The Mana World Forums

Just some thoughts I've had for new stuff while playing the game; people have suggested I bring it to the forum.

Spells -----------------------
In this category, I've had a number of different thoughts on possible ways to go about it.
I like the idea of speaking the spell in chat, so lets not remove that.
Spells --- variations --------
One thing I've noticed comes off pretty badly is when a game tries to make different elemental flavors of the same spell, like some D&D games. Each element is a different thing, and should work differently in a spell. #flar does not work the same way as #ingrav or #chiza, and other combat spells should also work in a way unlike existing spells.
-Elemental spells
Not really a fan of the earth/wind/fire/water thing, too cliche. But here are ideas:
-Ice might probably be a close range type thing, like ice spikes or something.
-the obvious idea is to give ice slowing power, but thats too obvious.
-Perhaps elemental spells can have more power in an enviroment where that element is prevailent (like fire is stronger in a hot place), but countered by the fact that the native creatures there are already resistant to that element.
-Thermodynamics!
Why not make spells based on this? Cold is an absence of heat, and to make hold, you steal heat.
-this might lead to an ice-fire combination attack, or a mana regeneration spell that converts the heat energy into mana
-Energy negation
-undead should logically be resilient to physical harm because they are animated magically instead of physically. So while we are suseptible to knives because they disrupt our physical processes, magically animated beings should be suseptible to magic more. In particular, things like undead should have a "revive kills zombie" effect. Or some other specialized Life School magic for countering dark magic. And that brings me to...
-Power through specificity
What if people got more powerful not because of skills that are just more powerful in general, but because they collect skills that are powerful in certain circumstances, and power came from knowing which ones are used where?
-A D&D example of this might be like how the "move earth" spell might be seen as useless by combat spell purists, but may still one-hit kill an earth elemental and other similar enemies. It's power is balanced out by the unlikeliness of a chance to use it.
-likewise, a spell that works the same in any situation should be rather weak; it takes no mental energy to do the same thing in every situation. And mages are supposed to be SMART.
-Concentration spells
This idea is for spells that may have a powerful effect, but come at the cost of the mage not being able to do anything else, or the spell will end. This can range from simply not being able to cast other spells, to not even being able to move or be hit without the effect ending.
-Linear warriors, quadradic wizards-
Many people have complained about how mages are overpowered.
In most games, the trope is that warriors are easy to use in the beginning, but progress steadily, while mages are horribly weak starting out, but progress expodentially. Having the ability to cheaply stat-reset kinda helps people avoid the difficulty that would balance out the future power of a mage.
Maybe what would help balance it out would be if there was more early difficulty in the path of the mage that is not so easily avoided by a few thousand gold worth of stat reset.

Spells --- Dark Path --------
This subcategory, I've had a few thoughts mainly concerning the implications of what a "Dark path" is.
Some ideas are:
-Spells of an ethically questionable nature-
-controlling the souls of the dead or otherwise summoned being against thier will
-stealing life force
-spells that sacrifice people to work
-mind manipulation
-spells of a particularly brutal and nasty (inhumane) nature
-spells that may not be evil by themselves, but involve components that would be gained by questionable means.
-inversions or distortions of how the spells are supposed to work
-healing spells cast backwards harm instead
-wouldn't really be evil by itself unless further consequences were introduced
-Not evil by themselves, but taught by evil means
-evil types are self-interested with a pathological disregard for others; they have no problem with sacrificing thier "students", and the key the dark path may be to know when to find a new teacher and not be lulled into a trap. In fact, it may be that the only reason that evil mages do not betray thier equals is out of mutual fear of retaliation.
-healing can be taught by healing an interrogation victim for the purposes of further torture. Perhaps he has been cursed to death, and keeping him alive is horribly painful and he wishes nothing more than for you to let him die.
-one that is already done: magic taught in exchange for committing evil deeds. May overlap with above ideas.

