I feel like some spell rules need to be changed.

Right, so it's pretty much as the title says; I feel like some rules regarding spells need to be changed.  While I think the HP and damage systems should also perhaps change, I'm personally not smart enough to come up with something that would be of value, but I am smart enough to comment on certain values on spells.  I'm specifically speaking about the range and travel times of ranged abilities, spells and weapons.

The reason I feel like these factors should be changed is actually because of an application I made; their values are unacceptable within current rule systems, and while this may come across as me being salty, I've done a little research, and it makes no sense at all.  So, this won't only be benefiting me, this should benefit everyone as a whole.  As it stands right now, ranged spells, abilities and weapons that work as projectiles are not worth creating, and I'll explain why.

The application I'm talking about is a rifle.  Rifles typically have an effective range of 600 meters and can travel about 792 meters per second; there are some differences in them, sure, but these are pretty acceptable numbers.  My character's rifle would eventually reach those numbers as she ranks up in due time, however, this apparently is not acceptable, like I said.  Instead, I was asked to change the numbers down to 15-20 meters, with the speed being half that.  It's just how the rules work now, apparently.

Here's why that makes no sense, however; I can throw a baseball both farther and faster than that.  During my years in highschool, we (a few friends and I) decided to see how far we could throw a baseball.  I was able to throw it about 304 feet, but we'll round it to 300 feet to make things a little easier.  That's about 91 meters, which is almost the same range value of an S-Rank spell, being 100 meters.  I further did a little more research on how fast the ball needs to be traveling in order to reach that distance, and it's about 90 miles per hour; that translates to being 40 meters per second, which would be an acceptable speed value for a normal A-Rank spell.  Of course not everyone has the same capabilities - some throw farther, others not as far, but I had a pretty good pitch.  Already, as a regular human, I can outperform an incredible amount of mages when it comes to distances and projectile speed as I am right now.

We do use real life as a way to gauge some of our values.  The one I'm talking about specifically is default speeds for each rank.  Anyways, carrying on with the ball throw, since that's the easiest example to use, mages are automatically stronger, faster, and can endure more than normal people.  Let's see how far a B-Rank mage can pitch.  Since there are no rules regarding how far people can throw (and for the love of god don't implement something like that as it won't solve the problem) I'll be using unarmed melee damage as a way to gauge how much stronger a B-Rank mage is than someone like me, or you.

Let's use D-Rank as the normal human striking strength.  Their damage is 5.  C-Rank's is 10, while B-Rank's is 15.  B-Rank mages are three times as strong as a normal human.  In other words, they can pitch at 273 meters at speeds of 120 meters per second, and these values of course increase as people rank up.

If you make throwing magic you're more effective than any S-Rank mage or even some H-Rank mage spells that work as some sort of projectile.  Guns, and presumably things like cannons, rockets, even a bow and arrow would likely never be able to measure up to that.  I think that's really silly for mages that are supposed to break the world and reality with their magical prowess, where throwing things is more effective for a ranged battle, and to top that all off, their tools at D-Rank can nearly be out-run by a normal human (20 mph is about 9 meters per second)?

I dunno man, to me, that seems like it's really weird.  Imagine being faster than a D-Rank fireball, just casually running past it.  Seems pretty ridiculous, right?

So, now that I've explained why our current values make literally ZERO sense, I'll speak briefly on my suggestion.  Remember when I said I wasn't smart enough to figure out hp and damage suggestions?  I'm not sure I'm smart enough to figure out range and speeds for projectiles, either.  The obvious suggestion is "make the values higher" but that can be anything.  Honestly, I'm not really sure.  Back in the day, people just kind of threw those values in there, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing - mages are supposed to feel magical and grand, especially at higher ranks.

You're supposed to be able to break the WORLD WITH YOUR FOOTSTEPS!  Having really high range and speed values should absolutely be a thing.  Not only would it make more sense for us in our universe, it also will allow for more diverse and interesting magics, like myself, who would rely on that range.  In order to prevent the higher range being available to everyone with literally any magic, I do suggest reading and understanding the magic of the person who you're reading well; if they use water magic, for example, a water whip shouldn't go as far or as fast as someone who uses magic that revolves around a bow.  That would be a bit harder to figure out, but not impossible.  Maybe there should be types of magic?  Again, I don't really know.

Well, I guess that's all I really had to say.  Kinda an unorganized mess, but I think it gets the message across.  To any members reading - feel free to say what you think. I'm curious to see whether or not I'm agreed with, or laughed at. I just really hope this suggestion doesn't get ignored, 'cus I feel like it's actually a pretty important point to talk about.

