General advice for designing magical skills:
* Be Clear about what the skill does and how it does it, because that's what will determine its bias. A spell that creates an expanding magical force which sets things on fire is different from a spell that creates an expanding ball of fire, which in turn is different from a spell that creates a fiery explosion. A spell that curses someone directly is different from a spell that summons a demon to do so on your behalf. A spell that increases the damage someone does in battle is a M1@3 "blessing;" a spell that actually makes him physically stronger is a M15@ "alter reality." It's a big and important difference.
* Leave Wiggle Room in the spell's effect. Multiverser relies heavily on elements that influence the effectiveness of a spell, especially the skill level of the caster and the roll of the dice on any given casting. Framing the effects in absolute terms makes it difficult for the spell to work. If you're thinking of the effect in terms of absolutes, you're probably picturing a skilled caster getting a good roll. If you reframe the description of the effect to allow for partial success, it will be much easier to translate the spell into the rules system while keeping it an effective skill.
* Pay Close Attention to your Limiting Factors. The best limiters are things that the caster must say, must do, or must use. You can also place conditions; the best of those are the ones that you can think of in terms of material components - that is, "must be cast in a chapel in the woods" can be evaluated as if you just added "chapel in the woods" to the list material components, right between "eye of newt" and "tongue of wombat." Conditions that can't be expressed as components are probably best expressed in a non-absolute way - instead of "only works on followers of an Alliance faith," consider using "bonused if the target is of an Alliance faith, penalized if the target is not."
I may continue this list if I think of anything else.
I appreciate that Mr. Young. Maybe now you know why I keep bringing up Pearl Harbor. To you it's beating a dead horse, TO ME it's something I don't fully understand. There's a lot to be learned about the game, and about myself from examining that.
MJ,
Examples please. You showed me the way with 'Starship Destiny' and with your superheroine sorceresses adventures in Philly. I merely followed, and now this? Show me where I err, or retract your statement. Perhaps you are right, but for now I feel dissapointed.
Eric
Eric,
Why are you disappointed in MJ? I can't find a negative statement anywhere in his post. I could understand being upset with me; I've got a post up there somewhere that questions the applicability of your theories and essentially accuses you of impatience. Looking at his post, I just don't see what you could be interpreting as any kind of accusation. Examples of what?
MJ,
I appreciate the vote of confidence. Most of that understanding comes from asking a lot of questions and listening to the answers. If it weren't for the forum, I don't know where I'd be.
I'd considered stepping out of the area of generating ideas for the world and sticking to mechanical work before now. Now that Tad and O'Sevens seem to be generating content well together, I think I can do that without stalling the process.
_
A couple more design questions before I come back with some evaluations of suggested spells:
1) How are the abnormal abilities distributed across the population?
2) How great is the gap in power between a skilled Champion and an average person off the street?
3) How common is it for a person to be unaffiliated with any Faction?
A writer cannot accept an accusation of plagiarism. If I have done so, then I should delete the offending material. But if my material offends, then so does MJ's, I would think.
Your positions are in the nature of reasonable interpretations of events, with me having a different, but still reasonable interpretation of events.
I increasingly wonder if the game is worth the candle. And at that point there is little to be said. I've raised a trumpet call, and a great fuss, and for what end? If I'm willing to continue to be a blistering gadfly, then maybe some tiny improvements might be made. But I do not enjoy that role. And it seems the game is not worth the candle.
And then some of the inevitable blowback from being a pill arrives, and I wonder when I will lose my own foolish naivete. Sweet reason does not rule the universe.
At one point I had a job. Beads of sweat would literally fly from my forehead about two feet before they started really curving downward. My boss told me to slow down. I and the one other like me were paid poorly, and treated like scum by many of the other workers who did not work as hard.
I broke my elbow ice skating.
My doc suggested I find a new job, and not work so hard. I stopped being insane. I stopped trying to force the universe into how I wanted it to be by my hard work. I got fired.
And my next job, I got paid about twice as much, and had to work far less, and got treated much more decently.
God probably sent an angel to break my elbow. I needed that elbow broken because I was too hard-headed to see that I couldn't force reality into a reasonable configuration. I had to go elsewhere. This has been my continual failing all my life, feeling that hard work and reason will win the day.
Best of luck to everyone. I'm taking a sabbatical for I don't know how long.
approaches plagiarism at times, but he also has the familiarity with the genres to know when he's getting too close.
That sounds to me like "doesn't plagiarize." If he had intended to accuse you of plagiarism, I highly doubt he would have done so in public at all, much less as an aside while he was praising your imagination . . .
Eric, I am sorry; you took me wrong.
Anyone who is prolific winds up skirting plagiarism very closely at times. I do it, and I'm not as prolific as some of my fans seem to think. My point was not that you plagiarize the work of others, but that you are very good at creating something in genre that echoes of the work of others but is still unique. Seriously--you yourself admit that your Weeds Vampires are an effort to capture the flavor of Joss Whedon's quick-made quick-killed Buffy vampires, and they're a good pattern without being a direct copy. There's a talent there, an ability to identify how to capture the sense of a thing that is very specifically the genre of one individual without stealing what that individual has done.
