Societies and spells

[Spang11]

A little observation I had the other day, last time I was able to play much:

Considering the fact that Weirdfellows have no spells of their own but can cast anybody else's, the not insignificant amounts of effort required to first complete a society's missions, and then become an apostate again to change sides, and that when you join another non-Weirdfellow society, you can no longer use the old spells from the old society anyway (which I have no problem with), it seems maybe a little bit unfair that you then have to erase all the old society's spells before you can learn any from the new society. Especially as this detail isn't mentioned n the Help (or wasn't last i looked).

Obviously you have to be careful to balance things and avoid game-breaking effects that might come from being able to know 2 or 3 sets of spells atonce, but I think it isn't all that easy to achieve anyway, and I'm not sure what other benefits Weirdfellows get from their own missions (wasn't able to complete any before I left originally- which was partly in order to try and complete that mission in fact) compared to everybody else.

If it is a concern, I suppose perhaps there could be some sort of further limits on how many spells total a player can learn, instead? Or maybe other mechanisms could be found for why apostates can't cast their old society's spells outside of Weirdfellows, if the RPing issue is important.

[Taylor]

Hm...I didn't even think about the fact that you have to unlearn old spells before you learn new ones as being a problem for the Weirdfellows. That's definitely pretty sucky. I'll have to change that.

I also have "spell scrolls" coded (but not in the game yet, there are still some bugs to work out) and I was thinking of giving the Weirdfellows an ability that lets them learn spells from those scrolls, but that's probably a little further off.

[Salen]

next round i'm going weirdfellows and trying to get two spells from each to see what i could then do. but ballencing through all the societies is gona be tough.

[Spang11]

Hey that's neat, I had wondered if there might be other places to get spells from, but had been coming to the conclusion it must be only through other societies, as I'd never seen any. That'd be quite good if the scrolls were put in somehow And yes it'd be nice if we could keep the old spells somehow even if they can't be used within the new society (which AFAIR they couldn't anyway)

And Salen: When I was still in Weirdfellows it didn't seem TOO hard to balance the society favour levels (if that's what you're talking about), but what I have found hard is that in order to learn spells from the other societies, you have to do those societies missions: the difficulty is then not so much the missions themselves, but that completing them raises your favour for that society substantially above the others (and the more spells you're able to learn, the worse this situation is), and then once you want to leave again- whether to Weirdfellows or anybody else, you have to bring it back down some, and the other favours up.

Which is fair enough. But the only way I know to do so, is to fight monsters that are on your current society's "side", and not any of the ones your society likes you to fight. But your being a member of that society seems to make it far more likely that the societies' enemies will join in battles against you, even if you're attacking your own societies' monsters. So in practice, I find I have to not only fight a lot of the right battles, but flee a lot more "wrong" battles, to be able to become apostate. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing balancewise, but it's something to be prepared for before you try.

[Salen]

yeah but i've got it down in my head i think, if i do the bros first and learn 2, then i go and kill incubui and imps till i can sneak into the inquisition, gain two there...then i just kill humans till the young ones like me, then ill be close to ballanced and be back weird. then with all the runes i'll have i can start causing mayhem...least thats the plan so far