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magic and fighters




  I really hate class distinctions.  I think it's fundamentally stupid
to say "This guy is a wizard, so he cannot equip armour".  Has the
wizard got spines or something?  Why shouldn't a wizard be able to swing
around a sword?  Or wear armour?

  But why should someone wearing armour be good at casting spells?  Also,
why should someone who is swinging around a heavy sword have hands free for
effective spellcasting?

If you're wearing a tin can, your spells should fail more often.  I would
MUCH rather see this built in to the code than trying to hard-code
distinctions between classes.

  Why does everyone hate the concept of the Renaissance Man so much?
What's wrong with one player being very, very good at two different things?
Koss, that ice skater from Norway, won some gold medals and is also in
medical school.  Why should we hard-code it so that players like Koss are
impossible?  It happens in real life, but we want to make it impossible
in a fantasy game?

  It is sufficient to build in a greater chance of spell failure
if you're wearing too much garbage.  Prayers should be immune to this.
This is also much easier than building in class distinctions.

  I really disagree with the idea that you should always be what you start
as.  I think you should be what you are good at.  Comon, a fighter who has
a strength of 16 and an int of 25 should be played like a wizard, not
like a fighter.  And with an int of 25, he should be a damned good wizard,
not crippled because he bears the arbitrary label 'fighter'.

  I DO agree that a person should not be both a good fighter and
a good magician at the same instant.  I do not think Koss could wear ice
skates and do surgery at the same time.

  Similarly, a player should not be able to wear armor and swing a sword
around and cast spells at the same time, at least not very successfully.

  I think that's a much better way of doing it than having 'classes'.
What needs to be done:

1)  Build in spell failure dependent on armour worn and weapons wielded
2)  Make it MUCH more expensive in time to take armour on and off.
3)  have spell failures do various amusing things.

  I will eventually do these things if no one does them first.

PeterM