Re: Classes, Race, Experience proposal

[Peter Mardahl <peterm@soda.berkeley.edu>]

In message <199405250049.12634.surt.ifi.uio.no@ifi.uio.no>, Kjetil Torgrim Homm
e writes:
>It sounds fine to me!
>
>According to my reading, a character can mix clerical and magical
>spells freely in theory. What I don't like is that since you have two
>pools, "grace" and "mana", players will be encouraged to exploit them
>both to their full (ie. to become something in between priest and
>mage). Is there anything except from cosmetic reasons to split
>spellpoints in two?
  I was going to keep the total of mana and grace constant by
reducing mana somewhat.  Grace would be a much smaller pool.
I think that grace and mana are fundamentally different.  I don't
see why the ability to channel god-power and produce magical
effect should come from the same place....  It is the god's strength
that you are using, not your own.  I was planning a 2/3 1/3 split
between mana and grace....
  Also, and important point:  it is possible for grace to go negative.
Just that spell failure goes through the roof.  This is fundamentally
different from mana....

>Hey -- I had an idea. Let's calculate a quantity of magic to be
>divided between "mana" and "grace" based on the power stat, call it
>Q. The player has values C and M for doing clerical and magical
>things respectively.

  I had a vague idea of making grace depend on Wis and Power,
and mana depend only on Power.  The god's favor the wise, but
your magical strength is inborn and independent of how smart you
are.  Intelligence would then determine spell-learning ability,
as wisdom would Prayer-learning ability.

>
>Season the formulas to taste. The main point is that you should get
>more magic power (total) by specializing.

  Hmm.  I hadn't actually thought about making a tradeoff between
mana size and grace size.  I had only envisioned the two of them
depending like this:

grace		wis,	priest level,	power

mana			mage level	power

  On the surface of it, it seems rather bizarre to me to be
advancing in priest level and watch your mana go down!  And for
this reason, I would argue against it.

  I think it's sufficient to force characters to advance levels
in each division to gain their mana/grace.

Advancement is a tricky issue.  How do we advance players?
How do we advance their hp, actually?  Mana and grace are clear.
Same with wc and weapons speed.

I guess a viable proposal would be to take the maximum level of the
character, use THAT to compute hp as has been done before, with the
con bonus as usual.

More plugging for experience divisions:
  we can make it harder for mages to advance in level than fighters.
This is MUCH NEEDED.  Funny thing is that i massacre monsters by
the roomfull with my wizard, and become a better fighter.  :)
Senseless.

Regards,

PeterM