ID:39411
 
Keywords: inspiration
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<font face="Century, serif">A Small Preamble

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Century, serif">Ether Magic is the transformation of magic, from one noun (person, place, or thing) to another. This is a small rundown of a system using Ether Magic in a game. I stretch it way out, far more than most people will want, so feel free to take creative license when trying to recreate the system. I thought up this system to bridge the gap I often find in mages and warriors. Far too often, mages either do no good, or are too powerful. With this approach, you put a new kink in the system, and show the power of a class that does not fight. This was originally a design doc for one of my projects, but the project has not gone anywhere, and I worked this into a little article. Please, enjoy.

<font face="Century, serif">Ether Mage

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Century, serif">Ether mages can bestow great power upon others, but very little upon themselves. They can rarely kill anything with their magic, but they can allow others to kill things with many times their normal skill. There are 3 major types of ether enchantment.
  1. <font face="Century, serif">Beefing up a player, allowing him to hit with much greater damage, take less damage, and maybe even do elemental damage.

  2. <font face="Century, serif">Enchanting ether weapons such as Ether Swords (which will be explained more later)

  3. <font face="Century, serif">Creating Ether Potions (which will be explained more later)

<font face="Century, serif"> Ether mages will start with 1 element (out of whatever elements your game has) of their choice. This one element will be the starting focus of their enchanting, and will always be the main power of said enchanting. Say at level 1 they will have “Buff Ice” and “Enchant Ice”, but once they get to level 5, they will gain “Buff Fire” and “Enchant Fire”. This sounds all good, but really their ice magic will be stronger than fire, mainly because they have been working on it. Fire will then be useful when fighting ice, and vice versa. (Elemental forces in role-playing games typically have opposites, like the colors on a color wheel -- each has a special weakness to its exact opposite.) A buff of Ice would cause Ice damage to be added to the attack, and a resistance to water-based attacks.

<font face="Century, serif"> Use of an Ether Mage in a group is great! All an Ether Mage's active spell effects will expire as soon as the Ether Mage dies or leaves the party. This prevents a level 60 Ether Mage from enchanting and buffing a level 2 to allow him to kill a level 10 creature, and it helps make the game emphasize party-based play (Ether Mages are MADE for party fighting, and much weaker than the average class in solo efforts).

<font face="Century, serif">Ether Enchantable Weapons

<font face="Century, serif"> A lone warrior’s nightmare, a party’s best friend. An uncharged enchanted weapon is about as weak as you can get such a thing, but a charged is much more powerful than any comparable non-enchanted weapon. They come in many shapes and sizes, but mostly power weapons such as swords and axes are best for ether enchanting. Things like staffs and wands, weapons mostly used by mages, don't need ether enchanting because they are rarely used and are a waste of the ether mage's MP. A ether weapon should normally have two ether slots, an upside and a downside. An upside would be say... +3 ice damage. A downside would be -2 fire resistance. These values could change depending on the skill of the Ether Mage. Also, on the rare occasion you find a ether wand, it would most likely offer +3 ice magic instead of melee damage.

<font face="Century, serif">Ether Potions

<font face="Century, serif"> One man's empty beer bottle is another mage's bomb. Ether Mages should be able to store spells inside of bottles. Perhaps using twice as much mana, and some rather costly bottles, you could keep your Fireball spell inside of a nice portable unit. These ether potions wouldn't want to stick around; they would retain their potency for no more than a few in-game days. The power of the potion would depend on the mage. A level 1 Ether Mage with his +2 skill in wind might be able to store a nice breeze, but a level 50 with +200 in wind could bottle up a Hurricane Hugo. These potions could be sold, or just kept for when needed. A bottling skill would also come in handy. So someone who has been Ether Maging his whole 50 levels, but never touched a bottle, might end up blowing the roof off trying to get his hurricane in there.

<font face="Century, serif">Ether Mages though the levels

<font face="Century, serif"> Starting out, when enchanting a weapon, a Ether Mage would do very little to it, but as his level rose, he would do more. A beginner might enchant a level 50 weapon with +50 fire and -30 water, but he would only enhance it to +5 fire and -40 water. Why? Because it is way past his ability. If he where to do a level 5 weapon with +3 fire and -6 water, he might make it more like +4 fire and -4 water. Now, if he were level 50, he would do something like +10 fire and +1 water. Why? Because it is way under his level; he can work with it like it was nothing, because he is used to enchanting things with much, much higher room for enchanting. Also, his ability in that particular magic type will change the outcome a bit. A Ether Mage high in fire magic might add a bit more to the fire bonus, but unless he has high skill with water as well, he will also increase the water penalty.

<font face="Century, serif"> I hope you found this interesting, if nothing else. This system would allow for some real strategy and would allow one weapon, person, arrow, to go much further in battle. This was not a set of rules, rather food for thought. This could be expanded much further, or simplified, however would best fit your game. Thanks and good night!


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You kind of lost the rest of the front page message.
Popisfizzy wrote:
You kind of lost the rest of the front page message.

Yep, I'm trying to fix it now, but I keep getting Error 500. BYOND hates me!
Woah, I totally didn't post this on here, but cool. So you guys can edit the "Posted by"? Makes sense in this context. Now to re-read it and figure out how stupid I was back then.
Danial.Beta wrote:
Woah, I totally didn't post this on here, but cool. So you guys can edit the "Posted by"? Makes sense in this context. Now to re-read it and figure out how stupid I was back then.

Hah! I wasn't sure which keyname to post it under. But if it was stupid I wouldn't have posted it at all!

I'll allow that the "posted by" is a little confusing... I'd add some note in parentheses if I could, but the author's name is validated against legitimate BYOND keys, so that doesn't work. I did put a clarification in the blurb text, at least.
I don't really care, it was published under the key Scoobert before, so it could remain, but I see you already changed it, so good enough.
Actually Great Idea Really I'm making a Berserk Game (medieval theme based on an anime) but elemental upgrades would really set the game off a lil more so then then plain weapons (although self enchants would be reserved for only high lvl mage class chars and specific Smiths....)
Uh, i got some hard time adding elemental effects and magic on my game. Can someone please help me out? I got the whole 'flowchart thing', but my problem is how to apply it in DM. Like, when the usr attacks a monster while he is wielding a weapon that is infused with an element ,say it's a fire sword and it's element is fire (of course). The weapon's elemental effect will be added to the monster's status (a list of effects that is affecting the mob's behavior like: poisoned, burning, reversed, stunned, dizzy, frozen, bleeding, etc.) leaving a damage over time effect or whatever effect you want. But if the monster's base element is the same as the weapon's element (so let's just say that the monster is a magma golem), it will leave a HP++ over time effect or will only make the monster stronger or will just deflect or absorb the element's effect and receive the physical damage. While if the monster is an animated tree (an earth elemental), it will inflict double damage on the monster.
Umm, just a stab here, because I haven't played with DM in a long time, but a simple way to do it would be a multiplier. So you would have a list of all elements that are unusual for that monster, and each element has a multiplier attached.

So if the magma golem is resistant to fire, damage to him would have a -1 multiplier if it was fire based. So if the damage was 35, add the multiplier of -1 and 35*-1=-35. But the multiplier for fire damage on an Ent would take a 2 multiplier, so 35*2=70.

I recommend http://www.byond.com/developer/forum/?forum=5 for further questions of this type.