Designing a Magic System - Part Fifteen (On Hacks)

(You'll probably want to read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen first).

The school spell lists as I designed them in part fourteen are intended to be a mix of banding tradition as well as an attempt to find new ways of making magic in Unangband interesting. I've been inspired here, as much elsewhere, by the design work in Sangband and elsewhere by Leon Marrick and although aided by many, this particular series of articles is dedicated to him and the insight and inspiration he has given me and many others.

Angband is a game of resources: and each magic school has a different way of handling the resources of light, food, escape, healing, mana (spell points) and item identification which help define them. Wizards have no reliable source of food at all, and no high level healing, but can readily concentrate mana to recover it and have the most flexible range of escape spells, and both the ability to light rooms as well as to use light as an attack, and to replace their fuel based light source with a magical spell which can be indefinitely powered provided that sufficient mana is available (and that the wizard is not plunged into darkness by letting this spell run out - spells require light to be read from their respective spellbooks). The Unangband Wizard has the ability to take advantage of magical items such as wands and staffs: both with a spell (gauge magic) which readily identifies the number of charges that the item has, and a recharge magic spell to replenish these charges as they are used.

I attempted to balance the flexibility and power of the wizard escape spells by limiting them significantly for the other magical schools. Druids can only teleport to and from water or natural areas (defined as being adjacent to plants), masters only to and from darkness, thaumaturgists require a nearby source of fire, and sorcerors can only teleport temporarily, returning to the location that they teleported from after a moderate amount of time passes. This was done to allow other escape spells, such as temporary hasting, and spells which shape and change nearby terrain, such as wizard lock and warp wood, to be preferred by these classes in various ways. However, the escape spells are much less flexible, perhaps too inflexible, to be reliably used, and since escape is of critical importance to magic using classes it may mean that the wizard ends up being the preferred class choice for Unangband players.

Druids are encouraged to manipulate their surroundings and many druid spells have been made synergistic with each other: while they can only teleport near nature, they can create trees to bring nature to them in the first place, and then these trees can be used to tangleroot opponents or recover health using the tree of life spell; similarly the mana pool spell draws mana from nearby sources of water. Once opponents are entangled, it becomes much easier to affect them with slow building natural attack spells which are their forte (a yet to be implemented forte at the moment unfortunately), and the ground can be further prepared by shaping the rock by turning it to mud. Food for a druid is trivially satiated with a single spell, light is randomly scattered around them as opposed to lighting up whole rooms (which encourages more preparation to 'fill the gaps'), and item identification through a useful but obscure system of runes which hint at a particular items function.

Masters summon monsters, and while the friendly monster AI is powerful and flexible enough for monstrous combat between the master's allies and enemies, I need to give the master more granular control for when they summon multiple differing types of monsters. To encourage the master to have more investment in their minions, I've added a Find Familiar spell, which summons a unique creature that the Master can tailor over the course of their career - but if this creature dies, it is lost forever.

One thing I've enjoyed doing with various master spells is monster design: in particular the Animate Dead spell requires I come up with undead versions of various body parts and creature types. I'll say more about hacks shortly, but I've implemented this as a blend of hacks of various kinds, instead of a 'purer' convert a monster to undead function. The sorceror's Animate Object has been similarly entertaining.

Masters relish darkness instead of light, attacking with it in various ways, teleporting to and from it, and consequently have a temporary infravision spell which allows them to detect warm blooded monsters in the darkness - I should also add a Night Sight spell which provides further visual acuity at a higher level. High level healing is acquired by draining the life from living enemies (or allies), which simultaneously feeds the Master, and mana can be acquired by sacrificing hit points in return - since Masters need mana to pay off summoning debt, it could be overpowered letting this be more readily recovered. Item identification provides a general hint as to whether an item is beneficial, and what approximate effect it has.

Sorcerors are a mix of traps, charm spells, mental attacks and shape-changing: charms being more effective than the master's abilities in summoning, and shape-changing very much a work in progress. I've probably gone overboard in terms of making shape shifting unfriendly for the player to use as it forces them to discard equipment in various inventory slots. I suspect I'll move back to the Oangband/Sangband style solution of making shape-shifting just affect player attributes. Sorcerors are almost as flexible as wizards in the ways they can escape, perhaps more so, but lack a pure 'get away and stay away' single turn spell. They are superior to other classes in their item identification magics, and instead a source of sustenance, they can readily slow their metabolism to prolong the effects of food they have consumed. Sorcerors lack any ready source of light, healing or mana however, so will be forced to scrounge for other methods of illuminating the dungeon and recovering from wounds and spellcasting.

Finally thaumaturgists are attack, attack, attack, with a mainline in randomly assigned elemental types (to be implemented) and a sideline in acid and fire magics. They can usefully renew their torch flame to allow unlimited light and step into flames to teleport and escape but otherwise lack any utility spells.

After spending fifteen parts discussing various design decisions to try to come up with a consistent and systematic method, I've yet to find a solution. In particular, my answers are variations on two themes. The first is a refutation of the argument I made in part one, that 'As a game designer, [...] flavour is all important, but ultimately distracting'. Designing classes is almost all about flavour and style: do these abilities fit a consistent theme, do they complement each other, and so on? We can take on principles of good design, and the importance of the language and grammar of design will be increasingly a requirement as our games continue to increase in complexity. But ultimately, we want to present the player with interesting choices, a set of hills or valleys in the possibility space of the game, and to avoid overwhelming the player with too much choice, we have to highlight certain highs and lows, while ignoring others.

The second theme is the importance of exceptions. As a programmer, your intuition is ultimately to try to re-use your code where ever possible. But as a game designer, of the magic systems, you want to ensure that each ability uses at least some unique code path. That is, each ability in your game must in some way be a hack. It can be a small hack (fire burns, cold freezes) or a large hack (the recent implementation of a Find Familiar spell required a complete monster progression system to be interesting), but it should ensure that each ability is different, and therefore affects the game play in some unique way. Extend the ability idea as far as you can (cold freezes water, allowing you to cross rivers and block swimming monsters from attacking you) and then push yourself a little to see where it takes you. Don't obsess with trying to make the code clean and regular: it's the abilities that the player has that keep them empowered and playing, and suspension of disbelief should trump any reduction in code complexity.

Normally I finish these design articles with a set of principles, but here I only have practise. It has taken me close to 7 months to list these practises and there are many more devils in the detail that only a close inspection of the code and asking me questions will do justice to (and please, ask me on the blog rather than via email so that the questions and answers are shared for all). I'm not throwing my hands up in the air: but this type of design requires iteration and playing, and decisions, and your decisions will not be the same as mine.

(You'll want to continue reading the follow article series Designing a Magic System Redux, where I address issues, such as status effects, magic items and summoning which I haven't discussed so far).