Talk:Tree Magic

From Sagataflwiki

This is a first for this wki, an article not written by The Designer, but rather by loki, at least initially. The Designer has set up the article skeleton, and loki will be working from a short but fairly coplete MS Word document written (by The Designer) some years ago, on Tree Magic. A wikifikation process almost cannot avoid changing the material being wikified, sometimes elaborating and making the material more flexible by adding more options, or generalizing it, and in other cases simplifying (hopefully losslessly or nearly so). The only instruction given to loki is to implement a "picks" system or Tree Magic Levels system, instead of stating the Essence cost of each option directly, as was done in the original MS Word document.--Peter Knutsen (the Designer) 19:47, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

I've now added a table structure/skeleton at the bottom of the article, that loki can expand and adapt to suit this article. From now on I'll leave him to it (from what he wrote to me yesterday, it migh be a couple of weeks before he has the time to start this project).--Peter Knutsen (the Designer) 06:42, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Ok, I've started adding a little bit of structure to the article. I will probably just use basic text at the beginning to put in most of the information and data I need, then I'll change some of it to tables in order to improve readability. I've re-read the original Tree Magic doc, and I agree that the full topic will probably be split over different articles. The first one, this one, covering the rationales, the mechanical aspects (how to compute costs and growth times, what steps need to be taken and the main effects that can be put in. A second article will cover the Enhanced Bloodlines effects and (probably) a third one will cover the Aura effects, especially if you mean to expand on it.

I'll start stating the principles behind the different costing/timing schemes and then I'll provide tables where those are needed to increase the overall readability and make it easier for the player to figure out the final costs/times without excessive calculations. For those precalculated tables I'll be using 12 moons to a year and 30 days to a moon as conversion factors. -- Loki 6 December 2010

Actually, 1 Moon is exactly 28 Days (4 Weeks of 7 Days each), and 1 Year is almost exactly 13 Moons. Where are your figures of 12 and 30 coming from? Also, it's standard nomenclature to capitalize Time Interval terms to make clear they're precise game-mechanical distinctions. Other than that you're doing fine, but do you know how to create new articles? (I agree with separating Aura effects out into its own article, like I suggested you do with Bloodline effects, and since Aura effects will probably be very similar to Domain Magic, I better get my ass in gear and resume working on those articles.)

It was standard business practice. I didn't know your conversion factors. Now I will be obviosuly using the ones you gave me. I've just started putting in the most obvious stuff. It will probably take me some time, both because I'm not very used to wiki and because I keep mixing up Sagatafl and OMNIA in my head :) I do think, though, that a specific Advantage/Power/Enhancer/Lore is needed to modify the standard conversion factor of 1 Tree Level = 0.2 Essence (I used this since almost all of your costing schemes were based on multiples of 0.2ES, with picks for EBL and discounted Prepare rituals being the only exceptions). Otherwise it's just pointless to use levels/picks instead of Essence directly. It's not like they're tallied all at once and then some non-linear formula is applied to the total (like in Contacts or House) in order to prevent/encourage excessive choices. They're just used pretty much one at a time, for every Ritual. So the conversion Levels-ES should be either based on the Character's scores (somehow) or be modifiable via Advantages (or both, maybe). - Loki, 7 December 2010.