I agree and wanted to throw some information here:

In Asa's case a C-Rank would literally be able to outrun a bullet because the speeds would more or less match with 10m/s being half of the max range of 20 meters

At S-Rank the speed of a spell (50m/s as prescribed by the rules) is 30m/s slower than an animal irl (Peregrine Falcon) and these mages are supposed to be nearly the pinnacle of magic.

**The Speed of a spell is always half its range in knockback <- This seems pretty absolute for a "guide" as the section of the rules refers to it. Not only is it absolute, but it encourages people to just go with the largest speed possible. Wouldn't it make sense to have the speed increase at the range decreases in order to incentivize players to choose one over the other?

While the rules refer to "draw backs" allowing for more speed or range, I believe that the drawbacks of range or speed themselves should be explicitly listed such as "the shorter the range the faster the spell" or something akin to that while also removing that whole bit about the speed always being half of the range.

From a balance perspective, I could understand why bullet speeds might not be very fun to allow, as they would be too fast to even react. At the same time, though, mages are powerful beings which can screw with the rules of nature- so maybe bullets might not exactly be the worst thing? I'm not sure really.

I'm kinda on the same boat as Asa though. I think the rules regarding speeds and range should be a bit less restrictive and a bit more tweaked. Even though it's listed as a **guide** it's not exactly treated that way. It's treated a bit more like a rule (as even stated within the changelogs when they were added to the rules from being "unwritten rules")

If you can literally throw an object faster and further than you can magically cast it,  your system is broken,  like,  a hamster in a parrot cage broken,  not squirrel on caffeine broken. 

Not to mention you can semi-casually out pace low rank spells with just a bit of a jog.  Not that it'll be a long jog either, seeing as the ranges are so short.

It's also important to note that you're not supposed to dodge bullets after you see them.  You respond to the very act of drawing the weapon, the actions leading up to the bullet.    I use to be allowed to make spells that have clear "Wind up" prior to the effect.  Even true speed of light lasers,  but that's something that's becoming less accepted as interpretations get harsher. 


Staff have always treated the "Guidelines" as hard rules,  even when the rules seem to go out of there way to point out that "HEY, These are just guidelines!"   And when I mean always I mean long before current generation,  it's a quirk that's been passed down.   It gets a little more strict every passing year though.   Starting to feel a little hard to breathe with the how tight it's starting to get, and that was kinda the main drawing point of the site,  the main trump card FT-RP holds above so many other RP sites.  That you can theoretically fit in just about any character type.   Though that's slowly dwindled.   (You can't really play a lawful - Official type character anymore without being a vigilante, since RK and MC have since been closed off for example).



But Speed and Range are things I've been nagging on for years (Constructively, with very usable given replacement systems), so,  oh well.   :jailbait:

I agree with the range thing fully, as i wanted to make magic based on artillery ranges, a bit much even without these rules, but even if i got S-rank, the most i could shoot an artillery weapon, would be a few hundred meters, which is barely anything. It wouldn't even be classed as artillery.

Aside from that, if we don't take into account irl, which we should a bit, even in the anime/manga, they are easily able to thwart these ranges, even as low rank mages.

For balance, it should really be a case to case basis, long range spells could easily have drawbacks and honestly, we could probably triple the range limits right now and see almost no changes in balance, as it would open up much more creativity. Damage is much more tricky than that, but i have never heard anyone complain that the ranges were too much. So you could easily triple the current range limits and not worry about a thing, but they would still be lower than irl, even if we are supposedly mages.

So i would suggest a case by case basis for ranges, have some in the rules, as guidelines, not strict limits on ranges. Or damage and stuff for that matter, as if it's just guidelines, creativity will be much better on the site. And honestly, if someone's magic does become broken in pvp, which not a lot happens on the site as i have noticed, you can always talk to that person about their magic and see if something can be changed.

This has been brought up a chunk before and I even worked on something when I was a dev to fix it because people on site rarely follow the range and speed for their spells at all. It simply got rid of both parts to magic and would leave it all up to those in the thread. Yeah, it can be abused a bit but the site is built up on RP so why do we have all these PvP like standards when even PvP is determined by those RPing in whatever way they want? Just is an old set of rules that we can do without or only care about for the possibility of PvP and those fighting wanting to use it, I guess.

I was wondering how that would turn out since I saw your weapon posted, read over it since I like reading what other firearm users do, and kind of figured those numbers would come to bite. Unfortunately, this topic has been discussed some back when the issue of posting the at the time hidden range and speed guidelines was suggested and probably many times before that. There are only two solutions I can think of where one is to increase the current values by a large amount, like you said. Even if they do that though someone would still say later on that it wasn't enough. I doubt they'd ever increase it so much that your rifle would make sense for example. The other one is to just get rid of it entirely and use the trust system which I am sure that has been tried and did not work which is why we have the system we have today.

