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Magic rare but powerful?
Vermillion_Raventhal
Member EpicPosts: 4,198
What method would you use to keep magic a powerful force but relatively rare? Or at least full magic users relatively rare.
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Personally, I'm not a fan of the "holy trinity" of Tank, Heals, DPS. I prefer to add one further class, which is support. Support is dedicated to assisting the team and causing disruption in the other team.
Another way to limit magic is to give each spell a material component which is used when the spell is cast. The more powerful a spell is, the more rare the component required to cast it.
If you want rare magic, but still have magic heals, then divide the types of magic into divine and non-divine. Divine spells can only be cast to benefit players, such as heals and removing curses. Non-divine can can hurt, confuse or disrupt other players, but cannot heal or remove curses.
Added to this system would be a fractionally small (less than 1%) chance that a character develops "innate" magic at the level cap. Making it only kick in at the cap would prevent constant rerolls to try to hit the jackpot, but would also grant a little mystery and excitement to maxing out a toon on the what-if chance that you were actually born with spells.
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The moment anything in an MMO is considered powerful, half the population will start trying to get it by any means possible, whether it takes 18-hour days or botting or 3rd-party cheat programs or E-Bay.
The other half of the population will complain about it and most likely quit the game...
In UO mages were relatively rare in the first 4-5 years or so because community knowledge was limited, and reagents were relatively rare, so all mages competed for the limited supply, and quite expensive. A player could buy chain mail, a long sword and a shield from any blacksmith vendor for maybe 150 gold and then tackle most of the game's content and earn thousands of gold. 150g for a mage was enough to kill maybe 10-12 mobs, less if you have to heal, cure or use defensive spells.
AC tried to put some limit on magic with the Spell Economy where the more a spell was used globally the less effective it was, but it didn't have that much of an impact.
EQ tried locking the best spells behind length grinds with little impact. Arguably that could be compared to a melee class grinding for their weapons but casters needed gear almost as much.
Since then I can't really think of any major MMOs that have tried to limit the number of casters, probably because it's not realistically possible. The only method that has shown any results is scarcity in early UO, and I don't think modern instant gratification gamers would tolerate that. The idea that you would have to spend a good part of your gaming time hunting for well stocked shops or gathering reagents in the wild would be a real shock to the post WoW MMO world.
A system where there's a global/regional mana pool that all players in the area share (i.e. once all of the mana in the area is gone nobody can regen mana there) could work, but would most likely just make people complain until it was changed.
I somewhat like the idea tho.
The answer for how to control mages is to follow the same pattern as is seen in almost all fantasy literature: you keep them extremely rare, and never let their powers exceed a tactical level. IE, the strongest magic user in the world can level an army, but he cannot alone obliterate a continent, or reverse time, or what have you. On top of this, you could pile strict restrictions on overuse - a magic user can tax themselves to the point where, temporarily, their spells sputter and die, thus forcing a magic user to carry weapons, gear, etc., even if they aren't - by necessity - as proficient with it as they might otherwise be had they trained from birth as a warrior.
Even a powerful wizard like Gandalf the Grey suffered from fatigue issues - he could only do so much (Rowling's wizards, on the other hand, seemed to have an unlimited spell supply - part of the reason why her world-building isn't as great as everyone contends). A mage with endless small-scale attacks is nearly as fearsome as one with one outrageously gargantuan one - ALL SPELLS should dramatically exhaust the caster, and the 'endless mana bar' should go the way of the dodo.
Magic in MMORPGs has become far too utilitarian - it is everywhere, it is constant, and it is bereft of respect. You could restrict its presence provided that you were honest with your community from the get-go, and didn't leave everyone on the outside feeling shafted because they couldn't wield spells.
The current situation, however, is embarrassing. Magic should be rare and wonderful, not conventional and dull.
Which is a shame, early LMs were fun, Torval had a cool post about them in an another thread.
I wish LOTRO had stuck to its guns, and also that it had been a bit more popular. It would have been far better had it been able to support an EVE-style subscription model.
In short, I'd make magic act more like a set of consumables that you could slot and utilise when needed, but make them at least slightly limited, so that you couldn't blow your entire load of high-powered spells all willy-nilly. There'd probably be some balancing: Like making it so that lower tier or weaker spells were much easier to stock up on. But anything super powerful would take time to create/recharge/learn and would be limited to only a few casts at a time.
