I thought you could make moves as frequently as ordinary moves. Though, the moves could cost mana in a similar way as running makes a character exhausted.


See the MOQ.FI wiki

Chaostrom's idea of this magic system being the prayer system sounds pretty good to me. At least the magic system could be similar to the prayer system. The characters' scores on the coordinate system would be calculated once for each turn and they'd determine certain factors in the game.

Negative diamonds: more vulnerable
Positive diamonds: less vulnerable

Negative spades: less damaging attacks
Positive spades: more damaging attacks

Negative hearts: less morale
Positive hears: more morale

Negative clubs: less charisma, wisdom and intelligence
Positive clubs: more charisma, wisdom and intelligence

A slot along the X or Y axis: no effect?

Maybe, instead of "magic system" or "prayer system" we could call this the "energy system". This way we don't need to replace the already existing prayer system but we also leave the door open for other kinds of magic such as astral projection or telekinesis.

This way the energy system would not override the rest of the game. Even if you had lots of energy users as allies it wouldn't affect anything before someone tried to do something else than energy manipulation. But you could have an army of monks as your pets so that they wouldn't fight but would simply project good energies for you and bad energies against your enemies. Perhaps the housewives of Attnam would rather do this in battle than engage in physical combat.

A possible advantage of energy use is that you don't have to conflict your enemy in order to project bad energies at them. Therefore you can project bad energies at other characters before attacking them and causing them to become enemies. That is to say, characters could be neutral in the physical world yet belligerent in the energy world. Although too much bad energy projection might be a sufficient cause for conflict in itself.

All,
there is no magic spell system in IVAN so far. That is to say, there's no system like the one in Nethack in which you select a spell to be cast and consume a few mana points. But maybe we don't want such a system.

In many games with spells and mana points I've been bothered by the fact that spells are like guns and mana points are like ammo. The only difference between a spell and a weapon is that spells are weightless and cannot be given to another character because they aren't objects.

I've spent the last decade mostly preoccupied with metaphysical research. This research led me to develop a kind of a board game. The board game might be a fun alternative to the familiar "guns and ammo" mana system.

You can check out the board game if you use Google Chrome as your browser. The current version is written in JavaScript and works as a web page. The address of the game is: http://a.moq.fi/ver486-2.htm . You can click the button labeled Autoplay to start the game so that all players are bots. Most runs of the game turn repetitive after 10-100 turns. If the run turns repetitive you can refresh the browser window and start a new one. The runs turn repetitive because the AI I've written isn't very good yet. You can also play the game with human players.

This is a highly unusual game but I'll describe some features. First of all, the board is a Cartesian coordinate system. When one player moves, all other players move too. The moving player is transferred into the square in which he moves himself but all other players are transferred into a square which is the vector sum of their current position and the move of the moving player. The origin of the coordinate system is in the middle of the board.

Upon moving players gain or lose points according to which square they lands on. There are four types of points: diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs. Diamonds could be a factor that determines the health and attack ability of the player, hearts could be a factor of morale, spades could be a factor of intelligence and clubs could be a factor of magical ability.

There are four kinds of experience levels in the game, each one describing a direction to which a player may move on the board. A player gains an experience level so that other players move him to a square which is just beyond his reach and on the axes of the coordinate system.

We don't need to use this kind of an experience level system. Instead, we can model these experience levels with books. Ie. if you find "the Book of Holiness" then the player gets a level of four to the up direction, because the square labeled "Holy" is four squares up from the origin.

I don't really know whether this game can be implemented as the magic system of IVAN but I thought I should mention it. At least it's something completely new and different, so if it can be meaningfully included as a part of IVAN then IVAN will include something completely new and different. But first of all, I hope that what I wrote here is somehow intelligible to someone else. Feel free to ask questions.