A question (also what I've been up 2)

[SilentThief]

First of, lets get what I've been doing and what I'll do outta the way:

I've been working 2 fulltime (minimum wage) jobs. Since I now am working like 70-80 hours a week, I'm gonna lurk more and sleep less. I am however taking care of business: I am paying my rent and now the electricity that was in question is paid as well (never good if you got kids, they can take them if you cant pay your electric and where I'm at is real unfriendly for poor folk... they wouldn't help me with an electric bill or rent but they offered to let me n the family live in a shelter for $8 a day... no thanx, luck gave me another job WOOHOO)

anyhow, electric paid, internet will be paid (hopefully before they stop my service, reconnect fee sux), and we had the basics (rent food) covered. Now after catching up a little I'll be able to buy a windows XP system disk becuz of all my woes with linux, wine, and DC. Which brings me back to the forum, and ends my drama.

Even with four hours of sleep a day, I still think about what I can and cannot (yet) do with DC. So without futher ado, I have a question:
Lets say you make a spell and design it with the flag that states players cannot memorize. This naturally makes it so you cannot memorize and it will not show up for spell selection during rest or level up. Can you then scribe this spell from a scroll into your spellbook so as to work around this? If so, this would bypass the limitations on making specialist mages and priests!!! I mean think about it: you could have a set of "core" spells for these classes and then in-game you would have to join some kind of faction (church or mages guild, for example) to get a certain set of spells, and you could play in a different faction (rival church and wizard university, for the other examples) to get A DIFFERENT SET OF SPELLS for the same kind of character.

ST
ps, watch out when I finally get DC running properly... all I can say is "watch out!"

[Shadow Stranger]

Specialist Mages existed in the first two Gold Box Dragonlance games, the White Robes and the Red Robes have their own spell lists. (In the third and last game, the party was in an area where specialization did not apply.)
Spell specialization would be a good idea, it would really add depth to a class. You would have to forbid learning, scribing or memorizing the forbidden spells. I don't know how you would do this.

[manikus]

Hey ST, glad to hear that you are taking care of business.

In DC, can't memorize means can't memorize whenever the spell is given to the spellcaster, under any circumstances.
With that said, you almost gave the way to do it in your question - make it unlearnable by characters - then the spellcaster will not have the spell unless you give it to her.

Unfortunately, just using this trick does not specialist mages (or priests) make. The designer (you) may intend that certain spells only be give to certain characters, but a player could still create a mage and give them spells from all of the 'special' groups that you have created. Now, with that being said, it may be possible to do this using special abilities - you could have a player choose which specialist mage they want for a partiuclar PC and a special ability is assigned to that PC. Now, you will have added an appropriate SA or flag on each spell that will allow it to only be used by a spellcasting PC with the correct SA (given in the first part). I think this oculd be done right now, but it would be a lot of work - adding an SA to each spell and creating ones to be given to PCs - not hard at all, just a lot of work.

[Uatu]

Hey SilentThief, sounds like a rough time, but it also sounds like you are doing good with it - kudos to you, you are working real hard. Hopefully soon you can find a more cushy job that brings more money to the table.

[Shadow Stranger]

You could do it with one spell list per specialist class, that is how it works in Dragonlance.
Manikus:
I clicked the "manikus' Dungeon Craft" link on your post above and I got:
"Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apache/1.3.33 Server at AppStuff Port 80"
Has the domain name expired?

[manikus]

Re: the "manikus web site" link - I had been mentioning for a while, both here and in the FRUA Community forums that my site was going a way, I just forgot to change the signature here. I'll take care of that today.

[SilentThief]

muhahaha! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!! I'm windowed again!!!! Time to show my DC skillz and not just TALK about them!!!! You've been warned!!!

ST

[Shadow Stranger]

In Dragonlance you have three spell lists and three mage classes: Black, Red, White. Specialist mages were handled in Baldurs Gate 2, I don't know how this was done of course.

[Uatu]

Specialist mages in Baldur's Gate 2 were similar to how they did Dragonlance, i.e. they just had different spell lists. (In 2e AD&D, specialist mages can memorize extra spells from their specialization schools of magic, but in Baldur's Gate 2 they just had extra spell slots.)

Dragonlance clerics should also have had limited spell lists (we can say that Dragonlance pioneered specialization for both mages and clerics), but the Gold Box games didn't do that (according to rules, Dragonlance clerics have pretty puny spell lists, and very few clerics even have the Cure Light Wounds spell).

[Paul Stevens]

It seems that perhaps you want
specialized PCs. At PC creation time
perhaps we could allow you to run scripts
that would assign special abilities......
"Priest of Toads", "Billiard Player", "Superman".
Then you could easily assign annotations
to the spells that only particular specializations
could use. A spell that had no such annotation
("Bless") could be used in the usual fashion.
But....for example.....a spell ("Masse") with the
"Billiard Player" annotation could only
be used by PC with that special ability.

In other words, only a particular class of PC
could use spells of a particular class. And the
PC's class could be pre-generated or assigned
with scripts at PC creation. We might want to
allow scripts to display something on the
PC description screen. ("Billiard Player").