[MOD-WIP] Mighty Magick - A complete magic overhaul

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kiskoller
Posts: 36
Joined: Fri Sep 27, 2019 11:13 am

Re: [MOD-WIP] Mighty Magick - A complete magic overhaul

Post by kiskoller »

I've looked into spell acquisition as progression topic.

Sadly any kind of change to how spells are acquired would require change in the game's source code to expose some methods for mods. Examples: register magic effects and spells (bundles), limiting spellmaking based on cost and skill, differentiating between spell vendors.

As of now there is a feature lock untill 1.0, which means no such development will be approved.

Due to these constraints development of this mod is halted. I will tweak the existing mod features based on feedback, should I receive any, but I don't think I can add anything new to it.

daggerdude
Posts: 241
Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 2:22 pm

Re: [MOD-WIP] Mighty Magick - A complete magic overhaul

Post by daggerdude »

I read through your post and thought about it a tad, and I just had some feedback for you.

- because arrows can miss and swings can fail there is a certain fairness to spell failing. However the difference between all those things is that mages can send far fewer attacks making it very unfair even to archery where most people would carry at least 50 arrows. On that basis I think that chance should be eliminated.

-I think that the more powerful spell the more it should cost, but without the complexity of the current spell system. This might sound screwy but I think arena had a much better spell system in general. You got a list of spells with costs attached to them and the only thing that might fail is a creature right might resisted or you might not have enough mana.

- this would have to be another mod but I think it's BS that alchemists don't sell potions and that you can't pay an alchemist to make potions for you and that you have to join the temple, what you can only join one temple of. This might seem unrelated but in fact there's absolutely no way to play as a mage without good potions, and having to go through the temple is really a pain in the ass.

- I think that the schools as well are kinda... Crappy. Daggerfall spells are pretty crap compared to Morrowind or oblivion even.
Going pure mage is so not worth it. Magical candles? Creating objects? Banish spells that have like no chance of success?

- the best pure mage game I've ever played is diablo 1. 2 was alright, let's not talk about 3. Idk for a game like daggerfall theage should have more power than it does.

kiskoller
Posts: 36
Joined: Fri Sep 27, 2019 11:13 am

Re: [MOD-WIP] Mighty Magick - A complete magic overhaul

Post by kiskoller »

daggerdude wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 2:09 pm I read through your post and thought about it a tad, and I just had some feedback for you.

- because arrows can miss and swings can fail there is a certain fairness to spell failing. However the difference between all those things is that mages can send far fewer attacks making it very unfair even to archery where most people would carry at least 50 arrows. On that basis I think that chance should be eliminated.
I did manage to fully eliminate chance from damaging spells. I agree with your logic here.
daggerdude wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 2:09 pm -I think that the more powerful spell the more it should cost, but without the complexity of the current spell system. This might sound screwy but I think arena had a much better spell system in general. You got a list of spells with costs attached to them and the only thing that might fail is a creature right might resisted or you might not have enough mana.
So you suggest the removal of spell scaling? Honestly I also think it's the way to go. Remove spell scaling, introduce spell tiers to block player from stronger spells. Stronger spells cost more magicka but are a tiny bit more economical. Similar to Morrowind.
daggerdude wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 2:09 pm - this would have to be another mod but I think it's BS that alchemists don't sell potions and that you can't pay an alchemist to make potions for you and that you have to join the temple, what you can only join one temple of. This might seem unrelated but in fact there's absolutely no way to play as a mage without good potions, and having to go through the temple is really a pain in the ass.
You can also join the Dark Brotherhood as well. There is also a mod for alchemical kit you can use. I haven't tried it yet because I haven't really delved into alchemy yet. I disagree, in vanilla you don't need potions as a mage. But restore power is really useful now.
daggerdude wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 2:09 pm - I think that the schools as well are kinda... Crappy. Daggerfall spells are pretty crap compared to Morrowind or oblivion even.
Going pure mage is so not worth it. Magical candles? Creating objects? Banish spells that have like no chance of success?
I disagree. Playing mage is really rewarding, at high levels it is unkillable, oneshots everything, flies on demand, charms people, maxes out every stat via buffs. Truly powerful.

daggerdude
Posts: 241
Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 2:22 pm

Re: [MOD-WIP] Mighty Magick - A complete magic overhaul

Post by daggerdude »

On Potions, continued:

Daggerfall is a crazy game. you can buy ships and houses and have another life basically in this game. Potions, regardless of where you get them, are expensive ish in time and money, but it's not unobtainable, which leads to the problem. Potions are either everything, or nothing.
Later games treat them like buying a mountain dew. Morrowind probably had the best system though in that potions were expensive and you had alchemy and a potion could be all the difference, but you couldn't depend on them.

