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Author Topic: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]  (Read 56354 times)

voliol

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #45 on: February 12, 2019, 03:49:54 am »

I've always gotten an enormous kick out of the idea of magic associated with the Pregnancy sphere, especially with the community's well-known frustration with dwarven children and catsplosions.
Pregnancy

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There are lots of interesting negative ways that this could work out too, I imagine:
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Edit- oops didn't mean to post yet

There's also a BIRTH sphere, and FERTILITY, that overlap with it. It's an unusually complicated sphere for sure.

Animals
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Hapchazzard

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #46 on: February 12, 2019, 01:12:23 pm »

Added everything except for DEFORMITY and voliol's suggestions for ANIMALS, will do those soon, too.

On the whole pregnancy/birth thing - yeah, I noticed that those two spheres are a bit problematic in terms of overlap, in that it's difficult to dissociate them from each other. I thought about potentially bundling them together into a single hybrid sphere, but I'll wait to see what other people come up with for them first. Suicide and misery are another two spheres that have a similar problem.

Also, someone mentioned their suggestions being 'unbalanced', to which I say - at HIGH and especially EXTREME levels, balance should be almost a non-factor. Toady himself said in the PC gamer interview that magic shouldn't be inherently balanced (unless we're talking about the literal BALANCE sphere, presumably, but that's a different thing) or else it would probably be boring. My personal opinion is that every single sphere should have at least one spell effect in the EXTREME category that makes you think "Wow, that sounds OP as hell!". The thing is, very high magic levels would usually be difficult and costly to reach, and even if you do, would be far more difficult to control, and misfires would have the potential to be far more devastating than normal, providing a natural 'balance' to every extreme ability anyways. If I'm constantly throwing massive walls of fire at besieging armies with a noobish caster, I shouldn't be surprised if at some point they misfire and cause a volcano to erupt in the middle of my fort. That, IMO, should provide a natural sort of 'balance' without forcing magic to be boring and formulaic.
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Pillbo

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #47 on: February 12, 2019, 06:32:29 pm »

Ok this is too much fun to think about, I need to give it a break

Pregnancy

SNIP

There's also a BIRTH sphere, and FERTILITY, that overlap with it. It's an unusually complicated sphere for sure.

Yeah, I was thinking that a lot of the pregnancy ideas might work better for fertility. But after looking at the wiki FERTILITY as it exists in game is associated with the spheres for AGRICULTURE, FOOD, and RAIN with it's precluded sphere being BLIGHT.  So unless fertility's definition changes I would think pregnancy ideas would just need split up with BIRTH and maybe some CREATION (it's associated spheres are  BIRTH, CHILDREN, CREATION, FAMILY, MARRIAGE)
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Animals
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"The biome itself is an animal" That is so awesome, similar idea could be had for PLANTS or TREES.  I love the idea of animals becoming more intelligent, maybe even turning into animal people with magical strength, while dwarves become more animalistic with time, what an interesting effect it would be to have a fortress turn into an Beast-person fortress slowly over time while all your dwarves slowly wondered off into the wilds to live.  I could also imagine people interpreting this scenario was being against the spirit of the animal sphere to “elevate” animals to the form of humanoids. I kind of hope both are possible but I also imagine this type scenario:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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Pillbo

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #48 on: February 12, 2019, 06:34:03 pm »

TREES (Child of NATURE  & PLANTS )

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DEFORMITY

SNIP

Some of these might work better with DEFORMITY's associated sphere DISEASE, I’ll try to separate them a little —

+
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DISEASE

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voliol

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #49 on: February 13, 2019, 03:47:28 am »

I can't really come up with any ideas for the rest of the spheres that have already been gone through once, so I'll start with a "new" one.

Water
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voliol

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #50 on: February 14, 2019, 01:13:29 pm »

...and more of it:
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Hapchazzard

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #51 on: February 14, 2019, 01:33:42 pm »

Alrighty, added TREES and DEFORMITY. Need to add DISEASE and WATER, too. Since someone used the 'rituals and sources' category now, thought I'd add some of them to some of the existing spheres:

Fire
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Agriculture
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Water
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voliol

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #52 on: February 16, 2019, 09:13:28 am »

Art
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Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Pillbo

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #53 on: February 16, 2019, 09:17:57 pm »

As another was DREAMS could go.

