Spell Idea

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Archived from groups: alt.games.everquest (More info?)

A friend and I were talking about that upcoming D&D MMORPG, and an
article he read and was telling me about from the developers, on the
problems of adapting the D&D system to an MMORPG.

While discussing this, I had an interesting idea for a spell or ability:
Foresight.

Here's how it would work. You cast Foresight before a fight
(particularly before boss fights), which is a group spell. Every member
of the group is told that they feel a vision coming on, and asked if
they accept the vision. If they all do, for the next N seconds (higher
level Foresight would have a larger N), the party's actions take place
in the vision, not in the real world.

So, the party uses Foresight, and attacks the boss. When the vision
ends, the party is back to where it started--nothing was real, no one is
dead, the mob is not dead, no loot was won. The fight was not real.

However, if the party attacks the boss for real, within a short time
after the end of the vision, the real fight will match the vision (if
the party members act the same way for real that they did in the vision).

Basically, the server records the sequence of choices made by the
players during the vision, and the decisions made by the mobs, and the
results of random events such as to-hit rolls and damage, and then,
during the real fight, compares the real fight to that record. As long
as the players' choices match the record from the vision, the server
makes the mob choices and the random events match. If a player deviates
from the vision record (casts the wrong spell, for example), the mobs
and random rolls are no longer constrained by the vision record.

So, if you see victory in your vision, then you just have to do the same
thing, and you will win. If you see defeat in your vision, and choose
to fight anyway, you can follow the vision up until your first fatal
mistake, and then avoid that.

I think this could be a fun spell.

--
--Tim Smith

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.everquest (More info?)

Tim Smith <reply_in_group@mouse-potato.com> writes:
> Here's how it would work. You cast Foresight before a fight
> (particularly before boss fights), which is a group spell. Every member
> of the group is told that they feel a vision coming on, and asked if
> they accept the vision. If they all do, for the next N seconds (higher
> level Foresight would have a larger N), the party's actions take place
> in the vision, not in the real world.
>
> So, the party uses Foresight, and attacks the boss. When the vision
> ends, the party is back to where it started--nothing was real, no one is
> dead, the mob is not dead, no loot was won. The fight was not real.
>
> However, if the party attacks the boss for real, within a short time
> after the end of the vision, the real fight will match the vision (if
> the party members act the same way for real that they did in the vision).

This sounds neat, but would be a nightmare to implement. What
counts as "acting the same way"? If someone's timing differs by
a fraction of a second on the replay, does that break the vision?
If someone turns a few degrees more or less, or steps slightly
closer or further, does that break the vision? Heck, thinking back
on any of the big battles I've been in, I sure wouldn't want to have
to repeat all my actions exactly, or anything even close to it.

I suppose you could have the vision end with an opportunity for the
group (or raid?) to accept the outcome of the vision; if everyone
agrees, the action picks up where the vision ended. But that would
bring its own problems, because people would be in the middle of
casting spells or songs, and fighters would be in the groove, and
suddenly the action would stop while everyone discussed whether to
take the result and keep going, and then boom, you're back in the
fight and everyone's rhythms are screwed up!

Realistically, I think the best you could hope for from this spell
would be a "practice" fight: You get to fight for a few minutes and
see what happens, but then it's all rolled back to when you cast the
spell. You can then decide whether to go ahead with the real fight,
but there's no guarantee that the result will be the same. It would
still be a great way to try out some possible tactics without risking
an actual wipe.

Even so, the implementation details are enormous, especially if you're
not in an instanced zone. What happens to the rest of the world while
you're seeing your Vision? What if someone else trains a wandering
mob past your group; is that part of the vision too? Will it be undone
when the vision fades, even though the person it was chasing wasn't in
your group? What happens to that person? Not to mention the headaches
of remembering the state of all your items, spell reset timers, etc.,
so they can be restored later.

And finally, the spell has far too much potential for abuse. People
could use it to scout out areas, for example: just cast Vision, then
the group spreads out and sees what mobs are where, checks whether
chests are trapped, and so forth, and then uses the information to
plan what to do for real.

In face-to-face role-playing, spells and other plot devices (oracles,
etc.) that let players see the future are always very hard to work in,
and that's with a live GM who's able to nudge the story line to make
things come out fitting the (usually vague) predictions. Getting it
to work in an automated fashion sounds like quite the can of worms.

-- Don.

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