free thoughts of Winter Wolves Games programmer

TOD: skills,deities and spells

May 13th, 2007 Posted in roleplay games, tower of destiny, winter wolves games

Ok today I made my final decision about skills and spells.

It will work this way:

  1. all races can be any class. some are more inclined to be casters than fighter, but they will be able to be good fighters anyway
  2. there will be 3 main stats: hit points, mana points and fatigue.
  3. there will be 2 main classes type: fighters and casters. Plus some hybrid like druids or skirmishers that can do both.
  4. The fighting classes will use fatigue to use special attacks that learn automatically as they level up and that unlock based on skills or attributes. Example there can be a special attack called “Swing Strike” that will require slashing skill >20 and dexterity > 10.
  5. The casting classes will have the spells based on their deity. Each deity has a set of different spells based on different aspects. So you will have a wizard dwarf that will be specialized in nuking opponents and create magic item for example. Or a human that can cast protective and self-empowering spells.
  6. For the casting classes, they’ll have restrictions based on the skills of a specific school of magic. Example, White Magic (the life magic) will include most healing spells from all the deities. Obviously the class healer will have more initial skills and will have a higher skill cap than any other class for White Magic.

I think this system rulez, because each deity will have his own white/black/red magic and so on, leading to lot of variety in spells. That’s why also I made “only” 3 races in the first episode. Those 3 races generates 6 different subset of spells list, and each spell will be of one of the five schools below:

White Magic White Magic includes mainly healing and empowering spells
Black Magic Black Magic includes offensive and damage over time spells
Red Magic Red Magic includes a mix of offensive and self-empowering spells
Yellow Magic Yellow Magic includes a mix of charming and summoning spells
Green Magic Green Magic includes a mix of weakening and regenerating spells
Blue Magic Blue Magic includes enchanting items and speed control spell

This way, the classical pure fighting classes like warriors will still have special attacks, based on their race/skills, but won’t be able to cast spells. Hybrid classes like skirmisher and paladins (and probably future ones like bards/rangers) will have both special attacks based on fatigue but also some spells based on their deities.

One thing is sure, will be a mess to program, even with just 3 races! :D

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