Arcane Arena Manual

Arcane Arena Manual version 1.0 1. General 2. Game Abstract 3. Characters 4. Reference Statistics 5. Equipment Statistics 6. Movement 7. Combat 8. Gaining Experience 9. Spell Casting 10. Items 11. Spell Book GENERAL Arcane Arena is a game of gladiator combat that takes place on a mysterious island filled with mythical beasts and fearsome spells, insert cliche here. Using a client/server model, Arcane Arena is a persistent world, massively multiplayer game. By utilizing a unique battle system in which individual speed charactaristics effect the real-world rate at which they receive turns, battles capture both the adreline rush of real time games and the complex, tactical satisfaction of turn based games. GAME ABSTRACT The goals are to provide a comprehensive battle system which takes spatial, and temporal aspects of a fight into account and is absolutely as simple as possible. Simplicity of information and options will be key in a time-limited combat. The system's rules and options need to be complex enough to provide room for the expression of skill, if it's just hacking at each other, it's not cool. Chess has 10 rules, but it's complex. There are four main characteristic scores and they are Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Speed. Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence are raw scores that affect your ability in battle, casting spells and available mana. Speed determines how quickly you can act. (Obscure, we know...) A players' ability in battle is affected by their characteristics, weapon, armor and experience level. These are all raw scores and are determined by a combination of your characteristics, experience points and equipment. Weapons and armor each have baseline stats that can be modified upwards by magic. In an effort to make a magic rich game, magic can affect any and all ability scores, regardless of whether that score is related to offense, defense or a characteristic. CHARACTERS All of the raw scores in the game do not have any maximum. That allows people to continue to improve their characters over time regardless of their level. New characters start with all their core stats equal to 14. Mana is initially 20. MAIN CHARACTERISTICS: Strength - a minimum strength is required to use various weapons. Strength gives bonuses to your maximum melee damage (but not minimum) based on the following equation: (Str - 10)/2. Dexterity - Dexterity affects your ability to hit in combat as well as your ability to dodge. See the section on to hit skill and combat for details. Intelligence - Intelligence affects how much mana you get when you gain an experience level. For all spells cast at you that are not auto-hit spells, Intelligence increases your defense score by Int/4. Speed - All actions you take are entered into a game queue, or buffer. The rate at which these actions are taken off the queue and performed by the Arcane Arena server is determined by your Speed statistic. During battle, your speed can range from appro…