Standardizing Scrolls, Potions, and Wands

So then ... in vanilla ToEE, we have nine different scroll icons available to be displayed in a player's inventory. Different color scrolls seem to be assigned to the different schools of magic. Thus, a school of magic could be thought to have an official representative color - very useful in a graphical interface like ToEE to let you know at a glance what the nature of any particular scroll is. The implementation is patchy at best, but the basic breakdown is this:

• abjuration scrolls are dark blue
• conjuration scrolls are red
• divination scrolls are yellow
• enchantment scrolls are light blue
• evocation scrolls are orange
• illusion scrolls are green
• necromancy scrolls are purple
• transmutation scrolls are grey

There is also a white scroll but I don't know what it's used for yet.

The situation becomes a bit more complicated when we add in potions and wands. There are only five potion icons - yellow, red, purple, dark blue, and green. And wands are even worse with only three: red, light blue, and green. Consider also the fact that potions apply different colors to different schools of magic than scrolls do, and suddenly we've got a nasty mess on our hands.

Now the good news: HK has done a couple new wand icons for us (yellow and purple), and following his lead I have rounded out the rest with orange potion and wand icons, a dark blue wand icon, a light blue potion icon, and grey potion and wand icons. This means that we can now have a uniformly applied system of colors representing schools of magic across the ToEE magic spectrum - scrolls, wands, and potions. Yay!

Now back to the problems. Conjuration potions such as Cure Light Wounds, as we all know, are blue. Conjuration scrolls, on the other hand, are red. There are other incongruities like this as well. I'd like to fix this, and being as I suspect it would be too traumatic a change for players' cure potions to suddenly turn red, the fix in the case of conjuration would mean turning its scrolls to blue, and thus turning abjuration scrolls and potions (and wands) red.

I would also like to take it one step further and make all magical evocation stuff red instead of orange, and switch the abjuration stuff from the red it just traded conjuration for to orange. The reason for this should be pretty obvious - evocation usually means boom!, and red is more indicative of danger than orange. The 'dispel this or that' abjuration stuff can be the nice mellow orange.

During the course of this proposed fix, I'd also make sure all the other scrolls, potions, and wands were in full compliance with their associated school colors.

So in a nutshell what I'm asking is this: does anyone mind if

1. evocation scrolls, potions (are there any?), and wands become red
2. conjuration scrolls, potions, and wands all become blue
3. abjuration scrolls, potions and wands become orange

Everything else can stay the same as it is, and we've still got white out there waiting in the wings.

 

Yeah - there are the icons for Bull's Strength (clay thingie) and another one or two. I wouldn't change those. Likewise for the specific wands that are different (magic missile, etc.)

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Whoops, maggit the ninja!

I don't know that there are any limitations aside from practical ones, but I can't conceive of anyone doing a unique icon for every spell.

 

I've been asking for flasks, urns and other models that could come in different sizes forever :sadblinky

I have no idea if there is an upper limit for Icons but I am hoping there isn't

 

Yeah, I agree: since there is colouring for the different schools we should standardize that, but the unknown element has to remain - especially in the hope that we may actually get cursed stuff happening one day.

 

I'll third that - it might be why scrolls aren't specific too.

btw, just an fyi, I have added scrolls for Summon Monster VI - IX, Summon Nature's Ally VI - IX, and Mass Inflict Moderate/Serious/Critical Wounds.

 

Yeah, so that you don't know for sure what you're getting unless you ID it. Unfortunately that's easily exposed though, as the poison potions don't stack.

Incidentally, I've found out some interesting things about the number of spells per school (assuming that the scroll pool is representative of the available spells themselves): The king daddy schools of magic are conjuration and transmutation, both having a great many spells. These are followed by abjuration and evocation, which have a very respectable number. Next up are necromancy and enchantment, which may be thougt to be slightly lacking. And the readheaded stepchildren are divination and illusion, which have comparatively few spells to choose from. This seems especially unfortunate in the case of illusion, for which you might think there would be a lot of potential.

If anybody does any more new spells in the future, it might be nice to focus on divination and illusion to boost them up a bit.

 

I doubt I would remember the schools either - but as Gaear said, its just about consistency for people who do take D&D that seriously. The rest of us won't lose anything by it.

Regarding Illusion, it generally has to be subtly DMed: hard to mod, unfortunately.