Forum:Spell infobox

Nearly all the articles here do a good job of associating the material with the Ultima to which they are connected, with one major exception: spells. It seems that very few spells say which Ultima they belong to, and many of those don't offer any kind of clue.

All spells have some of reagents, words, runes, MP costs, scope of usability, elemental association, circle, and, of course, the game. Could an info box hold these? AngusM 03:32, June 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * An infobox could hold these, yes; it would get very complicated between games, though. Some spells share names between installments, but change circles, words of power, etc. etc. Not to dissuade you, though; I think it's an awesome idea and long overdue, and a format similar to the NPC box would work to separate the weird changes between installments. --Polygoncount 08:04, June 26, 2010 (UTC)
 * Any objection to treating each spell within a game as unique? It would certainly clear up the confusion I've had before, where a spell seems to come from one game, but then has properties from another. Perhaps in addition to the above fields, an info box could have related to n in Ultima m. AngusM 19:51, June 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * That sounds like a good idea.--Sega381 20:51, June 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * I completely agree this needs cleanup. Having a spell have a separate article for each game it is in would leave us with some extremely sparse articles though. For example Resurrect we would have Resurrect (U7), Resurrect (U6), In Mani Corp (or Create Life from Death), Resurrect (U4), Surmandum and Anju Sermani. Each of these would have only a smattering of information with a lot of it repeating. How I would arrange this would be to join U5 through U7 (and maybe U4) onto one page. Separate the information by sections. The U5 names would be redirects to the proper section ( Resurrect ). U4 could probably be handled by a section as well. U3 is tricky since it has two spells. I'd say give each of those spells their own article but make reference to them somewhere on the Resurrect article. -- Fenyx4 15:18, June 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * This probably makes the most sense. I'm still waiting to hear your opinion about an infobox, though. AngusM 17:44, June 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * Wanted to have the above figured out so I had an idea what the infobox would need. Sounds like one with similar complexity to the NPC infobox would be called for. (Not AS complex but pretty close.) Not quite sure on all the details but definitely do-able.
 * Oh! I also feel like we should have more categories. Category:Ultima V Spells, Category:Ultima III spells, etc. -- Fenyx4 20:48, June 28, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, this solution seems fine. Basically, would be treating each spell as unique, but we would be putting all the "very similar" unique spells together in the same page. We COULD also have separate infoboxes for each of the sections in the article. I'm not sure how this would look, though.--Sega381 14:27, June 29, 2010 (UTC)
 * I've thought about this a bit, and I've come to realize that I don't know what's so wrong about a lot of sparse articles, which is what would happen if we treated each spell in a game as unique. If we try to group spells, then we'll have a lot of common properties, and then have unique properties, all of which would have to be marshaled into their own sections. At first glance, that looks a lot more hairy. So what's the fear of having a lot of sparse articles? Is it that their numbers would cause spam for the reader when looking for something?
 * Trying to look at this through a reader's eyes, if I was looking for a spell from a certain game, I might search for a spell by name. If that name was one I came up w/, or got from a game, I'd notice which game it came from, because of the article name. However, if that didn't work, I would think that the related to field would get me where I need to go pretty fast. AngusM 19:29, June 29, 2010 (UTC)