Environmental effect from  Med-Extreme creatures increasingly lose touch with reality. Like walking into a forgetful fog. 
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Hapchazzard

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #54 on: February 17, 2019, 08:11:37 am »

Just an FYI for everyone - I'm currently away from home, and formatting posts on mobile is a pain, to say the least. I'll continue updating the list when I get back home tomorrow.
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voliol

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #55 on: February 20, 2019, 04:33:30 am »

Light:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

therahedwig

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #56 on: February 20, 2019, 11:24:59 am »

Quote
Dye an object white.

Maybe it'd be an idea to turn this into 'dye an object into any other color', because rainbows are a form of light, right, and light is like, waves. And I think it'd also like, dilute the association between white and light because that might be a teensy bit racially charged, fairly specific to a neo-classical understanding of light(earlier understandings such as egyptian, early christian often connected light and the color red and gold), and in turn make DF a little less flexible.
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voliol

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #57 on: February 20, 2019, 12:37:30 pm »

Quote
Dye an object white.

Maybe it'd be an idea to turn this into 'dye an object into any other color', because rainbows are a form of light, right, and light is like, waves. And I think it'd also like, dilute the association between white and light because that might be a teensy bit racially charged, fairly specific to a neo-classical understanding of light(earlier understandings such as egyptian, early christian often connected light and the color red and gold), and in turn make DF a little less flexible.

Yeah that's sensible. The problem is that you might want to leave the "dye into any color" effect for the actual RAINBOWS sphere, though I suppose some overlap wouldn't be that big of an issue. The "light-iest" color changing between worlds is a really interesting, I was not aware of the historical perspective.

Pillbo

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #58 on: February 21, 2019, 03:06:24 pm »

DREAMS

MED
- Causes distractability, forgetfulness
HIGH
- Amnesia, confusion, lost in a mental haze
EXTREME
- Lose touch with reality, can be convinced of anything and easily manipulated, mind controlled

______________________________

BALANCE is a weird one, I don't have much but-

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
______________________________

WEALTH
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______________________________

Quote
Dye an object white.

Maybe it'd be an idea to turn this into 'dye an object into any other color', because rainbows are a form of light, right, and light is like, waves. And I think it'd also like, dilute the association between white and light because that might be a teensy bit racially charged, fairly specific to a neo-classical understanding of light(earlier understandings such as egyptian, early christian often connected light and the color red and gold), and in turn make DF a little less flexible.

Yeah that's sensible. The problem is that you might want to leave the "dye into any color" effect for the actual RAINBOWS sphere, though I suppose some overlap wouldn't be that big of an issue. The "light-iest" color changing between worlds is a really interesting, I was not aware of the historical perspective.

LIGHT

I agree that LIGHT =/= WHITE, at least IRL, in the way the game works it could be that WHITE=LIGHT, BLACK=DARK, I don't know.  RAINBOWS are a really hard one too, since they are just an effect on light, it could be they should just be a sub-sphere in light and not really their own sphere, or if WHITE=LIGHT, BLACK=DARK, then COLOR=RAINBOWS; I guess it's how much Toady wants these to be attached to their real world counterparts.

For brainstorming's sake I would think of LIGHT as the totality of the electromagnetic spectrum, radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light (RAINBOW), ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. That said a strongly LIGHT aligned sphere could possibly be extremely hostile to life. If everything here gives off light, and in any part of the spectrum the area could quickly become extremely radioactive. I have no idea if Toady would want to incorporate radiation into the game, but I don't think anyone would be surprised. You might have to wear lead armor to survive this area.
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thompson

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Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« Reply #59 on: February 21, 2019, 06:46:13 pm »

Overlap between spheres can be resolved by organising them into families and having some effects common to the entire family, others specific to some sub-branch, and some to a specific sphere. The spheres kind of already have some heirachy, so perhaps it could be derived from that?
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