Did I not recognize the similarity between Farmland Beta and Independence Day? Farmland Alpha and The Crucible? Tristan's Labyrinth and Dungeons & Dragons? I think they're all significantly different, but I cannot say that I was not influenced by the existing works, nor that I always made every necessary effort to distinguish what I was doing from what they had done.
You know that the game already encourages plagiarism by referees--take a movie, take a book, take a game, take a television show, and reproduce the core of the plot here. We have joked that every writer of anything out there is working for us, because it's all grist for the mill. The trick is, when we want to publish something, we have to be more careful to make sure it's original.
You're good at that. You can look at the work of someone else, and say, "Let's make something original that is like that." That's very hard to do. I've been struggling just recently with that exact problem. I want to create a lost colony spaceship world, and I am familiar with three--the game Metamorphosis Alpha, the Star Trek episode For the World Is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky, and a Tom Baker Dr. Who episode the name of which I may never have known. I don't want my lost colony spaceship world to be any of those, but I need something to make it different, so I'm stretching my mind to do this in a way it's not been done before.
I would bet you could do that in fifteen minutes.
(Please don't; your suggestions will make my task more difficult at this point.)
No offense was intended; please don't take any.
--M. J. Young
I accept your clarification. I'm taking a sabbathical anyways.
I suspected. Good luck.
O'Sevens - I said I'd tackle your spells, so here's my attempt at your first one.
1) "Blood and Chaos"
Direct causation of pain is the most basic application of necromancy, and as such this is M13@1 ('Cause Pain or Discomfort'). The baseline is a Repeat Factor of 1, a single target, and an effect lasting RS/10 minutes; on a successful casting, the target must make a willpower check (RS = simple/difficult/none) or else take no action beyond responding to the pain. Except for the option of a lesser effect against multiple targets, it looks like Blood and Chaos is a baseline spell. The increase in intensity of pain with the skill of the caster is adequately modeled by the scaled willpower check (the better the caster, the higher the potential successful roll). For a professional-level caster, the RF increases to 2 and the pain lasts twice as long (RS/5 min); for an expert, the RF is 3, the duration triples to 3xRS/10 min, and for our third "tripling" we'll add in a chance for residual effects: if the skill roll is at least 51 and the victim fails the first willpower check, he makes another (RS = no check necessary/simple/difficult), with failure indicating residual effects adjudicated by the referee.
-Requires the caster's choice of curse upon the victim. Each caster chooses one when learning this spell. I'm assuming this is just the verbal component. If this is supposed to be part of the magical effect, let me know.
___
Here's the skill as I would record it on a character sheet:
"Blood and Chaos," M13@1, caster spits epithets and gestures with left hand (may be holding an instrument); RF 1, targeted success roll, single target must make willpower check against pain each minute or be unable to act (RS=simple/difficult/none); lasts RS/10 minutes, +0 SM
Incidentally, that's the first magical skill I've ever seen with no sitmods for anything.
Since that fits so well just as it is, I'm inclined to make the group-discomfort effect a separate spell, cast slightly differently (a different verbal component, say) but usually studied in tandem with this one:
"Blood and Chaos" (group), M13@1, caster spits epithets and gestures with left hand (may be holding an instrument); RF 1, up to four targets, targeted success roll evaluated separately against each target; targets take penalties (-1 all attributes and skills); lasts RS/5 minutes, +0 SM
Note that untargeted skill success gets penalized -2 because BRAs are reduced; averaged attributes also get -2 (one for their component attributes' decrease, one in their own right), and thus targeted skill checks - i.e., attacks - receive a total of -4 (-1 to BRA, -2 to M/RSV, -1 to skill). I doubled the duration for this second version because it's kind of weak. [I determined this with math. Ask if you are curious.] For the expert, number of targets triples to twelve.
___
Before I can tackle your next spell, I need to know more about this:
Those of other faiths are not dealt damage and are not caused physical pain, but their faith is assailed by doubt. If they cannot resist the mental attack of the Abyss, their own faith degrades. Those with more faith are hurt worse (P+W suffer especially brutally from this spell). Anyone whose faith is completely destroyed by this spell is offered by the Abyss to have their faith levels restored, but they are DM converts.
I can run this several ways depending on the effect you want. Are we looking at some kind of mental enslavement, where the will of the victim is overcome by magical power? Or is this some sort of direct assault on the actual faith of the character, permanently or temporarily lowering his skill ability level in his religion (without necessarily affecting his loyalties)? Options are myriad.
Wodium - Love the Blood and Chaos work.
