Color Me Provocative
How Might Combat Magic Work in Sigma?
Frankly, I think combat magic in most RPGs (especially text-based) is so cumbersome it’s not even usable. I imagine this fool wearing some calfskin jacket (anything else is too heavy, oy vey) and a pointy star-emblazened wizard hat stabbing in vain with a knife in between manually-initiated blindingly-powerful displays of force.
The fact is: wizards don’t hold knives and shields. They hold wands or sources of other magical potency. And they kill you with them.
Thus my proposal.
Wizards hold wands as weapons. Different types of wands (crooked, steel, green aura… up to the designer) do different things in combat. Magic is passive and automatic, meaning the typical combat tick also incorporates magical exchanges if applicable. These “things” are controlled by weapon skills, because that’s what they are.
Look, I’m an dwarf-ogre thug. I wouldn’t know magic if it bit me in my ogre butt. You hand me a wand and I don’t know what to do with it. It is junk to me, though perhaps marketable junk. I sell this piece of junk to somebody wearing a star-emblazened cap and they beat me up and take my lunch money. The wand becomes a weapon.
Turn the situation around and hand me a 100lb spiked club. Same circumstances apply.
QED, a wand is a weapon.
Weapon skills for different styles and severities of magic. Stance and all other Sigma system attributes are similarly affected by choices of a certain available weapon skill.
More to follow…