Re: Swimming, falling, flying and drowning...

From: Daniel Koepke (dkoepke@CALIFORNIA.COM)
Date: 10/16/97


On Thu, 16 Oct 1997, David Klasinc wrote:

-+Still too powerful, because every sea, every river, every ocean would
-+become crossable w.o any difficulties.

For my mud I've made flying difficult.  That is, it not only drains
the person's energy, but it's terribly difficult to do it.  First,
while you can magically lift quite a bit more than you weigh, you
can't lift it quite so high as you'd want to fly affectively.  The
higher you fly, or the more weight you have, the more energy it
takes to cast the spell and the shorter the spell actually is (it
drains energy for as long as you fly).  If you run out of energy,
then you're going to fall.  This means that flying can still be
done, but it's a rarity, and no-one will be doing it to fly over
large bodies of water (because if they don't make it, they're
exhausted and in the middle of a lake, which is most certainly a
good way to die).  Basically, flying can be used as a last ditch
effort to escape something, or to defeat a difficult obstacle (but
the obstacles almost always extract a price).

-+> * Have it require some obscure or hard to get material
-+> component (e.g., "breath of the west wind").
-+This might be a good idea :)

I generally like the concept of components for some--if not all--
magical spells.  Mainly the more powerful ones in my MUD will
often require a special component or components that can be as
obscure as 'the petal of a fire temptress' to garlic.  The thing
that makes my mud interesting is that it has a historical
background where people didn't always speak the same language,
or have the same way of expressing ideas.  So "garlic" might be
called something completely different in the old book they're
learning this ancient spell from.  What's more is the fact that
I have several spells that only a few people will ever get.


--
Daniel Anton Koepke -:- dkoepke@california.com -:- [Nether]
"Human language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes
 for bears to dance to when all the while we want to move the
 stars to pity." -- Flaubert


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