Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Emotional Magic

Long time no post! I've been pretty busy lately. I'm currently taking care of a bunch of things in preparation for my upcoming vacation. Australia here I come! I'm pretty excited, but there has been a lot that I've needed to wrap up around here before I can leave with an empty head.

I've still been thinking a lot about Mirage, and I've come up with a loose model for my magic system. I wanted to have a unique magic system that would still be familiar to those used to normal magic systems. What I decided on was to model my magic system against emotions. The magic users in the game would have to embrace a type of emotion to be able to use particular spells. Embracing different emotions could also affect your character, through status effects or stat modifications. A magic user could embrace up to two types of emotions at a time. The more someone embraces a particular emotion the better they get at using it. Higher proficiencies in a particular emotion would unlock new spells and either decrease or increase the way in which it effects them. High proficiencies in multiple schools would unlock spells that could only be reached by a mixture of emotions.

I decided on six basic emotions. They are Anger, Fear, Sadness, Love, Hope, and Joy. They create a wheel of emotions, with natural opposites. The mixed emotions would also have names as well. So if you mixed Anger with Sadness you would get Betrayal. Betrayal spells would only be active once you've reached significant proficiency in both Anger and Sadness schools. You would also be required to embrace both emotions. Certainly spells in these mixed schools would be more powerful than their base emotions.

Once you've reached a particular level in a particular emotion it's name might reflect that. Anger would become Rage, Fear would become Terror, and so on. I'm not sure if this particular twist would be too complicated or not. It might end up being confusing.

I mentioned that embracing emotions would effect your character in some way. If a player chose to embrace Anger, they might gradually lose hit points. If a player chose to embrace Love they might gradually gain hit points. Embracing both emotions would counteract each others effects, but the spells coming out of the mixture between Anger and Love might not be as strong as those coming from other emotional schools.

I designed the system in mind so that there would be benefits and losses to each emotion. It was also designed for a great amount of variety in the types of spells available to the player. The player would also have to make a decision on what emotions they are going to focus on, and this decision could impact them through the entire game. I'm curious to see what other people's thoughts on this type of magic system are. As always comments, suggestions, and improvements are always welcome!

1 comment:

Orillian said...

I'm interested to see how you play this out. It's a rather unique twist on the ever so old schools of magic concept. please expand upon this. I like the stat or status modifier thing when using different emotions. puts a bit of a tactical edge to the entire spell casting genre. maybe some emotions might be harder to focus then others allowing some like anger/Rage to be quickly accessed while others might take longer to build up to be able to use the spells associated with them!

Anyways. KEEP posting!

O.