SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT CHANGE

It's become obvious that there are many trivial disagreements about parts of the story / setting, that I had hoped to work around. Instead, because it's too much trouble to please everyone, I think I'll opt to simplify my original proposal a bit. As before, I'll attach suggestions about how some ideas might effect other areas of the game, such as the system in general.

Here are some of my thoughts about possible changes we could apply:

Four elements instead of eight

Everyone likes the basic fire, water, earth, air structure, but when anything is added to it, it seems to quickly become too unbelievable. The original plan for the 8 elements was to give a guideline for the amount of races, as well as a way to categorize a magic system.

Which sort of leads to the next suggestions.

Appearence over race

It also seems to be an agreeable notion, that a race system might end up feeling like more of a restriction than a source of variety. If we were able to make the playerset more modular, people could just customize their appearence somewhat, when they create a character. Instead of having obvious labels for a strict set of races, everyone would just be 'people'.. we can still make region / country / kingdom names and such, even make certain appearences more common in certain areas.

Instead of having all of this Talpan, Sparron, Tritan-stuff, perhaps we should be more playfully subtle about it. Most of the populous can be generally human in appereance, but occasionally someone looks like a fishperson, dogperson, etc.. That said, just becuase someone looks like a fish, shouldn't mean that they are excellent swimmers or practice in the art of water magic. Maybe it's just a fish-faced farmer, who's never even been swimming. I just think it'd be way cooler if we had an environment that wasn't so easily labelled and segregated. (to avoid stuff like what I just mentioned..)

examples of stereotyping with race and ability:

• "Hey fish-face, why don't you magic me up a glass of water, eh?"
• "Hey fish-face, let's go swimming, eh?"
• "Hey dog-face, how's that guy's butt smell?"
• "Hey dog-face, FETCH!"

..imagine you're walking down the street with your friend and there are lots of people around you; lots of people of different nationality and more importantly, different skin-tones.. So everything is normal and your friend suddenly and loudly comments on someone's appearence, just because they have a different color skin than him. This would most likely be taken as an insult of racist nature. I would like to transpose this fact of society to the Mana World, but with seemingly more obvious animal qualities.

In the same manner that the previous example was insulting in the real world, the following should be equally insulting in the Mana World.

http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/people_without_races.jpg

Appearence is just starting to feel like a bad thing to attach skills and such to. For example, if you make a new character that has a fish-head and you consciously don't distribute any starting points to swimming skills, water magics, etc.. you'll be much more aware of the fact that in this world, appearence shouldn't be taken so literally in relation to a character's abilities. Assumption like that will remain however, if we have a strict race system with racial modifiers and abilities attached to them. If we are only planning to use race as a method of spicing up the choice in character models, let's make it more customizable.

A POSSIBLE FOUNDATION FOR A SYSTEM WITHOUT RACES

There are at least a couple games I'm inspired by for this suggestion: Paladin's Quest for its incremential, magical-attribute system; Breath of Fire for the use of animorphic people, with more emphasis on specific traits than race; Fallout because of the personal traits used in the character creation process, to fine tune/detail the character.

Attributes

There would have to be some sort of starting cap / max for scores like these, to avoid characters starting with all of their points distributed to one attribute. However it's mathematically accomplished, each attribute should have at least one point, when you create a character.

Body

• http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/att_body_strength.png STRENGTH : muscular efficiency/power
• http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/att_body_dexterity.png DEXTERITY : manual coordination
• http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/att_body_agility.png AGILITY : bodily precision
• http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/att_body_stamina.png STAMINA : health, endurance, etc

Mind

• Will  : mental efficiency/power
• Intuition : how well you learn by doing, without instruction.
• Perception: how well you learn by lesson, observation, study, etc
• Luck  : luck.

Soul

• Fire  : your potential to control Fire elmental enregy.
• Water  : your potential to control Water elemental energy.
• Earth  : your potential to control Earth elemental energy.
• Sky  : your potential to control Sky elemental energy.