This is why i'm saying potions are really another thing all together, and there's really no good solution. I do understand i can get the potion maker by joining the dark brotherhood, but why can't i just join the temple of julianos? And even then, temple skill requirements are all over the place.

To be sure, Temples need an overhaul. There should be a temple between the 6 of them that caters to pure warriors, pure mages, pure thieves, and 3 hybrids that are helpful like battle mages, bards, or cleric/healer. That way you can role play them well and get your potion fix.

But then you also get potions WAY LATE in the game because bethesda thought this was how things should be balanced. It's stupid, and like i said, needs to change....

But you can't really balance your mod around what the game SHOULD be, you have to model it around the system in place. so, idk. Good luck on that one i guess.

On Schools:

Morrowind is perhaps the most developed magic system in the series, though oblivion was a blast to play as a pure mage. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Spells

Thaumagery basically got rolled into illusion and replaced with conjuration: a great move. As a mage you need a meat shield, you simply do. Otherwise, you have to basically sleep a lot, save scum, abuse magic items, ect to really get the most out of your game.

The language skills were dropped, which was the best decision ever, and also changed the spells up drastically. Who wants to pacify a monster by learning a language or stuff from like 3 different spell schools when you can just use the pacify or charm spell?
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Magic

By FAR, the morrowind spells were better, and i would reiterate that they were the absolute best in the series to me
Oblivion was a little too... streamlined? like, they had to axe some of the more esoteric things to make it a console game or something since they got a contract with microsoft to basically be one of the opening games along with halo for the xbox 360 - they sold new xboxes with it and i preordered the collectors edition with the pocket guide to the empire and the septim coin with my xbox promotional.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Spells

I've been playing since arena, and based on what i understand from ALL the games, the reason I like ARENA is this.

Classes were WAY simpler. Thieves got lockpicking and crit aas a passive, magic users specialized, levels enhanced things rather than skill placement... One of the things back in the day is that the dev team "never understood" why killing a bat made you a better mage, and so the skill based system was born. But what makes the classic TTRPG's fun is your character was a fighter, or a magic user, or a ranger, or whatever, you had your limitations on race and such, and you were a TOTALLY seperate thing. I ran a D&D 1st edition game and compared to later, it's so much simpler.

And thats why i think as "ARENA2" daggerfall fell flat. It got too ambitious.

Now, for YOU AND YOUR MOD... https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Classes, https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Magic

ARENA HAD THE SPELL SYSTEM RIGHT. There were "circinate spell" levels with some pre made, canned effects. Don't get me wrong, the spellmaker in daggerfall can be useful and i always have touch and target in all elements to make sure i have a spell that works for each enemy, but i don't see why spells have to be such a pain in the ass..

The compromise then would be to revert back to a simpler form and make spells follow a simpler formula that eliminates chance and doesn't have so many useless variables in them, making them all useful. A dispel spell should always work provided you have the magic, but it definitely is a high level spell the way daggerfall does that spell, because dispel is all of a type, not up to a level. so banish will banish all daedra, holy word dispels all undead, instead of up to a certain level or whatever. thats one of the reasons they axed that spell, because it sort of was lame. At a certain point it's better to just kill a monster rather than waste all your mana on dispel or banish, but if you're roleplaying a cleric it's important to be a specialist a destroying the undead scourge and being able to banish demons and dispel undead.

But, i understand this is a overhaul utilizing what's already there, not a rework, so the best way to handle that is to make spells static and effective and let the price be what it may.
The problem is all the algorithms for calculating spell price suck, and what is fair or not fair, and that the arena specializations don't carry over for magic (but for weapons there's a buff? what?) and so theres a lot to do on a rework to make it worth reworking.

daggerdude
Posts: 241
Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 2:22 pm

Re: [MOD-WIP] Mighty Magick - A complete magic overhaul

Post by daggerdude »

Sorry I realized that was a short novella, I've been playing this for 20 years straight and it was like my first major RPG since I was able to really play computers.

Daggerfall is what happens when you take a great concept and you retool it and tweak it and expand it so much that it just becomes this big bloated thing and none of the parts work as well on paper as they do in the actual game because there's too many parts.

In summary, eliminating spell chance, simplifying spell formulas, and balancing high versus low level spells and their prices and the mana cost and the way of recovering mana would be a definite step forward in the right direction of making pure mage a fun and survivable class.

