kind of trying to emulate the real program limitations of memory and CPU here, though the metaphor is imperfect. So that's really the fundamental idea. The player would slowly learn new spell-functions as the game went on, and become more proficient in figuring out how to put them together, until the potential is quite staggering. A player could make a levitation spell just by applying a force to themself... or it might be more efficient, or faster, to make a jump spell by making a big force to send you flying into the air. But that might also hurt on the way down, unless you modify the spell to break your fall for you... You could even make a fork-bomb spell that would endlessly create copies of itself, presumably doing something productive in the process. But your resources are limited, and you might fall over unconcious if you try to create more spells than you have power/memory for... And, of course, you would have an awesome tutorial at the beginning of the game that would hand-hold you through making your first spells, and you would slowly gain more and more powerful componants, and so on. Now, there are a couple problems. The main problem is that to really make this worthwhile, you would probably need a rather awesome game engine. If I make a spell to disintegrate walls or turn a forest into pumpkins, then the game has to be able to disintegrate walls (and maybe make a building fall down), or replace a lot of trees with a lot of rather seasonal melons. This is, ahem, an implementation issue. Saying "you just can't do this" kind of breaks the immersion, and the immersion is the point. Tailoring the spell system so you literally couldn't do things that the game engine can't deal with would be... hard, but perhaps not impossible. The second problem, and what caused the big argument with my friends, is the fact that I think it would be cool to be able to make counter-spells. Essentially... you would be able to percieve bits of an enemy magician's magic as they cast it, probably in the form of glowy bits of their spell-program buzzing around them or something. I think it would be cool if you could make spells that would, one way or another, have a chance of screwing up someone else's: either breaking/modifying a spell that's already in effect, or introducing bugs into a spell as it's being cast. I think this could be rather fun, as it could lead to rather unpredictable effects. Turning "If ... then a else b" into "if ... then b else a", in a random spot of a spell-program as an enemy is casting it... who knows what might happen? Of course, that's also the problem, because if you can screw up someone's spell pretty much whenever you feel like it, it kinda breaks things. Everyone will be forced to use tiny, fast spells they can whip off in an instant, or big huge ones with rediculous redundancy and error-checking. So then to preserve balance you would need some way to shield against counter-spells, and then to counter the shields, and life would just kinda get rediculous. So messing up spells-in-progress may just get ditched; it'd be a neat idea, but shouldn't be the primary offensive and defensive technique. Now, unravelling set-spells, such as a barrier or a trap, are fair game... One suggestion a friend had was to make a spell that instead of interfering with an enemy's spell-casting directly, just made it take longer or use more mana. That'd be interesting, but it seems sort of like an effect without a cause... Making concentration a character attribute might be a better way of going about it. Then you might build a strobe-light spell that can make someone's head really hurt, but they might just wrap themself in magical darkness and use a detecting-spell to "see" where they're aiming... Any questions? Comments? Criticisms? Noble offers to do all the hard work for me? [Edited by - Icefox on October 30, 2006 2:09:38 PM]

I think that it's a really neat idea, and it could benefit a lot from keeping it simple. If you have a drag and drop type of interface where users could create different spells from basic elements, then they get to feel like they're doing a lot of customization. However, you are ultimately the one who gets to pick and choose which elements just don't work together. With this in mind, it would be a little easier to make counter spells. Substitute "fire" with "Cheerios", substitute "transform into ogre" with "transform into kitten" "copy" becomes "transform into kitten made of Cheerios and then copy"

Once you figure out what your limits are, you'll know where their limits begin. With a lot of planning, forethought, and a few mistakes, this could be a very interesting and creative system.

Post an update if anything comes of it.

Morrowind had a spell combiner feature but not as ground breaking as this one. In that game you had a load of smaller spells which you could go to an NPC who would allow you to make a More powerful spell. Say you wanted a "Retreat" spell. You could have invisibility,fast walking, and maybe some added defense to make a spell that was perfect for retreats. I would just go ahead and limit the options as including spells that while nifty are purely asthetic (pumpkins) they would take to much power.

For counter spells I would say that you should go in the way of D&D where you could send out the same spell and the two would just negate each other so that while you could cancel the spell you have to muster a similarly powerful spell.

Play morrowind and see the feature in action it should give some serious feedback on how the feature could work.

NotAYakk:
Your glyph system sounds rather cool, though it makes me think more of magic as a circuit diagram than a programming language. Which might be pretty interesting, really... Might be an easier way of visualizing how the spell actually works, at least. It could mean more design work since it's a bit of a departure from the programming languages I've actually built before, but... I'll toy with the idea.

I've never really played Morrowind much, but I'll give it a go. And I've never even heard of Dungeon Master, but it sounds quite interesting. I'll have to do some more research, I see...

Oh, I'm trying to stay away from the stereotypical fire/water/earth/air elements, though. They're, well, boring. I'm still messing around with the exact parameters, but the elements or domains of magic I have so far are heat, light, matter, life, space, motion, and power. They aren't all equal; heat, light and matter all sort of work more or less the same, just on different aspects of reality. You can create it, remove it, or otherwise manipulate it. Motion is pretty much what it sounds like, making things go. Life is sensing and manipulating living things, healing, detecting life, seeing through the eyes of a mouse, and so on. Space is shaping objects, teleportation, possibly planar travel of one form or another, doing things at a distance. And power is raw magic; drawing it from the environment, messing with it, percieving it.

Hmmm, it occurs to me though that Space and Motion might be the most important ones, simply because you're ALWAYS going to end up using them one way or another. I'm not quite sure whether that's a downside or not, yet.