Thank you for your interest, everyone!
@fairygodfeather I had a lot of fun playing Academagia as well, and I completely agree with your criticisms of the game. The skill trees were too extensive, many subskills were often functionally redundant, 95% of the spells were useless, and the choice aspects of the game felt encumbered. Despite these flaws, I loved the game because of the writing and world-building: I felt immersed in their universe, and I could believe that I was a student at a magical institute. My goal here is to recreate these crucial rpg elements without burdening the player with hundreds of subskills.
Here’s a rough outline of the stats and skill trees.
4 main attributes: Fitness, Intelligence, Finesse, Charm
These govern your base success rate in performing certain actions before taking into account your scores in specific skills. This allows players to be ‘naturally talented’ at certain tasks without having to train for it (e.g. high charm score might allow you to pass a persuasion check even if you have no points in the ‘rhetoric’ skill).
10-20 skills. Examples: “wit”, “deceit”, “courage”, “athletics”, “observation”, “explore”, “deduction”
These are used to successfully progress through the game.
5 magic courses/primary schools of magic:
Invocation -ability to control elements and primal energy, fire, water, air, etc
Negation - defense of the dark arts, basically. This school of magic focuses on resisting magic, diverting spells cast at you, etc
Transfiguration - converting things into other things. Need to enter a building? Sure, you could create a fireball and blast a hole in the wall, or you can transfigure a window into a door!
Charms - creating and seeing through illusions, glamours, and other magical forms of deception.
Glyphs - creating wards, leaving behind magical traps, protective glyphs, etc
And there are 2 forbidden schools of magic, which are no longer taught at the school (obviously)
Gates - the art of summoning/conjuring creatures from other planes of existence
Domination - in a nut shell, mind control.
@marajade @dj_cuty
I haven’t decided if players should just choose which college they want or if they are assigned based on a personality assessment. Favouring the former option right now.
The 6 colleges each embody a motto, and attracts different types of students. One of the colleges does attract ‘slytherin’ esque types ;), as it favours students who are more cunning, ambitious, or underhanded (though not necessarily evil). I’m not at home right now so I can’t show you the list of colleges, but I’ll post it here later.
What age will the characters be? First years will be around 13 years old (same age as freshmen in high school). There are 5 school years in total, but the first installment will just span the first year.
Will there be romances? Yes!
Will there be family interaction? I’m iffy about this one, as it could be difficult to implement for roleplaying purposes, but yes, expect to receive correspondences from your parents (unless you’re the black sheep of the family or an orphan).
The setting is fantasy, similar to Academagia. There is technology (flying ships, clockwork, steam), but no computers or modern facilities here.
