FYI - GM Rottcloar's Post in Warrior Mages, Familiars - March 23, 2002
(Read further down for Ranger-related information.)
Heeheehee, I love that. Great idea, Mike, great description, Cledwyn.
I already warned you guys that I'm not much of a poster, but I do read this (and only this folder), and I'd like to extend a huge thank you to those of you that have been posting creative, constructive ideas.
Let me bring you up to speed on what's going on. I am presently going through the system as it stands, and trying to make sense of it. This is not easy code to follow, not so much because of it's complexity, but because of it's obscurity. There are few comments, and the bulk of this was written when GSL (the scripting language) had a much smaller bag of tricks.
Now, the whole old fam/new fam thing... Here's the deal. As you may know, familiars were originally written in GS3, and were a spell. As a spell, I think we can all agree, familiars are pretty amazing! Now, familiars weren't intended (as I understand it) to do anything like enter combat. Jump forward to DR.
Familiars have a critter profile (a profile is basically a list of places to put values, like 'hit points') and that's why they show up in bold if you're using monsterbold. But where a critter would normally have things like hit points, speed, and whatever attributes that make up a critter, familiars have a bunch of zeroes, and a few values that are completely nonstandard. They are not critters, even though they sorta have a critter 'body'. This is why they can't be attacked, and don't do other critter things like pee on the rug.
Now, this is all well and good until you start thinking about things like combat. This is where the blank stare sets in.
So, rewrite them to use different fields, right? Well, that could be done, but we'd still be stuck with a system that was essentially only designed to be a spell of limited duration. Why is that bad? Well, the system isn't the sort of thing you can grow old with without a lot of GM intervention. As the system exists, there should always be more fams coming out, that should be even more impressive, until you can summon the World Dragon, and then I guess it's game over. But the real issue is that any time something even trivial is added to the system (like perform) every familiar needs to be updated. With every generation, the job becomes more complex.
I personally think familiars are really damn cool, or I wouldn't have wanted to work on them. Frankly, I wouldn't have come to DR in the first place. I wanted to be a war mage, summon powerful critters, and have a blast. I don't like the idea of taking apart something that works, especially when there are people that enjoy it (by the way, I will make every attempt to always make sure the next step is in place before anything is changed). Now, if we leave the old system in place (which is certainly still possible, nothing has been set in stone) we have familiars that are affected by combat (I hope) and familiars that aren't. Familiars that have some modest summoning costs, and those that don't...
When you think about it familiars are exceptions to a lot of rules. There's no casting cost, they have unlimited duration, and some of you are using 'sleep' to help get around the range limitations. The problem with all of that is that they're totally outside the normal rules of the universe we're trying to describe: specifically, all of your hard work and training as war mages don't really matter when applied to familiars (familiars have level restrictions, which drives me batty). A good example of what I'm talking about is magical devices. What is magical devices skill good for? For a lot of you it's getting more magical devices skill. In other words, when I talk about possibly adding in some limitations, this is not my way of saying I want to screw you guys. What I'm saying is that DR has a wealth of skills, stats, and abilities that you've worked hard to obtain, and they should MATTER. You magical devices skill should help you to use a magical device (like a talisman). Look at what we did with the roundtime on speech for an example. Yes there's a limitation there. One that goes away as you get more powerful. Which is half the definition of power- if nobody has limitations, you aren't powerful.
To my way of thinking having two lines of familiars starts to destroy the illusions that we try to create in the game world, but that may be just a matter of personal taste. Beyond that we start getting into issues with things like talisman selection. Let's say you are holding an old talisman and a new talisman and you give your familiar a command. Now, I can deal with this sort of thing in code, but it's going to be a lot of extra effort on my part for very little (in my opinion) return.
We're also talking about allowing Rangers to take companions from the familiar spectrum (companions were never a part of the original design of DR, and frankly, the familiars are all animals), and house pets (e.g. cats and dogs). So those familiar shapes are going to possibly be "devalued" to some degree.
Now, all that having been said, these are issues that are more important 'under the skin' of familiars than on the surface, which is what you guys seem to be talking about. I mean, it's not like there's any huge differences between the behaviour of the familiars that are in the game, most of what you are quibbling over is literally a noun and an adjective.
Having a spell that changes a familiar's appearance is certainly doable. In fact it's very appealing. A more elaborate system would include changing the familiar's personality to match. I had proposed something like this to Maelona, actually, and I'll add it to a list of possible things to develop (that list is already pretty long).
My overall point is that these things are not set in stone, I do turn to you guys for suggestions and ideas, and that we've got a number of options that I'm weighing. But sometimes what drives my decision making process are the technical issues that I have to solve.
But as always, I'll do whatever Maelona says ;)
GM Rottcloar
