here\'s a suggestion of an idea-source for the spell-system developers:
One of the best developed spell systems that I have ever come across is Rolemaster\'s Spell Law. I would imagine that getting a hold of the Spell Law book these days would be a little challenging. But it would be well worth the effort. Spell Law was, to my mind, vastly better than the AD&D spell system, or any of the other alternatives that were around a decade ago or so.
I think that Spell Law (SL) would mesh well with PlaneShift spells as they have been conceived of so far for a couple of reasons. First, SL was developed in the context of a game which permitted everyone to learn all skills (but used differential costs) much like PlaneShift. One variant didn\'t have classes -- exactly like PlaneShift. So in this respect, very little adaptation would be required to port some of the ideas.
SL divides spells into three groups: channelling, essence and mentalist. Channelled spells come from a diety. Essence spells are elemental in nature (in some broad sense). Mentalist spells depend on the mind, just as the name suggests. With some revisions, many of the spells that SL used could be translated into the 6-fold structure used by PlaneShift. I would imagine that many of the channelling spells would end up being in the dark or crystal categories. Many of the essence spells slot in naturally into the four elemental types. The mentalism spells would again end up being azure (in the case of illusions) or perhaps dark for the rest.
I think the thing that would make SL most useful to look at would be the actual detailed content of the spell lists themselves. Some of the spells were quite unique and very helpful. Myself, I\'m really bored of two of the standard alternatives in games today: D&D spells (1st: magic missie, 2nd level: web etc., 3rd level: fireball, then globe of invulnerability and the various \'Hand\' spells, etc. ). The EverQuest system which involves having lots of \'pets\' which do most of the fighting for you sucks too. Neverwinter when played conservatively also relies on pets like crazy. The probelm is that the spell caster ends up being a sort of spectator. Spell Law spells can give a developer some ideas as to how to go about creating a completely different system with few (if any) precedents in video-games.
Something else I should mention: Each of the three general spell schools in SL includes so-called \'open\', \'closed\' and \'arcane\' spell lists. The open lists are relatively easy to acquire. They can be learned from many teachers and contain common (but sometimes quite powerful) spells. Characters who had not actually specialized in spell-casting, like ranger or rogue types, can learn these spells without much trouble. The closed lists, in contrast, are available only to serious students. The difference is not merely a question of the power of the spells (in fact, often it\'s not that) -- closed spell lists contain some rather useful spells not on the open ones. I think the Planeshift equivalent might be glyphs which cannot be combined with other glyphs until a sufficiently high level in the various Ways had been attained. Finally the arcane lists were highly specialied. In some variants of the game, only particular classes had access to these lists and guarded them sedulously. An astrologer, for example, would have no access to the seer\'s dedicated lists, and so on. I think the way to implement that in PlaneShift might be to allow certain spells only once a particular combination of skills had been learned.
I hope I\'ve managed to convey the flavour of some of why Spell Law might be worth looking at. It would certainly be a great place to dig for ideas in making the PlaneShift spell system unique (at least among MMORPGs).
(In fact, Rolemaster generally--before the expansion packs--is a great place to look for design clues.)
cheers.