For Embrace the Night, the idea is to wear away his faith temporarily (lowering his skill level in the ability), but if his faith is reduced to 0 it becomes permanent unless he converts to DM on the spot, in which case it's instantly restored. So it's temporary until it finishes, then becomes permanent, unless they convert.
Hmm. I'm wary of that. Multiverser tends to tread lightly on permanence, crippling effects, and suchlike, with particular attention to how the average player would react if such a skill were turned on him.
What if the spell's effects are always only temporary, but if the score is reduced to zero, a suggestion effect kicks in to make the victim believe it will be permanent unless he converts? That sort of deception and false promise strikes me as particularly appropriate for Anarch holy magic. Of course, even if the target is convinced, he still has the choice to abandon faith entirely rather than embrace the darkness. (Said choice would of course result in his regaining his entire religion SAL once the spell's effect ended. Side suggestion: what if specific rejection of the Anarch side undid some of the spell's effect - perhaps removing half of the temporary penalty and making the target immune to further reductions for a period of time?)
Again, I suspect that in writing the concept for Embrace the Night, you have actually created several separate skills whose use will be closely related. In particular, the mind-influencing "false offer" effect would make a lot more sense as a separate skill which could only target victims with severely damaged religion SALs.
Before I do a bunch of work on Embrace the Night under that assumption, though, lemme know what you think. I might work on your number three in the meantime.
"What if the spell's effects are always only temporary, but if the score is reduced to zero, a suggestion effect kicks in to make the victim believe it will be permanent unless he converts? That sort of deception and false promise strikes me as particularly appropriate for Anarch holy magic. "
--Works for me.
Of course, even if the target is convinced, he still has the choice to abandon faith entirely rather than embrace the darkness.
--True.
(Said choice would of course result in his regaining his entire religion SAL once the spell's effect ended.
--Are you sure about that? He did just reject his gods in the face of despair...
Side suggestion: what if specific rejection of the Anarch side undid some of the spell's effect - perhaps removing half of the temporary penalty and making the target immune to further reductions for a period of time?)
--No. My original intent was that the spell should punish harder those who more strongly reject the dark side. Specific rejection of the Anarch faith should make the penalties accrue /faster/.
I think you're right that this is, in MV, about four different skills, but that's why I defer to you for mechanics - you know what you're doing.
Are you sure about that? He did just reject his gods in the face of despair...
Yes, I'm sure. Moments of doubt do not destroy years of faith, especially not when the doubt is magically induced and subsequently wears off. He may need to atone, depending on his faith and his god, but his religion SAL will remain intact unless he specifically converts to something else.
Side suggestion: what if specific rejection of the Anarch side undid some of the spell's effect - perhaps removing half of the temporary penalty and making the target immune to further reductions for a period of time?)
--No. My original intent was that the spell should punish harder those who more strongly reject the dark side. Specific rejection of the Anarch faith should make the penalties accrue /faster/.
I meant it as a side effect of the suggestion - that once the victim's SAL had been penalized to zero, the caster would be taking a risk in attempting to make a convert: if the victim believed the suggestion, he would either take the offer and be converted or reject it and thereby regain a measure of his original resolve. As a disadvantage for mind-altering "false choice" skill, it would make the conversion part easier to cast, but if it goes against the concept we can easily leave it out.
As far as hitting harder against people who reject Death Metal: we can bonus the spell against Alliance targets in exchange for a penalty against all others, but I'm inclined to keep the spell's effect constant against any given person within that affiliation - that is, a priest with a 2@8 SAL in M1@0 Catholicism would suffer the same penalties at the same rate as a layman with a 1@4 SAL. Consider that the priest is disadvantaged much more greatly by the reduction of his Religion score than the layman; too, I find it difficult to rationalize a preacher succumbing to this effect more rapidly than his lukewarm parishioners.
Ahh... I savvy now. Go for it just that way - you've got the right of it after all.
If I start seeing my spells turned into 10@ skills that curve out in any world that doesn't have a Merlin, I'll be very sad.
Glad you brought that up. As it turns out, the faith-destroying aspect of the spell is M15@2 - reduction of SAL is 15@1 Temporarily Alter Abilities, mind effects are M10@7 Suggestion, which gives us level of 15 and a curve of 17. Since morale bonuses are usually M1@1 (with any combat bonuses falling at M1@2 or M1@3), I'm guessing you want to separate the spell that bonuses DMers from the spell that assults P&W. Perhaps you have two casters, one slamming out a wall-o-noise on the electric guitar and another playing a sinister strain on the bass?
Scott, I think you posted that to the wrong thread?
--M. J. Young
It works just as well either way, MJ.
Scott - That works fine for me, just so long as you include the stipulation that they don't work one without the other.
Guys, what's going on with this? I have no clue how to write this up, so I was kind of hoping that Scott or Eric could do it. Is anyone still working on Music Wars Beta? I honestly don't know what else to do.
BTT
Eric told me to go digging for these, so I did. (BTT Back To Top) I don't know what else to do with beta, but maybe Eric will help.