[Jihgfed Pumpkinhead]

     I'd been wandering around the old threads, and found one about items, to which I thought I'd like to respond. I set it aside for awhile, though, and when I came back, I noticed that it, along with a large number of other threads, had fallen off the edge of the world. Do we need to worry about more important things falling off of the edge of the world too, like other threads, RPGDX itself, the Internet, perhaps California? Tell the truth, I wouldn't mind if California did, but the rest of those things are important.
     I wanted to respond to a thread on weapon systems, and how the power of weapons evolves over the course of an RPG. I wanted to post my system. I'll do that here.
     I've lifted this system pretty much directly out of a P&P RPG, with modifications to fit it into the world of my game, but I think it would actually work even better for a computer RPG than a P&P RPG.
     Firstly, the world is populated by spirits. Spirits are semi-sentient representations of both real things and abstract concepts: you can have a tree-spirit, a fire-spirit, a yellow-spirit, an anger-spirit, etc. There is a magical discipline, Animism, by which one can control these spirits. Mostly what you'll be doing is putting spirits in items, sort of like materia from FF7, but different in a number of ways.
     An item so invested with a spirit displays certain magical properties: the dagger with the wind-spirit is more likely to hit, you get the idea, fairly standard stuff. What happens when you invest your hat with a cow-spirit? Damned if I know. That's half the fun: discovering all the sorts of combination of item and spirit, and what crazy effects they have.
     The other thing I like about this is that the thing which is improving is the PC himself, not his items, really. As you become a more powerful Animist, you can bind more and more powerful spirits.
     The idea of questing to find a powerful spirit, and then convincing him to enter your sword, is just, to me, so much more entertaining than questing to find the sword itself.
     Almost all the items will be available at the very beginning of the game, they will just not be nearly as powerful as their fetish counterparts.
     The other great thing is that spirits are alive, and have their own motivations; I always thought that FF7 could do a lot more than they did with summon-materia in this direction. For the most part, you'll have to convince the spirits to help you out; if you've got a rabbit-spirit in your shoes to make you run fast, and you go around arbitrarily killing the fuzzy little critters, the spirit might decide he'd really rather be elsewhere, and run out on you.
     Well, I'm sure I could add other things to this post, but this is quite long enough already, and I think I've made the major point. Thoughts?

[Bjorn]

I hope you don't mind me only answering your first question. We used to have auto-forum-pruning in the beginning but we (Mandrake and I) decided to disable it as long as the database wouldn't become too big. Now that I'm moving it around to the new server and to my local testserver I decided to reduce the download by removing all threads that were more than 150 days old. I'm sorry to hear someone was still interested in reading it. I still got it backup up so if you still want to read some of it there might be a way to restore it decently.

[Rainer Deyke]

I like this system. It's similar to my own ideas, and I can't see any obvious flaws in it.

edit: That was obviously in reference to the spirit system, not the disappearing posts.

[Jihgfed Pumpkinhead]

     Thanks, Bjørn, but I'm pretty sure I've looked through most of the oldies. I only wanted to find that one thread so that I didn't need to start an entirely new thread, since they were pretty much the same topic. Point is, it wasn't really that important, I was just curious.

[lazee barok]

why not write a tutorial about, pumpkin? or a theory. i've been working on one as well, but i've stopped (i'm just lazee) i've actually got lots of good ideas, and i i think hard enough, i can think of ways to execute it. (sometimes)

[The Anarchist]

Heh, I love this idea, its hilarious. I can just imagine the properties a hat invested with a cow spirit might have - heavy, produces milk, tastes good when cooked... that would proberbly make the game worth playing just for the sheer hell of it.

Even better, they could have fights, so for example if a sword invested with a dog spirit happened to be equipped at the same time as a pair of shoes with a rabbit spirit you might find yourself stabbing your own feet every once in a while, heh.
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