Asheron\'s Call 1 had a verbalized magic system. The player still had to gather reagents and practice combining them to learn spells. He also had to have those components in his inventory when he wanted to cast a particular spell. When you cast a spell, you actually spoke a set of combined syllables. From \"listening\" to these syllables, another mage could discern the order of the schools to which the neccesary components belonged and gain some idea of how to combine reagents (or runes) to cast it himself.
Additonally, some components varied so as to make the publishing of spell lists and component combinations impossible. Well, not impossible but not exact either. As a spell became higher level, the number of components, their order and the quantities needed varied more and more greatly.
If you can imagine a line of 12 boxes which would be the \"learning screen\", a mage would pull components from his inventory to \"assemble\" a spell. Lower level spells might use only 6 boxes while higher ones used them all. Some spells required that a particular component be placed in more than one box. Themnage wouldthen hit the experiment key to see if he\'d created a useful combination. If he had, an icon for that spell was created in his spell book and could be placed in a hot key for combat use.
To make a system like this as open as possible, it seems you\'d mostly just have to create a list of uncombinable sequences, not actually define all the allowable spells.
So, it might be something like this:
A B C D E F G H I J K L
Where:
A=School of magic to define the elemental forces summoned.
B=Damage modifier
C=Damage over time modifier
D=Target skill of debuff
E=Stun effect if any
F=Hold effect if any
G=Duration
H=Level range. Defines a higher set of starting effects linked to I.
I=Determines which effect (B, C, D, E or F) H moves to higher range
J, K & L=Randomizers.
In fact, Asherons call put the randomizers first and increased the number of them as spell difficulty increased. this had the effect of forcing even more experimentation as the slots which created the effect were shifted in position. Every \'Slot\" contributed a syllable to the actual \"vocalization\" of the spell which occured when it was cast. The syllable changed depending on the actual reagent or rune which was in each slot. One of the randomizers also altered the syllable sets for every component so gold might be \"etf\" up to a certain level but became \"evu\" at higher level. Of course the system can be made even more complicated by introducing \"quality\" to the components as well.
The real trick to a system like this is not the spell creation matrix itself however but devising a system of spell animations to compliment it. I can\'t honestly recall the spell animations from Asheron\'s Call 1 but it seems for this sort of system to be really cool, there would need to be an animation matrix that more or less altered the animation based on the exact spell.
Let me clarify-One feature of a spell system like this is that there could be 20 or even more ranks of damage (or duration) for essentially the same spell. It would suck if they all had the same animation however. Not to mention that a spell that debuffed armor should look different from one that debuffs health and so on. Creating static animations for all these spells is a daunting task particularly for an open source, all-volunteer game.
What\'s needed, I think is for color to be the primary alterable animation component. Then a particular spell would have several short, linked animations and the colors of each would vary based on the spell strength etc. This could be a \"hidden\" element which was defined when the spell matrix was created. If it\'s possible to actually have animations play \"on top\" of each other, all the better.
That\'s my two cents...for now.