Other stuff!-------------------------
-Spears
One thing I've always thought is that we need spears in this game. Historically, spears have been a primary weapon, and swords, despite modern cultures love of them, were almost always a sidearm.
Spears are cheap and effective, probably only costing a few logs and an ingot (or something cheaper if it's not an iron spear; how about a dagger tied to a stick???).
It might come at the cost of not being able to use a shield, but spears have excellent critical hit rates and range for a melee weapon.

-Armor
Since adventurers are kinda rag-tag when it comes to equiptment (while soldiers and guards all have plate and short swords uniformly), there should be more improvised armors. These should not be stronger than actual armor (although actual armor may come with penalties). The pot helmet was a good idea, but it's no longer produced.
One thing that was once used in leiu of bronze curiass was something called a "linen curiass", which was several layers of linen pasted together into a stiff but light form of armor, and was actually favored more because of it's lack of encumberance. Plate armor, on the other hand, always suffered from serious ventilation and heat buildup problems. Doing heavy activity on a hot day in full plate mail can kill you.

-Hit points
Many people forget what the origional idea of what HP represented in the first place.
The idea was not how many times you can get impaled before you die; it was how well you could avoid serious injuries before you eventually take a fatal hit. Avoiding getting hit uses up a lot of energy, and actual combat is in fact very stressful on the mind and body.
For a game I've envisioned, I imagines that losing HP creates a cumulative chance that the next loss of HP is an instant kill (the chance proportional to HP lost), but maybe this might be a good fit for this game? It's just an idea, not even a suggestion.

-Coal and iron
We all see miners mining in these mines for what is presumably coal and iron. And yet, the only way to get coal and iron is to kill monsters that collect leftovers (or, in the case of moggins, may actually do the mining? I don't see any miners in the moggin caves).
And that brings us toooooooooooo...

-Ethical considerations
Kinda like how pokemon is kid-friendly dogfighting, has anyone really thought about the implications of gathering resources by murdering other creatures, most of which are passive unless you attack them? Its understandable if the resource is a body part, or if the resources are by-products of elimating a troublesome pest, but coal? Really? What about all those miners who presumably spend thier time in the mine digging up the stuff?
Might make more sense if the moggins were keeping the miners from doing thier jobs.

-Monk class
I've recently started an experiment to see if the brawling skill makes #upmarmu stronger. Still need to gather some more skill points to be sure, but it looks like the answer is yes.
This leads me to suggest that there should be a way for a Monk class to be viable, if only to give brawling and #upmarmu a reason to exist. Right now, the character is a agility warrior-mage, too unarmored to be an effective warrior, too magically weak to be an effective mage, and not skilled enough to rely on just fists yet.
(don't suggest cheating by leveling up as something else, then stat-resetting back later; it's a seriously underhanded way to play).

-Shearing
More monsters should be shearable. Nuff said. Especially since there are more monsters (like fire goblins) for whom shearing makes perfect sense.
Perhaps some shears could be made that are usable by non-mages, but would be less convenient than #chipchip.

-Firearms!
Since guns do not exist in TheManaWorld, and people still use swords and bows, guns would still be simple flintlock type things, made by some mad tinkering hermit, that give strong damage at the cost of speed and expense.
Some thoughts on guns and gunpowder:
Gunpowder is mainly made of 3 things: Charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter. The charoal and sulfur is simple enough, but what about saltpeter?
The most common way to get saltpeter is from desert sand, where urine has mineralized into potassium nitrate. Or by "potash" where urine is fermented in a pot of ashes.
The bullets probably need paper and iron ingots, and the gun itself needs ingots too.
The most wildly powerful gun would be the big iron (revolver), but it would have some immense costs and requirements (both in terms of resources and labor).
Since these are crude firearms, expect them to not be very accurate.
Perhaps a blunderbuss (crude shotgun) might be most useful for everyday use. The main purpose of shotguns was as a bird-hunting piece, since the spread shot made it easier to hit things.
If firearms are implemented, then there should be a focus just for them to further balance them out, the same way astral soul is needed for serious mages.

