Magic Spells

This request would probably be best left for farther down the road, when the game is more feature complete, but some utility spells available to all classes could be useful. Instead of mana or any other casting resource, they fatten the player when cast, and continue to fatten them while active for maintained spells. Intelligence could reduce the amount of weight gained. Some examples could include:

[ul][li]Identify (if/when we start getting magic items, identifies them; more powerful items add more weight upon identification)[/li]
[li]Teleport (go to any previously explored room on the current floor; the farther you teleport, the more weight gets added)[/li]
[li]Town Portal (Return to town, take portal back to floor while maintaining exploration; holding the portal open makes your weight climb until you return to the dungeon)[/li]
[li]Sense Monsters (Mark rooms with enemies in a near radius; a flat weight penalty for casting, plus more chub for every monster detected)[/li]
[li]Detect Traps (same as above, but with traps)[/li]
[li]Levitate (avoid certain floor based traps; fattens player while active. Could also be used after immobility is introduced to allow the player to try and escape the dungeon and make it back to the surface. The heavier the player, the more weight it adds per tick)[/li]
[li]Invisibility (Avoid certain monsters, goblins and rats for example but not skeleton mages or the succubus; agility/dexterity check based on current weight to see if you bump into them with your belly because it’s too large to sneak past)[/li]
[li]Buff Attribute (Same drill here, buff strength/vitality/etc, get fatter as long as you maintain the spell)[/li]
[li]Heal (Trade your wounds for your waistline)[/li]
[li]Bloat (Add weight to your opponent to slow them down and reduce their agility, while doing the same to yourself)[/li]
[li]Compress (Temporarily shrink your body to a more slender size to get through traps or regain mobility, but you’ll pay for it later)[/li][/ul]

These could lead to some fun situations. You’re at the second-to-last room on the current floor, but your health is too low to fight whatever boss monster lies behind its doors, and you’ve already drunk all your health potions. You don’t want to have to explore all the way through the dungeon again. You could cast Heal on yourself, but your belly is already threatening the straps on your cuirass and the extra weight would probably blow it wide open. You could create a Town Portal and return home to restock on potions, but the cost of casting and holding the portal open would necessitate a visit to the tailor as well, and you’d end up even heavier than if you just healed yourself. Or you could buff your strength and go for a full-frontal attack, and hope that your armor lasts long enough that it doesn’t become a literal “full-frontal” attack…

I’m really enjoying this game! I hope you like this suggestion, and I look forward to upcoming updates!

These are certainly cool skill ideas, but in terms of lore there needs to be an explanation as to why they cause you to gain weight to cast. The only requirement to cast magic is expelling active mana within your body so gaining weight as a side effect wouldn’t be justified. Perhaps these spells could be one-time use scrolls that the witch supplies to a seller in town to purposefully cause weight gain.

My thinking was that after using the mana, you naturally absorb mana from the surrounding environment to replace that expended in the spell. The tower, as befits a witch’s tower, has a high ambient magical atmosphere, but corrupted with her own brand of fattening magic. Of course, I also like the idea of the witch leaving scrolls around to tempt and entrap the foolish!

The issue lies in the fact that one cannot absorb “passive mana”, which is the mana that is expelled from our body and lingering in the air. “Active mana” is the mana circulating the body which provides life, and this is the only mana that can be used in magic spells; once it leaves the body it is considered passive and cannot be harnessed by human beings. If there were a way to absorb passive mana from the surrounding air and convert it to active mana, then your ideas could come to fruition, but I’ve been tailoring the story around this law.

The scrolls would make more sense since you can charge items with a spell to be used later if the material is right for magical conductivity (we know this because staves and wands exist). Additionally, it’s possible to add “conditions” to charged items. If you think of mana as electricity, and a scroll as an embedded system, it makes sense that you can use mana to “program” the scroll to perform a task. In this case, allowing the user to cast a spell with weight gain as the condition.

Ok, that makes sense why my suggestion doesn’t quite work. Is there more of the background information of the setting posted anywhere? I’d love to dig into it and learn more about how the world you created works.

I made a little write up in a past developer blog. It’s in the spoiler tag:

http://www.weightgaming.com/forum/index.php?topic=245.msg3403#msg3403