Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Magic Fuel and Good Humor

Well I think I have cracked the magical nut. Today I transferred my magic damage blueprints to healing spells. I have made it cost more to heal than to damage. I did this because it is easer to stab someone in the eye than to fix someone’s eye. It also makes the world a little bit grittier. Now I just need to fiddle around with power levels, manna quantities per level and all that fun stuff.

I was also thinking of an alignment system and harkened back to my high school literature days to remember the four Humors: Sanguine, Melancholy, Phlematic, and Choleric. I know I know this isn’t an “alignment” per se. Bad people aren’t melancholy while the good are Sanguine. But I dislike the limitations mechanical alignments put on players. I do like having a system to help direct players, especially inexperienced players, in their character creation.

2 comments:

  1. I still haven’t had a chance to think long and hard about this but I still like just having a scale that you can put your character in rather than just "good" or "evil". Also as discussed I don’t like the above labels. Perhaps lawful and unlawful? I kinda like honorable and dishonorable. What about principled and unprincipled? Admirable and ignoble?

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  2. How about instead of having a morality system like "good/bad/law/chaos," you simply have a standard set of questions to ask people about your characters? Maybe like 10 or 20 questions like, "You just found out Jimmy the Hat has been cheating in your poker game. How does your character react?" You could leave it open ended and just use the questions to make your players think, or you could have multiple choice answers that guide them in choosing their "character's disposition". This could be an alignment or just a list of adjectives that describe a character like "surly" or "vengeful" or "noble".

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