-Quests
I personally love the story of the illia/luvia quest; an evil witch who tricked you into a trap to steal your soul. Pretty good concept of what the dark path of magic should look like.
But while there would be quests to learn dark magic through evil actions, this makes a perfect plot for quests to counter these dark wizards in a larger struggle that may or may not be common knowledge.
Certainly we can agree that some evil actions (like burning the soul of an orphan as a power source) would probably have a lot of magic value. Perhaps enough to power larger magical contraptions of a malignant nature. This might be the perfect plot device for major quests; both the kidnapping of childrens souls and the use of the machine must be put to an end.

For the dark path, as an idea, perhaps instead of rescuing the girl from the fey element, your job would be to help the fey element return an evil doppleganger of the girl to the mother. The fey element may even be one of the dark path teachers, like the earth spirit in the well.

Perhaps as a result of a spell from a dark wizard (who may or may not be an NPC), you can have a curse put on you that unlocks a quest to remove the curse (and become immune to being cursed again).

Another idea is events that can cause you to defect from one side to the other. Perhaps an artifact of evil is slowly corrupting your soul because you kept it instead of destroying it. Maybe you made a mistake early on and REALLY don't like what you are being railroaded towards. There really should be quests for corruption and forgiveness.
Notable here is the trope term "moral event horizon". If one wants to defect, there are some deeds you can commit that make it too late for you to go back.

And what about peaceful profession levels? What I mean is a seperate stat for your progress and skill in doing things that don't involve violence, like mining, weaving, farming, etc. Could have a thing like Fable where the hero earns some extra money doing odd jobs around town (well, they do have arkims quest, but that is still violent).



Anyway, that's all I have to spit up for now. Maybe later I'll add more. Feel free to discuss and debate the validity of any point. H0nk.

guns should never be in tmw in any style im. itd be cheesy and just wouldnt really fit in.
youre hp idea just completely eliminated the class of warrior since they cant dodge hits. congrats

bell chick wrote:guns should never be in tmw in any style im. itd be cheesy and just wouldnt really fit in.
youre hp idea just completely eliminated the class of warrior since they cant dodge hits. congrats

I did say it wasn't even a suggestion. Just an idea. Make of it what you will.

Woo, wall of text. Lets see what I can make of this.

-Elemental spells
Not really a fan of the earth/wind/fire/water thing, too cliche. But here are ideas:
-Ice might probably be a close range type thing, like ice spikes or something.
-the obvious idea is to give ice slowing power, but thats too obvious.
-Perhaps elemental spells can have more power in an enviroment where that element is prevailent (like fire is stronger in a hot place), but countered by the fact that the native creatures there are already resistant to that element.

Regarding elements, the server software supports nine elements plus a neutral element.

Specifically, they are, in ordinal order: Neutral, water, earth, fire, wind, poison, shadow, holy, ghost, and undead.

In a mob's element definition, the final digit denotes element type, and preceding digits denote strength of element type. So, for example, 23 is a mob that is weakly affiliated with fire, 49 is a mob that is moderately affiliated with undead, and 67 is a mob that is strong affiliated with holy.

To my knowledge, not a lot is done with this outside of spells. In the past, developers have preferred to work on creating emergent mechanics, a la Dwarf Fortress, as opposed to explicit mechanics, a la Rock-Paper-Scissors or other elemental counter games. Unfortunately, in practise this has meant things were done in an ad-hoc manner, and there isn't as much room for flexibility as intended.

-Thermodynamics!
Why not make spells based on this? Cold is an absence of heat, and to make hold, you steal heat.
-this might lead to an ice-fire combination attack, or a mana regeneration spell that converts the heat energy into mana

Sounds interesting. In the absence of a large-scale physics simulation, how would you see this working? Perhaps just denoting an area as "cold" for a while?
On the technical side of things, this could possibly be implemented by a LOCAL spell, which drops a quasi-NPC at the casting point, and prevents other such cold-steals from being cast nearby until it expires.
This could interact with nearby cold/fire mobs in interesting ways, as well as with spells used nearby - flare-dart and the upcoming fireball are both fire attacks, and could have their effectiveness reduced here.

