thread: 2013-09-03 : Ordering the Conversation: How do you choose?
On 2013-09-04, Josh W wrote:
It's hard to work this out in general, so I'll be specific, hopefully that will illuminate something:
In this situation, I'd want people to want to be wizards in order to pull off their goals, but I don't want them just to be wizards.
This means that magic has to help in their goals, but they cannot just hit a cast a spell button and implement the formal magic procedure in order to do that.
So where does this conversation fit in that overall scheme? Is it at the climax (wizards prepare for ages then pull off a grand spell)?
Is it a momentary tool in goals that are achieved another way (so it creates leverage of various kinds that are then used to bring people to their knees)?
Is it somehow continuous through the course of the game (everything is feeding into the spell you are pulling off)?
Next I'd want to create interesting or amusing interactions between the players, do they compete for resources? Do they seek multiple different overlapping kinds of leverage? Do they deal with the conflicting effects of their spells on the world?
This sets up the things that the mechanic will need to call back to or set up, and also some other constraints.
I suspect that if I was actually building this, I'd want two types of spell, the quick magical spice of doing wizardly things to make your life easier, and the big spells that you use as you're getting more malevolent. But as I'd want people to feel comfortable with the latter idea, the conversation would have to be compatible with both.
For that reason out of what I've come up with so far I'd focus on spells as leverage, with basic spells being of the "harry potter enchanted cutlery to cut up your steaks" style of thing, and then slowly upscale into stealing people's rain, turning their doors into walls, causing their fires to attack them, that sort of thing. Having the players as competing terrorists with their own armies of random objects seems an interesting sort of concept.
This best fits the second option, although given that it's effects will be mostly preparatory, I would want the random element to represent something fairly permanent. So the levels of control over an object would be dependent on some feature of the object, and the power rolled for the spell. There'd probably also be rules about getting there first, or about removing people's control of things.
As may be implicit, if they want to make people bow, living creatures cannot be a part of what the spell effects.
To create a reward cycle, you could have other people increase the wizard?s power by doing certain things for him that he can't do by magic, so there is a sort of escalation of tyranny.
