Reagent potency / potion doses

Some players will complain about everything. Some people hate reagents to begin with. Some might complain that there are different sized reagents. In UO there were several types of oar you could find. It looked messy in your pack (and it should have because it was raw ore).

So If we are going to have a more sophisticated reagent system, then I don't think too many people would have a problem grinding up reagents for use in magic and for some potions.

Being a mage shouldn't be as simple as one day you had some skill points and you got trained for an hour and now you have level 5 in a skill. In Ultima spell casters were portrayed as being scholarly. They had large libraries of books, and stuff. So why not have them spend a little bit of time to grind up some reagents. They can carry around a mortar and pestle with them and they can grind reagents as they find them if they want.

However just that little bit of preparation for our spells is still a very small amount of work to represent the true dedication and study of a real mage. I personally would want to feel more involved with my magic.

 

if a large mandrake has 8 uses, then grinding up one large mandrake gives you 8 pinches of refined mandrake.

Also how difficult will it be to just use a mortar and pestle to grind up a stack of black pearls? It should be as simple as drag and drop, or click the mortar and pestle and select the stack of black pearl, and you hear a grinding sound and we have the dust.

I don't think there needs to be a skill check because it isn't like we are creating anything new. It should be a standard mage skill that any apprentice should know.

If you grind a stack of 8 large black pearls that will give you 64 uses of black pearl. So we aren't talking about a whole lot of grinding time in game. It shouldn't put players out to have to grind up 8 stacks of reagents.

Also this is something that can be done after acquiring the actual reagents. It can be done at home, and you only carry the dust you need. Also another thing is that dust cannot be converted back to a whole pearl or any other reagent. There might be a need to have a full reagent like the ritual I mentioned before.

EDIT: Also if players are the ones that gather and sell reagents, then most people would be buying ground reagents off of player vendors, if in fact refined or processed reagents are what people actually use.

 

@Most eminent Sir Stile Teckel,

:> Noted.

I'm hoping everyone is keeping in mind the way I presented it is just a suggestion of how it would be done.

In theory, there could only be one type of mandrake, and that's it. The idea of giving it potency is just so players don't have to carry so much reagents in their pack and so they don't have to expend a whole reagent per every spell. This came from Chris Spear's idea that lower level spells only have a % chance of using up a reagent. Instead of a % chance of using it up, it would only use up a fraction of its magic.

The rest is just optional. Personally, I think the collecting aspect of having different potencies would be fun for the game, and would also add some additional lore to the reagents.

 

Having a variation on reagents affect potion quality is an interesting concept. I could see it making the gathering skills a little more interesting and meaningful. It might be worth it just for that. On the downside, I would worry that suddenly I have have four variations of each potion rattling around in my pack, and hard to distinguish from each other in the heat of combat when they are needed. Would the added complexity of potions still be fun then. Maybe. I don't know.

 

Okay, I updated the original post to make it a bit clearer.

 

You wouldn't need to. The potion glyph on your combat bar would just show the number of doses you have available and you wouldn't worry about where the doses are coming from. Seems pretty simple to me. What it would do, however, is let you stack your potion doses, by having a larger container.

Same thing for casting spells. It would just be drawn from your pool of reagents, without you worrying where its coming from.

In my initial idea, the reagent quality wouldn't necessarily affect potion quality, its just if you have poor quality reagents, you'd need more of them to make a potion, because they'd have less potency. If you have better quality, you'd need less, because they'd have more potency.

But it would be interesting if they could effect the quality of the potion, too.

 

Well If you're not willing to budge honestly I don't think this system works. Like I said I think it is cool that there would be different sized reagents that can be gathered or purchased that functionally has multiple uses. However, having them change color and losing chrarges after use is confusing and it creates a new stack of reagent.

If you think about it, you have proposed 4 types of every single reagent, but then go a step further and say as you use the reagents it degrades to different colored reagents (that's 4 phases of each of the 4 types of reagent).

