more on spells

[Nick Williams <njw@cs.city.ac.uk>]

It would be nice at some point if the spells were not hardcoded,
allowing people to create new spells on the fly:  you could link with
tcl or somesuch and define a language for spell effects and then allow
users to create spells of their own, or to learn new spells by reading
them from one-off books (which could be accidentally destroyed). 

With such a "on-the-fly" spell idea, the learning of spells becomes more
interesting.  You can have cantrips which are common spells known all
over the place: things you may find in spell scrolls for instance.  And
then more interesting spells would be on specific magic books which are
guarded or hidden.  You could also teach spells to other players, or
enscribe a scroll or book with a spell to give to other people.  Perhaps
wizards/mages could keep spellbooks in which they transcribe all of the
spells/cantrips they learn and on death, other people might find the
spellbooks with all the different spells in.  This would require
spellbooks to contain a list of spells in contrast to scrolls which
contain a single spell (much more realistic methinks).  Then spellbooks
would become rare artifacts, which should also have some sort of
protection (using the berkeley rune code) attached to them.  Attempting
to read a spellbook where the rune has not been deactivated in the
correct way would trigger the rune's effects (typically fireball or
somesuch).

example:
	book of fire spells: containing all sizes of fireball, firewall
generation, protection from fire, etc.
	Book of Iff: contains all the spells known by Iff.

This sounds like a pretty excellent idea to me, with not too much
modification to be done as it relies on simple enhancements to current
code: allowing runes to being applied to objects; providing different
mechanisms for deactivating runes; ability to transcribe a spell is a
simple patch onto an object, "teaching" spells would work in an
identical manner; enhancing spellbooks to have multiple spells.  The
runtime addition of new spells could be done at a later point, when the
distributed stuff was built in, as it would need to be there anyhow
(e.g. client connects to server which knows a spell you've never heard
of...).

Comments?
Nick Williams                          E-mail: njw@cs.city.ac.uk (MIME and ATK)
Systems Architecture Research Centre,  Tel: +44 71 477 8551
London, EC1V 0HB                       Fax: +44 71 477 8587