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« on: June 29, 2013, 12:07:41 pm »
Magic:
This is an idea I thought about a long time ago and have been fiddling with since.
Basically use runes, words and if "elementals" are ingredients/reagents, use those too.
Basically, if you say the words (Ancient Language xor English) the spell will be cast on your target, or maybe make it so you type the name of the target in the spell somewhere, which, now that I think about it, wouldn't work for targeting cows.
Runes are essentially stored spells. First you smelt a blank rune, then you use magic combined with blacksmithing to lock a spell inside the rune, give it like 20 uses that increases as your ability to cast the spell increases. Creating runes would be more difficult than casting the spell, but with a rune, casting a spell becomes very easy. Runes could then be put into traps to make spell traps.
Add "magic circles," structures that players can make in their houses that, when standing on, allows a mage to focus their magic and cast more difficult spells, but if the spell is difficult for them it would take more time to cast it, this would encourage wizards to prepare their spells before going off and adventuring.
I would also like to see more cooperative spell-casting abilities. That is if two mages are together they can cooperatively cast a difficult spell, or cast an easy spell with more strength.
There could also be natural structures (made by NPC's or whatnot) that boost magical abilities. This would make mages have pilgrimages to a far off place so they can learn a new spell or something.
Not directly related to magic, but experience sharing would be nice. A mage can assist a warrior by healing and buffing him, which normally gives too little experience to be viable. With xp-sharing you might see a lot more of this.
Overall the best thing would be finding a way to keep the magic words secretive, but that is probably impossible. (Maybe make it so an NPC or an object (writing on a cave wall) must tell you the magic words before you can use them.)