-undead should logically be resilient to physical harm because they are animated magically instead of physically. So while we are suseptible to knives because they disrupt our physical processes, magically animated beings should be suseptible to magic more. In particular, things like undead should have a "revive kills zombie" effect. Or some other specialized Life School magic for countering dark magic.

Higher levels of life magic should gain access to holy attacks. Other statements are more contentious, as I believe the graveyard is currently the experience farming location of choice for many.

-Power through specificity
What if people got more powerful not because of skills that are just more powerful in general, but because they collect skills that are powerful in certain circumstances, and power came from knowing which ones are used where?
-A D&D example of this might be like how the "move earth" spell might be seen as useless by combat spell purists, but may still one-hit kill an earth elemental and other similar enemies. It's power is balanced out by the unlikeliness of a chance to use it.
-likewise, a spell that works the same in any situation should be rather weak; it takes no mental energy to do the same thing in every situation. And mages are supposed to be SMART.

More of combat occuring through actives as opposed to auto-attacks is a gameplay stance I believe people are looking to apply everywhere, not just with magic.
I believe some of this is blocked by protocol changes or client functionality, but I'm not sure of the specifics.

-Concentration spells
This idea is for spells that may have a powerful effect, but come at the cost of the mage not being able to do anything else, or the spell will end. This can range from simply not being able to cast other spells, to not even being able to move or be hit without the effect ending.

Channeled actives are someting I've been wanting for years, but as far as I'm aware, the client still doesn't know about when it's not able to do things, so will show the local player as being able to move and act even when the server denies any action.
Additionally, very little of the particle system is exposed through netcode (to the point where I believe a mob's ranged attacks ended up being implemented with fast suiciding quasi-mobs), so I don't think the server will be able to control the visual indicators here either.

-Linear warriors, quadradic wizards-
Many people have complained about how mages are overpowered.
In most games, the trope is that warriors are easy to use in the beginning, but progress steadily, while mages are horribly weak starting out, but progress expodentially. Having the ability to cheaply stat-reset kinda helps people avoid the difficulty that would balance out the future power of a mage.
Maybe what would help balance it out would be if there was more early difficulty in the path of the mage that is not so easily avoided by a few thousand gold worth of stat reset.

I wouldn't be content with responding "mages are meant to be better lategame" to any assertion of imbalance. Even then, which speciality is best in which situation is something hotly debated and hard to back up without reliable, large scale figures.


I think the Dark path of magic is being worked on? I'm not sure who's doing what as much anymore now, though.

-Spears
One thing I've always thought is that we need spears in this game. Historically, spears have been a primary weapon, and swords, despite modern cultures love of them, were almost always a sidearm.
Spears are cheap and effective, probably only costing a few logs and an ingot (or something cheaper if it's not an iron spear; how about a dagger tied to a stick???).
It might come at the cost of not being able to use a shield, but spears have excellent critical hit rates and range for a melee weapon.

Interesting idea, and should be fairly straightforward to implement as well.

-Armor
Since adventurers are kinda rag-tag when it comes to equiptment (while soldiers and guards all have plate and short swords uniformly), there should be more improvised armors. These should not be stronger than actual armor (although actual armor may come with penalties). The pot helmet was a good idea, but it's no longer produced.
One thing that was once used in leiu of bronze curiass was something called a "linen curiass", which was several layers of linen pasted together into a stiff but light form of armor, and was actually favored more because of it's lack of encumberance. Plate armor, on the other hand, always suffered from serious ventilation and heat buildup problems. Doing heavy activity on a hot day in full plate mail can kill you.

