Posted by Proud Blade(VIP) on November 28, 2000 at 14:22:11:
In Reply to: Re: pen skill (little idea) posted by Isildur on November 28, 2000 at 08:01:56:
1) Necromancers who use a scroll for duo dimension. (Just park the zombies nearby. Who types "where zombie"?) 2) Invokers with a conjured (and shielded) archon. 3) Thieves with summon scrolls. 4) Bards sending nightgaunts, and fiending you as soon as you are dropped off in a norecall area. In addition to the game balance aspects, you have to consider the impact on exploration. Why risk dying in some god-awful deadly area when you could instead sit with your four mage buddies in some dark corner of Thera and get all the prep you'd need? You'd need some more serious checks and balances. Spell level can also be deceptive: Sleep is level 10, haste is level 15, conjure/bind elemental is level 20, crimson scourge is level 23, etc. A huge amount of mana isn't such a big deal... heroes can easily have 1000 or so, and regenerate it quickly, especially if slowed and/or Arcana. Requiring mastery of pen and scrolls is a good start, but both of those can be practiced with a little thinking and a lot of spam. Oddly, gold might be the most effective limit- paper is not cheap, although a little bit of exploration means that you can rack it up. (While it's not so hard to rack up gold, it does take time, and exploration knowledge. If you know easy ways to rack up gold, you also probably know easy ways to get cool scrolls.) If you needed -really- good paper (and pens) to write even simple scrolls (say spell level + 10), with a good chance of failure (even with perfected skills), then maybe you've got something. Still, it's a thorny issue because of "problem" spells like sleep which would allow single characters to act as very effective "teams", and inventing ways that might stop people from exploring more is bad as well. > If this ever did come to pass, it would have to be severely limited. If not, you'd have the same problems as when the Masters could brew potions. > Imagine getting slept by a Necromancer, then getting slow, soften and fumble cast you in addition to all the Necro maledictions, then your attacker begins the fight with a Hero-ranked Nova spell (or some other attack that hits the vulnerability of your character). Or how 'bout the trannie who holds you, then uses word of death? > Not to mention all the enhancements people would be casting on themselves...haste (which is already available), spiderhands, stoneskin (also already available), invoker shields (this would be huge). > I would suggest the following restrictions if this is ever implemented: > 1) A given pen/paper combo can only be used to create scrolls for spells whose level (for the creator's class) is lower than that of the *lesser* of the pen and paper's levels. > 2) A created scroll can only be used by a player whose rank is equal to or greater than that of the creator. This would prevent heros from cooking up really nasty scrolls and giving them to young folks. They can already dole out nasty eq, though, so maybe this isn't an issue. > 3) Can only create if pen/scrolls are both at 100%, plus the spell to be scribed also at 100%. > 4) It should take a huge amount of mana to create a scroll, and the success rate shouldn't be that high.