Now say there are only 8 reagents in the game like there were in Ultima (although sota will have more than 8)... 8 reagents, with 4 types, and 4 phases... that means your reagent back will possibly end up with 128 completely different stacks of reagents. Another way to put it... each reagent will have 16 possible stack types by 8 different reagents.


Unless there is a way to grind these reagents into dust, this simply does not work.

WAIT I Take that back...

8 small+ 16 medium+ 64 large = 88 unique stacks of each reagent times 8 reagents is 704 STACKS OF REAGENTS in our reagent bag. This cannot work. LoL

 

Nope.

There could only be one variant of every single reagent. In your pack, for most situations all this would mean is one reagent would be out of the stack at a time, since you're only using up one reagent at a time. That would just double the amount of stacks from 8 to 16.

If there are 4 variants of one reagents, you'd still only be using one reagent at a time. So if you do happen to have four variants of one type of reagent, you'd have 4 stacks, plus 1 extra stack for the one that is being used.

So, it wouldn't end up multiplying as much as you think.

But, in the end you'd still end up with a less raw items in your pack, because this would allow you to cut down on the amount of reagents you carry around.

I'm not against cutting up reagents, or grinding them either. I just don't know if it should be required. You're going to end up having the same amount of raw reagents in your pack anyway before you start grinding them.

 

Nope it creates a new stack once one of them changes form. You cannot have a blue pearl in the stack of black pearls, and also a blue pearl is a different object and arguably a different reagent than a black pearl. lol

MAGIC DUST IS THE WAY TO GO. lol

 

Yep, that's what I'm saying, though. All you have is one more stack :> So it is more stacks, but its not going to add up to 128.

Anyway..

* throws magic dust on Isaiah *

 

Dust - as particles in casting animations - does sound extremely appealing - from an aesthetic aspect and would tie in with current animations

 

I like this idea conceptually.

But therein lies the rub.

I how reagents are always in use. So people can't run around naked or be a cheap fighter mage (as they can currently). Reagents have to be used in this system. However, reagents can be used to less degree or "potency" based on the choices of the caster. This is a pretty cool idea, and so far I love it. But I think I love it because it essentially does what Chris Spears wants to avoid, making all spells require reagents.

 

I propose that the use of reagents be somehow linked to the deck via runes or scrolls. The concept is that, before battle, the Avatar is located at either an alchemy or some sort of spell crafting/inscribing station as you prepare spell-specific runes/scrolls with the required ingredients. I have various reagents in my inventory and many blank runes/scrolls to inscribe. So, in order to have spells available during play, you are pre-combining the necessary reagents for the high level spells onto runes/scrolls.

Potency of a rune ( eg: min/max damage ) can be determined by the quality of ingredients combined.

During battle you draw from the rune/scroll bag and a rune/scroll is used up when a spell is cast. You may have multiple, and identical, quantities of runes/scrolls in the bag. Thus, for example, you could prepare 10 fireball runes, 4 stun runes, 3 heals, etc. Once a specific type of rune is used up then that skill will no longer appear in the deck thus increasing the possibility of receiving a slug instead.

In summary, reagents are only used during high-level rune creation. Runes become blank when used during battle. Slugs replace spells during combat as each specific type of spell in the deck is exhausted.

My .02 cents

 

Hey now!!!!

I am only Most eminent Sir Stile Teckel to the hired help, to my friends I am only Stile *winks and grins*

What I really like about your proposal is the time you've put into it. Including even doing some graphics. Lot of people just talk about stuff. You've put a lot of work into it, which I think is huge in terms of showing your passionate about the ideas and conveying them rather just talking to talk, or just tossing out an idea.

I wish we saw more of that. It would cut down on the forum junk a lot and I also think it would help the Dev's a lot in what to pay attention to.

 

That reminds me of some of the Asian spell casters. I think there is a type of spell casting that uses cards in a very similar approach.

Sent from my Galaxy S5 using Tapatalk.

 

That is a good observation.

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Cool. I add the illustrations because I know some people don't like reading walls of text and it helps focus the discussion for them, and maybe encourage them to read the text.

Most Eminent is an honorific title :>