UPDATED WITH BETA!! White-Gray-Black Mage Concept

EDIT

KKK that was fast.

A v.0.1 beta is open for testing. I think everything is well explained and functional. Let me know of any bugs, or w/e you may encounter. 

Beta terms of use:

-- This is just eventing. If you take anything from here you don't have to credit me at all, unless your kind heart requests you to do so.

-- Don't post this in any other website. 

What this beta includes:

- Learning and forgetting skills automatically

- A couple battles (credits to Tektek's generator and Gaia Online for the battlers) to test the functionality

- Checking how may points you've got, as well as editing its value to that of your choice

- Deep explanation through Comment commands

- A bit messy common eventing

Contains a couple Yanfly scripts

end of edit

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While I was sitting doing my toilet things an cool idea struck my mind for a secondary char in my RPG.

The White-Gray-Black mage. When you unlock the char he wears his most common gray robe. He learns "Gray magic" spells by levelling like normal. 

Every time he casts a Black Magic, a variable goes up (i.e. Darkness increases var+1, Darkness all increases var+3). When this variable reaches a certain point, he will learn a new Black Magic spell and will also potentially lose a White or Gray Magic spell.

Every time he casts a White Magic, the same things happen in the opposite direction. Pretty much like karma.

What does this mean? 

- You choose how the character progresses

- Because it's a variable, you can customize his speech easily depending on his "karma"

- He can masterize and learn either Magic tree or become a jack-of-all-trades.

Seems fun? What would you like to say?

Nice concept, but I'd suggest totally reworking the class-name to something a little less literal and wordy.

Also, this is personal opinion here but, I'd scrap the idea of "forgetting" the Gray spells completely and make sure the chance of forgetting the White or Black spells very low.

you could always do what they did in pokemon and offer the player the choice to add the new skill to their skillset. have like 8 open slots, and once they're filled then the player will have to decide to add either white or black spells to replace the others.

Wouldn't it be annoying to switch sides though? If you learned all of the Black Magic spells, but then decided you wanted some Healing spells, how long would it take of you spamming White Magic spells over and over and over and over again to learn more? I find systems that force you to do certain battle actions to learn stuff to be kinda annoying. Stuff like "Cast Fire 50 times to learn Fira! Cast Fira 100 times to learn Firaga!" If I feel like I'm mindlessly spamming these spells for the SOLE purpose of upgrading, it's annoying. If you can find a way to weave the progression through natural play (and I suspect that would be difficult), it might not be so bad. Still, the last thing I want to do, is have to spend half an hour or more, casting Heal over and over again to learn more White Magic spells if I decide to change paths. This is the benefit of a Skill Point system where you can at any point, reset your skills and reallocate them. You can instantly switch over skill trees in these systems without having to spend time grinding.

While the general concept of a mage whose alignment changes based on the magic they use sounds like a cool idea in theory, the gameplay aspect sounds like it'd be kind of obnoxious in practice. It's kind of grindy and encourages spamming, and it sounds like there is no incentive to bother with the mechanic, especially for a side character. Most players would just decide to use this character as either a black mage or a white mage and keep them there without switching. Making a player forget a learned spell just feels like a punishment for switching. 

If you make a character that can switch around alignments, I think it'd be a more interesting and unique class if the character was able to flip back and forth several times over the course of a single battle. Like if you had a 'grey' mage with split personalities or say his powers come from having two opposing spirits housed within him or something like that. And he normally has a mixed skillset of grey magic with some weaker white magic and black magic, but useing spells that lean more strongly towards one alignment will either build up to, (using a variable like you said) or just have a percentage change of triggering a state or transformation. So while in black magic mode, you could get a boost to black magic damage, access to new spells only available in that mode, and non black magic spells could be weakend, have increased MP costs or be sealed off completely. (and vice versa for white magic mode)  

Or maybe a mode switch can have other triggers, like getting angry and slipping into black magic mode if attacked too many times. Etc. 

That system would take a few special scripts to implement, mainly for custom states and specialized skill costs, but there are many choices for scripts that can pull such a system off. 

The idea is interesting.  But, as others have stated, it would be tedious to change sides and have to re-learn spells.

Personally, I would have 3 separate Classes.  Then, keep an internal variable representing the "karma".  Change the variable based on how the user completes quests or which quests the user chooses to complete.  For example, if you kill the Evil King, that might earn you some bad karma (it IS killing to solve a plot problem, after all), but you might earn good karma by getting the Evil King deposed instead.  The latter is much harder and grants more XP.

At some point, change the user's class completely and irrevocably.  This would impact any future skills the Mage learns.  I'm thinking of how Cecil changes his class midway through FFIV, but with more user-controlled flexibility.

Also, if the mage is in a one person party, it's crucial to make sure s/he has the skills required to survive no matter the alignment.  And make sure, if there are alignment specific quests, that all alignments have a meaningful storyline to pursue.

I like the idea overall. I wonder to make less grinding if you were to do something where say at the point you learned a new spell you might learn Black Spell A and White Spell A. And if you used Black A more, say you became limited in the number of times you could use White A. Or the power of White A weakened while the power of Black A strengthened. And vice versa. Does that make sense at all? I guess I'm saying instead of losing one or the other altogether have some sort of sliding scale to make one more valuable over the other.

omg...at first glance I misread this in:

"White Gay Black Mage"

I thought it was a yaoi(?) lovestory between a white man and a black mage...ahahahahah!

On a serious note now, the idea is great but I quote what whitesphere said, just go with 3 separate classes mainly to avoid a lot of confusion.

I find the idea surprisingly creative! The use of a variable karma system really adds a certain depth to it, too, I'd say.

I'd say confine the system to a certain mage, though, to make the development more varied and not have everyone go through waves of sorts.

Yey people like it. I guess I'm out to create the appropriate skills, then. In my current project, there IS a mage character in the party, and at some point somewhat early in the game but not inmediatly, the Karma thing will kick-in.

You should give us a sample when a demo could be available. The concept is brilliant and I'm curious.

Since you are so enthusiast about it, yeah, I'm going to start working on a demo for you guys this evening. No ETA tho!

EDIT

KKK that was fast.

A v.0.1 beta is open for testing. I think everything is well explained and functional. Let me know of any bugs, or w/e you may encounter. 

Beta terms of use:

-- This is just eventing. If you take anything from here you don't have to credit me at all, unless your kind heart requests you to do so.

-- Don't post this in any other website. 

I didn't want to double post, so if you read this, leave a comment so people know there's something new, please < 3

end of edit

Bumpity  >:(