At least some of this comes from willing suspension of disbelief in a fantasy setting and rule of fun. Improvised armor sounds like a good idea, and could make the early game a lot more interesting, but in the end people will end up with whatever equipment is optimal for their style. There isn't much that can be done about that as long as equipment is unqualifiably better than others.

-Hit points
Many people forget what the origional idea of what HP represented in the first place.
The idea was not how many times you can get impaled before you die; it was how well you could avoid serious injuries before you eventually take a fatal hit. Avoiding getting hit uses up a lot of energy, and actual combat is in fact very stressful on the mind and body.
For a game I've envisioned, I imagines that losing HP creates a cumulative chance that the next loss of HP is an instant kill (the chance proportional to HP lost), but maybe this might be a good fit for this game? It's just an idea, not even a suggestion.

Fatigue mechanics are generally poorly received in gameplay.
You might be able to poke around with critical hit chances, but this sounds more like something that should be a skill rather than an inherent element of gameplay, and probably not for instant kills, as this creates tension in establishing PvE contexts versus PvP contexts.
Think the "doom" spell and other useless useful spells in every RPG ever, where it's never something the player can use effectively.

Hit points are definitely a problem in the game, though, as tmwAthena's player stat base derives from the "novice" eathena job class, which is supposed to last for only the first dozen or so levels until you decide what you want to be. Notably, the class has an HP coefficient of 0, which leaves players with a few orders of magnitude less health than they should have in the lategame, and creates extreme strain in other areas, such as defence, to have similarly absurd values to compensate.


---Freeyorp

Wow plenty of Ideas, worth of a dizain of threads
and thanks for the high level answer Freeyorp!
I'll retain one at the moment:

-Thermodynamics!
Why not make spells based on this? Cold is an absence of heat, and to make hold, you steal heat.
-this might lead to an ice-fire combination attack, or a mana regeneration spell that converts the heat energy into mana

Sounds interesting. In the absence of a large-scale physics simulation, how would you see this working? Perhaps just denoting an area as "cold" for a while?
On the technical side of things, this could possibly be implemented by a LOCAL spell, which drops a quasi-NPC at the casting point, and prevents other such cold-steals from being cast nearby until it expires.
This could interact with nearby cold/fire mobs in interesting ways, as well as with spells used nearby - flare-dart and the upcoming fireball are both fire attacks, and could have their effectiveness reduced here.

Whenever games use physics models, it is generally mechanics first, then heat and cold and a bit of electricity. It would be very interesting to have a larger use of thermodynamics to rule all energy exchanges. This idea was somehat in the original inma concept where you'd have to pay healing with your own health. A game thermodynamics could also make the idea of "Fatigue" easier to conceive as a cumulative consequence of efforts, whether they are physical, magic or a consequence of environment (heat, cold, poison...). Also physical heal could help to recover mana faster (and the opposite too) as mana can be used to heal.

Cold is an absence of heat, and to make hold, you steal heat.

Heat exchanges:
In a cold area, Player has a temperature T, environment T1≤T. you lose heat dQ=A*(T1-T)*dt (≤0 you gain a negative energy) while time increment dt, where A depends on equipment materials especially chest one and other parms such as some constitution. With the heat capacity C we have dQ= C*dT. both equations lead to an exponential enegy loss. In a hot area it will be the same but your temperature increases. As the Char internal energy is bounded ... It is possible to use other models such as diffusion one which might be better as the body is nor inert and supposed to be able to have reserves and produce some energy. A similar approach could be used in poisonous areas.

Fatigue:
In mechanics, usage is to introduce a cumulative Damage state function, which is between 0 and 1 and increases with external sollicitations. Death occurs at Damage 1 . The simplest model is linear, but leads to underestimation of life duration. A more realistic behaviour would be a slow increasing function in low and medium states, and more brutal in final stages. For example, damage function increment could increase with the instant received damage (or given with lower constants) and the actual damage.