Re: [Adonthell-devel] On combinations

[cirrus]

oooh I like your ideas on mixing!

Thing is we'd need a few rules on what sort of thigs can be mixed..

I guess you can always combine a spell with a spell and get a new spell:

spell + spell = spell

Spells could enchant pretty much anything too:

spell + weapon = weapon
spell + armour = armour
spell + potion = potion

Potions would behave in a similar way I suppose:

potion + potion = potion
potion + armour = armour (you can imagine pouring something onto armour,
right?)
potion + weapon = weapon

but combining weapons with each other doesn't make any sense

weapon + weapon = ----
weapon + armour = ----
armour + armour = ----

...unless you allow smithies to melt 2 weapons and make you a new
combined one but then you have problems like "what does it look like"
etc..

Anyway, if we allow the above kind of combinations then all
weapons/spells/potions... need earth, fire, water and air values.

I think the goal of mixing stuff should be to try to purify one or two
of the elements. Like, if a sword ends up 70% fire and 10% each for the
other elements then it's a fire sword! We could take this concept into
other areas of the game too, so different enemies might be more or less
suceptable to different elements - an orc might be immune to fire but
scared of water. So your fire sword won't do much damage to him but an
ice spell will.

Also since we have 4 main races each could have an element associated
with it - humans might be fire, dwarves earth, elves water and
half-elves air. So bearing that in mind a human might be able to handle
a fire sword better than an elf. Or an air based healing spell will work
best on a half-elf etc. etc.


The only difficulty I can see regarding spells and potions is avoiding
just having a fairly small selection of types of spell/potion. By this I
mean using the mixing approach you can create almost infinite amounts of
new potions all with slightly different characteristics but you might
end up not having any unique, memorable spells. If all are just healing
or attack with slightly different combinations of the elements you miss
out on other random types of spell, like, I dunno, changing enemies into
bunny rabbits and stff like that.

Perhaps spells and items can have an 'unchangeable' attribute which
means no matter what you try to combine with them they don't change.
This too can be extended - you might have 'additive' ones which keep all
of their characteristic but absorb anything that's mixed with them - so
essentially they'd have two parts once they've been mixed once - the bit
that was mixed in which when new things are thrown into the mix behaves
as if it was on it's own and then you have the 'unchangeble' rest which
is always present.
There can also be 'volatile' things which get destroyed as soon as any
attempt is made to combine them with something.


        -James

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