Traits

These are just a few loose ideas. Some are obviously drawn from certain games. When I mention bonuses and penalties to attributes, this can usually be assumed as a score maximum increase. For example, if we had a 100 point range on average.. let's say you picked small-frame for your character. He would enjoy a starting bonus after having distributed points already, but the real bonus lies at the maximum level of his scores. Again for the sake of the example, let's just say that small-frame's strength penalty is -5, with an opposite +5 toward agility. This character would be able to reach a maximum of 95 strength, but 105 agility. Another way to simulate racial traits, without being so strict.

GENERAL TRAITS generally have a drawback or flaw included with their merit.

These will be the traits that anyone can use. If we did something like this, we'd have to make sure to flag things appropriately; some traits would only be available during the creation process, while others would be attainable somehow through later development. Good questions would be, "How many traits can you start with?" or "What is the maximum number of traits a character can have?" or "Will a certain trait cancel another out? Can one trait cancel out MORE than one other?" ... etc.

• claws: you have claws which grow with you! OH, but you can't equip weapons or wear gloves - sorry!

• flippers: you are awarded with a substantial bonus with movement in the water, but suffer an equally substantial penalty when moving about on most solid terrain. Of course, you can't wear footwear of any kind.

• night-person: at night, you are awarded slight bonus modifiers to certain attributes, but suffer equal penalties during the morning hours.

• morning-person: like above, but for the morning.

• one-handedness: you prefer the use of a certain hand over the other. Single-handed weapons have a bonus for you, but two-handed weapons have a penalty.

• two-handedness: like above, but in favor of two-handed weapons.

• one-hand!: you lost one of your hands at some point in your life. You can only use single-handed weapons, but with a large bonus modifier.

• small-frame: penalty to strength and a bonus to agility. Fallout uses drawback toward your max carry weight, which I don't know if we'll use or not.

• large-frame: like above, but reversed. I imagined a bigger person able to use two-handed weapons as single-handed weapons - just an added thought.

• dumb-luck: you suffer a penalty to each of your mental attributes but luck, which you have a large bonus toward.

SPECIAL TRAITS are mostly awards of some sort and carry little or no drawback. They would work the best with an unlocking feature of some fashion.

These traits are not typically available. That is to say, if we offered them, there would have to be some sort of prerequisite or unlocking feature.

• ambidextrous: your single and dual-handed weapon skill act as one; when one increases, so does the other. If you create a character with this trait, their single and dual-handed weapon skills will also BEGIN at an equal level.

• gills: you have a complimentary set of gills with which to breathe water.

• webbed-toes: you gain a moderate bonus (not as good as with flippers) to your movement under water without any penalty to movement along other terrain.

• retractable-claws: when unarmed, your nails grow outward into claws, during combat (maybe not as strong as regular claws?). It'd work even better if we had a sheath/holster/put-away action.

Many of these traits would work wonderfully with overlay equipment-like graphics. They'd simply be more permanent in some cases, like the flippers trait for example. You could choose any character model - flipper "boot" graphics could just be applied permanently to your character. RADICAL!

Adding more later..

Abilities

Adding more later..

RETELLING THE STORY, IN THE HOPES OF PRODUCING A MORE AGREEABLE SETTING

This version of the story would call for the following: four elements, four spirits, four gods, four ancient heroes (elders or sages would work, too.); no race system; a primary epic quest involving the collection of crystal shards, with subsequent option to seek out the original crystals, in an effort to return the shards from whence they came; possibly a more modular use of playerset graphics, to better accomodate a raceless system.

A long time ago, civilization was manipulated by four vengeful and petty gods. These gods used their subtle influence to turn mankind against itself. After a long age of war, society was nearly annhialated; few remained alive.

When all hope seemed lost, four heroes emerged with powers rivaling that of the gods. With the help of every able bodied person in the world, these heroes were able to banish the gods.