Another thing that has to be considered is the fact that this site seems to mainly be about the job system. PvP is ridiculously rare and even socials seem to be quite uncommon and tend to die off quickly. Why do I bring this up? Because these rules seem to only exist due to trying to balance out PvP. The staff seem to give a lot of leeway in how you go about completing your jobs so long as the requirements are met and I doubt they track what's going on in your socials. Due to the very rare occurrences of PvP related matters, it likely isn't much of a priority to look into and come up with a solution to range balance.

Right. This site was heralded for the idea of "you can get anything approved so long as you do it right and smartly". This got abused, so what ended up happening is that everything was modeled to make sure that couldn't happen again, which, again, isn't a bad thing in theory, but what ended up happening is this situation we have now, where ranged spells are almost worthless. What should've happened is a simple fix, turned out to be like this.

But yeah, the main problem I feel is that the "guidelines", well first of all don't make much sense, and are treated too harshly as concrete rules. They're supposed to be just that - guidelines, so let's start treating them as such. Or, remove them entirely, that would probably be a much better solution. I'm not entirely sure, but I could probably help come up with something if this suggestion is actually taken seriously.

Thanks for the feedback guys!

Asayake wrote:Right.  This site was heralded for the idea of "you can get anything approved so long as you do it right and smartly".  This got abused, so what ended up happening is that everything was modeled to make sure that couldn't happen again, which, again, isn't a bad thing in theory, but what ended up happening is this situation we have now, where ranged spells are almost worthless.  What should've happened is a simple fix, turned out to be like this.

But yeah, the main problem I feel is that the "guidelines", well first of all don't make much sense, and are treated too harshly as concrete rules.  They're supposed to be just that - guidelines, so let's start treating them as such.  Or, remove them entirely, that would probably be a much better solution.  I'm not entirely sure, but I could probably help come up with something if this suggestion is actually taken seriously.

Thanks for the feedback guys!

The guidelines that the staff use(at least a good majority of them which include the range and speed stuff) came from me but the thing is, they are guidelines and not set in stone rules at all. I made a list of guidelines to show staff how to grade apps and other things but everything graded by staff is up to the discretion of that staff member and there are no rules to what they can approve so much as it is not something seen as overly powerful which is what I made those guidelines to help show a bit with multiple examples. I did tell them to use them how they see fit though when I passed them off so maybe they made them into actual rules since but idk.

The other thing is, if anything changes with ranges and speed staff will have to re-approve every app under the new rule(s) put in which is a lot of work for them to do, especially when they have trouble keeping up with apps as is sometimes so if anything happened it would have to work with what is stated in apps somehow already for quick approvals or even just be something like we have every rank have a clear cut speed and range based on a single word like Siren has suggested in the past. I have something with that on the dev side of the site but it was never approved or added but it is up to them to use it or not now if they want.

Cirven wrote:
The other thing is, if anything changes with ranges and speed staff will have to re-approve every app under the new rule(s) put in which is a lot of work for them to do, especially when they have trouble keeping up with apps as is sometimes so if anything happened it would have to work with what is stated in apps somehow already for quick approvals or even just be something like we have every rank have a clear cut speed and range based on a single word like Siren has suggested in the past. I have something with that on the dev side of the site but it was never approved or added but it is up to them to use it or not now if they want.

Not necessarily.  Any spell could be assumed to fit minimum or medium values for the new system.  With a quick non-serious adjustment/ staff intervention in instances where it's a problem.    From there apps could be updated when they would be updated normally, due to a rank up or such.

Similar to how the rules keep changing regarding buffs or regenerations,  and are retroactively applied.   Similar to the random rule that made regeneration work only every other post.

Feel like throwing in this as well, even if went old fashion and used a bow, fastest compound bows go about 100m/s.

This thread has brought up so much stuff that I have been dying to say, but haven't because of stuff brought up in another thread. Ive been going along with how the mods and admins treat 'guidelines', which are stated to have leeway in and out of the upper and lower limits, as concrete rules. But the fact that this site is slowly becoming less and less free, and more based a strict PvP rule system when I have been told on multiple ocassions that PvP has been removed from the site due to the difficulty of balancing and rarity of it, why are we still balancing to a PvP ideal?

Id say that if need be, you could have altered forms of yours spells for PvP, but when it comes to PvE let them be more realistic! You shouldnt be able to throw faster than you can fire a gun, you shouldn't be limited to healing a fraction of a wound per post when its been shown time and time again in both real life and in the anime that wounds heal pretty damn easy. Im just going to keep going along with this, since I know that im on thin ice already.

my name jeff

Did this go anywhere or nah? o-o Kinda curious about it still.

They changed ranges in patch notes.