If you've played Dark Souls 1 or 2 to any degree, you'll sort of know what I talk about. Fr'instance, if you get the spell "Soul Spear", you've got an incredibly powerful ranged blast attack that can take a chunk out of most boss HP and 1-shot a lot of lower strength enemies. But unless you really pour points into your intelligence and attunement stats, then you're only going to have 2 or 3 casts of Soul Spear at a time. Alternatively, if you somehow get two copies of the spell, you could sacrifice one spell slot and get double the amount of casts by slotting it twice, sort of thing.
Potentially, you could even run a kind of hybrid between this and the more contemporary "skills" based magic system most games today employ. Have it so that the more "standard" and "common" spells could be thrown a lot more easily on a simple cooldown or MP system, but if you, say, wanted to slam a meteorite into your enemies, hit them with a literal bolt of lightning from the sky, or summon some huge, powerful demon, then you'd need to be very careful about when and how you used the spells.
Unfortunately, it usually works the other way around. Players are enthusiastic about this kind of design, because every player believes THEY will somehow acquire the "rare and powerful" abilities and pwn everyone else. When that doesn't happen they complain bitterly and quit because the game is "broken".
I say let the developers make the game they want and fuck the complainers, they will do it anyway so just ignore the noise. Better to stick the design brief of a game then ruin it listening to the masses.
This design makes sure that unlocking a powerful profession takes the same amount of time as mastering X other professions. It also allows the developer to control for the rare item drop, effectively controlling for the number of possible "elite professions" there can be.
This actually was not the original design. The original design got scrapped, due to the publishers rushing the game to release. The initial plan was to have a series of hidden achievements. To unlock the elite profession, you would have to complete around 30 achievements. The trick is, you don't know what exactly the achievements are and you also don't know if you complete one. You are only told milestones of the progress (e.g. "You are half way there"). What's more, the achievements are randomly sampled from a large pool of possible achievements - so even if people figure out what the achievements are, you won't know what 30 you were assigned, out of a possible list of 150.
The achievements ranged from exploration ones ("visit the tallest mountain"), to completing dungeons, crafting items, socialising with people. This ensures whoever unlocks the profession has experienced your game across the board. It favours semi-hardcore people who like to enjoy the game as a whole. And unlike most approaches to locking something, this one does not really favour grinding players too much - it is unlikely a grinder would tick the exploration and socialising achievements.
The only way to keep magic rare is for the developers to design systems that discourage it and then not cave. Now that MMORPGs are "retreating" to be a niche genre again, I imagine that a few bold teams will eventually try to tackle a game where some elements like this are inherently "unfair." True MMORPGers of the sort who played EQ and UO are a much different breed of player than your average WoW-huffing Blizzardite, and can actually be reasoned with, provided that rules are just and cases made.
You could always hide it behind a perma-death wall. In order to use magic you must tap into the ability that makes your character immortal, meaning that if you're at 50% mana you lose 50% of your characters power(at 10% mana you lose 90%).
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
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In fact, we see these same unequal forces essentially at play with EVE Online's Titans. Yes, wonderful - you have the universe's largest and most powerful vessel at your disposal, with an incredibly strong superweapon... but without escorts, it's dead.
It's not an ideal example for this discussion, because the Jedi class itself was "iconic" (and would be highly sought after) in the Star Wars IP, and combining that with the most powerful abilities in the game was a guarantee that it would cause MAJOR problems.
Six months after launch, players were accusing SOE of lying about the "mysterious path" to unlock Jedi, and were claiming that it didn't actually exist. It seemed like nobody was getting it, so it must be a lie, not so ?
Players started leaving the game because they couldn't be a Jedi. They couldn't re-live their movie-trilogy fantasies of being Luke Skywalker. Being "rare and powerful" worked in the movies, because it was the story of ONE jedi. Multiplying that one jedi by 150K players in one small game world was obviously going to wreck the experience...
How does that make magic rare?
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You fly a Titan with escorts because it is expensive....
Okay, and if a Titan was the be-all, end-all of ships, it would be able to solo just fine, expensive or not, wouldn't it? Yeah, it's an expensive ship, but price wouldn't matter in the slightest if it wasn't incredibly vulnerable to boot.
Don't try to hang your comprehension issues on my example, bud.