This was accomplished by the use of immense magics, the likes of which modern mankind has not nearly harnessed. The gods were pushed into the elemental recycling process, where their immense forces of will impacted with that of the spirits, who were then forced into the physical universe; where they took an inactive new form, as crystals.

Though they had been sealed away, the gods had dealt a considerable blow to civiliation. So much was destroyed, that very little of mankind's sum of knowledge was able to be passed down through the generations.

To make matters worse, the four heroes were banished with the gods. Imprisoned inside the spirits (who now existed physically for the first time as crystals), the four gods and heroes continued their battle.

Eventually each god was able to overpower the hero trapped with them, barely escaping the crystalline prison and leaving the hero stuck inside the now cracked and detereorated crystals.

These escapes required so much force, that each crystal lost much of its mass when the god finally burst out. Countless shards of each crystal scattered outward, across the world. Mankind is so feebly attempting to rebuild their society, that this turn of events goes virtually unnoticed.

The crystalline form of the spirits functioned in a similar, but less direct fashion than their previous, nonphysical form; instead of directing energy to the gods, the elements simply poured out of the crystals into the world, free for anything to interact with. However oblivious to this escape, mankind still collectively posed too much of a threat to the gods, now that the spirits indescriminantly spew energy.

Fully aware of this fact, the gods went into hiding.. opting to bide their time and use their powers of patience and manipulation, instead of attacking mankind outright; a battle the gods would surely lose, as long as mankind's society is somewhat united.

still playing with this..

THE STORY AFFECTING OTHER AREAS OF DEVELOPMENT

Geography

This is easily the most troubling area to discuss change, as far as a group effort goes. Some of you are telling me to do what I feel needs to be done, others are telling me to make a story around the old geographical layout (from the old story), which I never had the intention of doing. It's obvious that the world map either needs to be done by one person or a small (predetermined) group, or it will continue to be the most repetetively scrutinized aspect of development. What I've begun documenting here should serve adequately for anyone to just design a world upon; whether I have any say in the actual world development at this point, I'm starting to not care. I'll just offer some simple guidelines to ponder, should this suggestion be implemented:

• are the four crystals in an even and symmetrical layout in the world, or are their locations slightly askew?
  • It depends on how secret/hidden away we want the crystals to be, as far as society's general perspective.
    • Are normal townsfolk telling you how to find the crystals, or is it a more elusive search than that?

Main epic quest

• I had sort of imagined using the epic quest (collecting crystal shards) as something that average people wouldn't really have much knowledge of; something to answer to the question, "Why are these characters so special, in comparison to the rest of the average world?"
  • It also lends some reason why the crystal shards might hold some significant source of power for the characters to tap into; guardians of crystal shards could often have special powers, acquired from the shards they carry.
    • The whole collection of crystal shards could be used in a number of different ways, as far as characters acquiring powers, abilities, traits, score modifiers, etc.. perhaps by holding them, adorning equipment with them, absorbing them; it's very open to interpretation.

Misc gameplay notes

• The basic idea that I had for the collection of crystal shards, was that you would somehow have the option to keep a crystal or crystals, thereby allowing you to tap into its powers.. or another option, to seek out the originating crystal (fire = red, water = green, sky = blue, earth = purple, yellow, whatever..) and replace the shard.
  • We could do something with that as well, like: each shard your character returns to a crystal is tallied into some sort of score for your account. That score could be used to unlock new traits for your new characters. I know Elven pretty put a veto on any "unlocking" features, but I figured it was worth mentioning anyway.

Please comment on anything here, email to david(at)inotthink.info, or PM me on the forums.. I'm sorry I haven't been on IRC, but it seems like any time a discussion about this stuff lasts for longer than a few moments, it gets out of hand and turns into a disagreement. I'll never be able to please everyone I guess, but I sure can try. Dabe 21:12, 22 October 2006 (CEST)