I can theorize how to make the game better in a paragraph of words but what about spells like open now? Or the language skills? How do you really balance all this stuff is what I'm wondering.

If there were any changes to the game that are sort of out of scope for what you're planning it would be this.

Temples should make a lot more sense. Like I said before, I should be able to roleplay my character a lot better and get access to the potions earlier and in the direct way I need to and want to get there.

I think potions should be reworked in the type of potions that occur in a loot pool and how many and whether you can buy them at The alchemist or not.
My opinion is the most important potions the most common ones should be sold in The alchemist inventory, such as a minor restore magica or health potion and cure disease or restore attributes potions.
I think all the resist this and boost that and such should be rare and should be pretty much exclusive to the alchemy table or extremely expensive, and definitely the ingredients themselves should be very expensive and rare.

A potion of speed or strength that adds like 20 30 points of attribute can really like change a game really quickly.

I think the most important thing for me that I wish would be added would be that all the magic schools would have a bonus to advantage like the weapons do so that your magic specialization actually matters a lot more. You can start off as a battle mage and learn all the other schools eventually given enough time and money and there's no harm or foul to it.
Take for instance of battle mage. This game was absolutely made for a battle mage to play and you're basically invincible after a while and your chances of survival are very high even early in the game.
Suppose the battle mage was great at destruction but poor in restoration or some other schools as well and basically the only thing he actually is good at is destruction, that changes the entire game and how it's played! It actually makes the need for certain magic items and potions more poignant.

And there's a lot more that could possibly be said on the magic system but those are things I think are doable with a little bit of coding that would greatly enhance the base game without changing it too terribly much and keeping it very much like an arena / daggerfall feel. Next games really change the way the game is played in a way that is unique and should be kept that way in much the same way daggerfall should be kept unique.

The perfect game to me would be if daggerfall were more like Morrowind in its skill balance, more like arena in the class design and restrictions, level based perks like in Oblivion, dual wielding and combat more like Skyrim.

And that will never happen entirely but there's definitely mods like this that can enhance the vanilla game and kind of rework some of the bugs and oversights. The trick is with everything changing it would be nice if everybody kind of worked on a remastered daggerfall together with vanilla conservative changes but everything kind of meshing together to form a whole because I can tell you A lot of these types of projects will definitely clash, and when one person works on it there's only the Creator's mind on it.

Anyway I look forward to seeing what you do that's just my thoughts on the matter

kiskoller
Posts: 36
Joined: Fri Sep 27, 2019 11:13 am

Re: [MOD-WIP] Mighty Magick - A complete magic overhaul

Post by kiskoller »

There's a lot that you've said and it is hard to cover all, but I'll try:

Potions are indeed hard to come by at low levels and too easy at high levels. However rebalancing potions and alchemy should be done in a separate mod. I'm using Field Alchemy Kit and Traveling Alchemist mods, these make potions much more accessible already. It's not ideal, but it's a step to the right direction.

Banish Undead/Daedra: We could replace chance of banishing ALL daedra with magnitude. Higher magnitude banishes higher level daedra or just damages if magnitude isn't high enough. Or we can introduce subclasses for each daedra type, so we can have Banish Secuder and Banish Dremora (Daedra Lord).

About Open: Well, locks already have levels to them. So Open can have magnitude and only open a door if it is strong enough. Kinda like in Oblivion (Open Easy Lock, Open Average Lock, etc.)

About class balance: Again, it needs work but it is currently outside of the scope of this mod. Still, I don't think there isn't enough specialization: You need to raise your skills first, and the higher the skill the easier it is to raise it (because you can use more powerful spells and use them more often). Sure, at the end you can max out all of them but that takes a lot time.

Honestly I'm not too worried about incompatiblity and clashes: this is a community project and most of the mod's source codes are out there, almost everybody posts their github repo. I don't see problem with compatiblity patches or people simply merging mods together.

Ideas will clash but that is okay, that will help us improve, the users can select better approaches. My quest marker mod is different from the one in the Archeologist mod and it is fine. People can choose which they prefer and once we get to the modpack stage of modding, where we're gonna have so many mods that modpacks and big overhauls are going to be needed, people can grab the best implementation. The only issue I can see is permission management: if we go to the Nexus/Skyrim way we can easily ruin the modding scene, but if we go with a more free-for-all mindset (Stalker, Minecraft), we can improve the game pretty fast.

Daggerfall is a really wide and shallow game, which is perfect for modding: all the foundations are there, we can just expand or streamline each specific game component and improve on the game.

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