Post:Tentative Magic 3.0 Spell List - 9/19/2010 - 17:46:14

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Re: Tentative Magic 3.0 Spell List · on 9/19/2010 5:46:14 PM 7551
>>The spell does too much and why an Earth spell makes you faster is a little bizarre. A lot of stuff in the Warrior Mage spellbooks changed simply because the 'mechanism of action', or how the spell accomplishes the goal, simply did not make sense with what it was doing. Thus, the boosts that didn't make sense were split apart to other spells.

To expand on this:

Mechanism of action is a term in medicine that refers to the direct causal relationship between a drug and its effect. If we can describe why in biomechanical terms a drug works, rather than simply that we inject you with something and it does stuff, then we understand its mechanism of action.

This is a concept that got hijacked for the sake of coherent spell design. When we talk about a spell's mechanism of action, we refer to the specific thing the spell proports to do: summon a shard of fire, stabilize your feet, grant you x-ray vision, whatever. Having a firm grip on that, we then want to make sure the spell's effects follow logically from that.

Magic doesn't need to be realistic, but it does need to be internally consistent and logically coherent. This is the scheme we currently embrace to see that through.

-Armifer

This message was originally posted in The Warrior Mages (35) \ Responses to GM/Official Announcements (2), by DR-ARMIFER on the play.net forums.