On 08/21/2017 05:49 PM, David Hurst wrote:
As stated, i'm trying to enhance the messages that players receive when learning
spells. To make this more engaging I wanted to have a clear picture of what we
all think these spellcasting skills represent. As a starting point I presented
this list as a definition of what is *currently *in place:
Evocation <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:evocation>- Spells that
remove energy (cold spells, poison, draining?, depletion?)
Sorcery <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:sorcery>- Spells that create
things (physical damage, food, strengthening)
Pyromancy <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:pyromancy>- Spells that
add energy (fire, lightning, light)
Summoning <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:summoning>- Spells that
call and control monsters (golems, pets, etc)
Praying <http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/spells:praying>- Spells gifted by
channeling your gods wishes through prayer
You can check the above links to see what spells are currently available for
each skill. I don't think the spells that are in the wrong place are not even
remotely going to cause balance issues. Large bullet moving to sorcery is not
going to break evocation which currently has all of the cold spells to level
with including icestorm at level 1. Ball lightning moving to pyromancy isn't
going to wreck evocation.
Having said that, I had this thought as I was writing the text for evocation and
it dawned on me that I have no idea what evocation actually is. Ruben pointed
out (and I agree with him) that the current spells don't line up very well with
historical definitions of evocation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evocation>and
sorcery <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery>. As far as I can tell it would
be straightforward to flip all the spells in the two skills over so that we have:
Evocation - Spells that create things (physical damage, food, strengthening)
Sorcery - Spells that remove energy (cold spells, poison, draining?, depletion?)
Pyromancy - Spells that add energy (fire, lightning, light)
Summoning - Spells that call and control monsters (golems, pets, etc)
Praying - Spells gifted by channeling your gods wishes through prayer
The definitions can be hard to map, because in dungeons of dragons, things
like fireball, lightning bolt, and almost all damage spells are in the
'evocation' school (they have different and more schools, so there isn't a 1:1
mapping)
As Leaf noted, in the past, there was some issues with balance in schools -
sorcery didn't have enough damage spells, so was hard to level. Note that there
also isn't any reason that there can't be some overlap in those skills -
certainly the reason that there was pyromancy in addition to evocation is all
the fire spells got put in evocation, it would have been an overly good skill.
And in some cases, I think there is basically the same spell (with slightly
different name) in multiple skills.
I'm not sure if you are looking for definition only, or if you plan to move
some spells to different skills. If the former, it will probably be hard to
really come up with too good a definition that covers everything for the reasons
above (this spell matches pyromancy definiton, why is it in evocation, etc).
If you are going to move spells around, you could also rename the skills if so
desired at that point to have better mapping (not that I necessary have better
ideas for new names). I think summoning is the most well defined and clear cut.
But there are also some spells which got dumped into sorcery as it was
basically the catchall for anything that did not fit evocation, pyromancy, or
summoning.
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