I''m fairly certain that you just missed my line of thinking entirely. Oh well. =)

"The unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates

I''ve always thought magic much too powerful in most rpg games.

Teleport spells in particular!

Most online rpgs seem to think that magic is something for the commoners. Spellcasters usually make up more than 50% of the player population. In order to attract more players, it''s been made easy to be a caster. From my early days of pen-and-paper rpg, I know that magic is supposed to be one of the hardest paths to follow in the early days of a characters life, but that slowly the spellcaster will gain in power, to one day surpass his brutish fighter friends. Not so in online games. Almost right from the bat, casters are equal to fighters. Why? Just to please the crowd?

Magic should NOT be a common thing. If a player wants to play a caster, he better be ready to sacrifice a lot of his time laying low, staying safe, because casters will NOT be of much help to groups in the earliest stages of their careers.

Example: Everquest
My way would be to make casters reach at least level 15-20 before they start catching up to their melee brothers and sisters.
But, the way it is now, at level 8 casters gain the ability to transport themselves across the planet (when Gating back to Bindpoint)...hm, teleport spells have always seemed to be THE most powerful spells available to anyone. Ah well, casters at level 8 SHOULD have those spells right?

Magical items:
Magical items should not be a goal of a player in his or her early days. Magical items should be something that comes later on in a character''s life, something to fight for, a real struggle. Maybe a character will never find even one magical item...
But...the satisfaction in FINALLY finding that ONE magical item you''ve been waiting for, is going to be SO much greater than ''finally finding that one magical item to complement your complete magical equipment, 50 pieces altogether''...

Then again...the masses seem to want the early magic, the quantity above quality. So that''s what they get.

A game without magic altogether (or with very minor magical things)...well, I am afraid that most games offer so much magic, so much fighting, simply because computers don''t have all that much more to offer yet.

I think somehow we have to find a breakthrough and suddenly find ourselves in a setting much like all those books we read. With hero''s living their lives, making decisions, and only fighting battles in desperate situations. I still have to find those books about heros that go off into the wild killing wolves..and more wolves...and fairies...and some wandering goblins just because. Or the books about a young boy, who starts casting fireballs, teleports himself to another city and changes himself into a tree. Hm, somehow those books don''t sound too interesting.

Silvermyst

Silvermyst: For someone who seems to like roleplaying a great deal, you seem to come up with only combat examples. What if being a mage early one is figuring out how to leviate light objects. What if the power to kill is somethihng you only learn later on, but is so unquestionably effective that it might just be worth the wait?

I hope that one day we will stop being slaves to combat in our designs. I know where you are coming from, I find myself using combat examples more than any other. It sucks, especially when you think about how I try to think about these things.

For my sake, let''s try and consider non-combat magic as well please. Oh! There''s a good question... does the average MMORPG have anything other than combat spells? Like little illusions, or simple magic? Or are they too "useless" for powergamers to bother with? I honestly don''t know much about this, I would appreciate an informed opinion.

I think we''ve just forgotten how cool a character can be without magic items. But in games now, you''re nothing but what you own. This kind of materialist obsession is very unsettling to me. You are not the sword you wield. You are not your level. You are not the experience you''ve gained. You are not your f*cking Khakis!

If you want to play a hero or a badass, there''s nothing more awesome than someone who is really awesome without supernatural assistance. Like Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke. This guy chops arrows out of the air with his *non-magical* sword. Too cool. Ashitaka was actually worse off than having NO magical items, he was cursed! And yet, a badass he was...

If we''re going to have willing suspension of disbelief, with characters reaching a level of perfection well beyond the mortal realm, do we really need to cater to material possesions?

Wog.

LANDFISH: Yeah, but I think combat examples work best to explain something (since most games really don''t allow for roleplaying, it''ll be hard to make a sudden change from rpg to real roleplaying). If players now do mostly fighting, they will understand things better when the example is related to battle

In Everquest there are NO non-combat spells as far as I know. Oh except for one (Sense Magic...but they got rid of that, since each character can automatically detect if an item is magic or not). Illusions can be used by Enchanters to have some fun (but again, they are mainly used by people to gain a better standing with NPCs when they sell something), and Minor Illusion (which changes you into a copy of the nearest object) can be used for a lot of fun...but I''ve already seen players being adviced not to use it too much (other players find it annoying! What the...)

Players have even asked Verant (producer of game) to input more ''fun'' spells, that would be completely unrelated to combat, and wouldn''t even have to be balanced etc...but...nope. Only spells that are combat-related are interesting to Verant...because the MASSES want more power.

Silvermyst

Hey, I just had a cool idea for a non-combat spell (or type of spells) in a MMORPG (I guess this is pretty off-topic however). Normally, you have some cool combat spells which help you to crush your enemies and these spells slowly become more and more powerfull, blabla, it''s all combat centered. But what if you had some spells, which exist just for pure enjoyment? For instance, an illusion spell which creates beautiful color effects or something. You could be able to create all sorts of cool and pretty effects with this spell by adjusting some parameters, or maybe moving the mouse and the spell "follows" your mouse movements and creates a beautiful pattern or something, and the better you get in this spell, the cooler the visual effects. This spell is just for fun, but you could entertain other people with it (maybe let them pay for watching or whatever) and you could slowly become a master of creating "art" through this spell; you would have a non-combat oriented motivation to become better. Well, this is just an example, but I think such spells would definitely add a lot of diversity form all the "comet showers" and "magic missiles" out there...

Spy, those are all combat related compared to say, a ''Back Massage" spell. =)

Anybody ever play the game "The Summoning"? If you have, you know what I''m talking about, if not, go do it now.

That is the way magic and magic items should be. Tough to learn, experimental, and there were like 3 magic weapons in the whole game, and 2 of them disappeared after you used them. There was other magical stuff, but when you found it, you would be thinkin "SWEEEEEET".

"Here comes armageddon, we're gonna have some fun.
Here comes armageddon, everybody grab your gun"