Thanks for the input everyone! I really appreciate it. I'm gonna spew more thoughts out now.
Kayaba and Ilya's deal
I realized I hadn't described this as explicitly as I thought I did.
It's Kayaba saying something like, "Play my game sincerely, and I'll save your life." Obviously, if Ilya tries to escape, or leak information to the real world, he'll fry her brain. That's a unilateral warning from Kayaba. But you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, so he offers to reward Ilya as compensation if she willingly cooperates with him.
If it's "explaining that people don't actually die", Ilya might be penalized for leaking that to the player base, and anyway, Kayaba could start frying brains whenever he wants so it could be retroactively true, and for all they know, people get moved to a [Hell server that simulations damnation] and be continuously tortured when [HP goes to zero], so it could still be pretty scary.
...Ilya would tell Shirou she learned that people don't actually die when HP goes to zero so he'd focus on playing the game with her instead of focusing on saving people from death.
Since her fundamental objective is "monopolizing Shirou's time", it's not like Ilya actually has any particular objections to being trapped in SAO (with Shirou).
...From Ilya's perspective, what Shirou doesn't know won't hurt him. So the deal between Ilya and Kayaba will remain their little secret.
Illfang
I think I know what I'm going to do now...
I really like Spectrum's "use familiars" idea, so rather than pulling out a huge katana, when he pulls out his Tulwar, Illfang's body will be completely over-run with worms and he'll get something like Mad Enhancement, or something like Worm Reassembly-Style Regeneration.
In floor 2, the REAL Floor Boss will be some kinda tapeworm monster riding in a sub-Boss, as an extension of what we saw with Illfang.
In floor 3, the Boss will be a knockoff of a
Mongolian Death Worm.
In floor 4, we'll get slime-type worms that are nearly immune to physical attacks.
In floor 5, a Zouken expy. He's basically immortal until you figure out how to kill him, and he's a body-snatcher. His death animation will be a speech announcing there are no Safe Zones above his floor.
I like this because I can establish that Zouken was Kayaba's magecraft instructor without bonkin' the audience over the head with it.
Shirou's Salvation Targets
I like the symmetry of saving Diabel and Kaibou and using their responses as a contrast. That's really good, Shadow Zeranion.
Well, I might move the "sincerely thankful" one to the other end of the First Boss Fight so it can be one of the people that was inspired to try to win the game by the victory, like Griselda or Sillica, and so it's not that ham-handed that it's what I'm doing, and so I don't make chapter two overly-long. (Maybe I'll stick a scene like that next to Kirito intervening with the Black Cats and call the chapter "Saving People" or sommat, or he'll interfere with Titan's Hand somehow?).
...I think it would be interesting to make Diabel the suspicious one, although he might bury it under good rhetoric? I want to preserve the nature of Diabel and Kaibou as both fundamentally good, but also flawed, people. Making Kaibou the villain of too many scenes compromises that, and Diabel needs feet of clay.
How much Magecraft does Kayaba know anyway?
For the many years that he's been preparing the game, Kayaba has been focused on accumulating as much spellcraft knowledge as he could, with a special focus on basic and well-established systems. So, something like "Formalcraft" that's well understood and made widely available to 1st-gen mages like him could be very thorough, something like "Runes" that's famous but disfavored might be patchy beyond the generalities, something like "Alchemy" that has many practicioners would be almost schizophrenic. There's an entire Department of Mineralogy at Clock Tower, which is where Rin matriculates after FSN, so I get the impression what she does with gems is something a little rare, but not exactly unusual... especially considering her family is descended from one of many apprentices to a certain famous guy.
Considering that Kayaba has access to Zouken's resources, however, obvious knowledge areas are familiar creation and operation, contract magic, summoning magic (although the Servant system might be too high-level to be worth utilizing), gem-craft from observing the development of the Tohsaka family, and whatever Zouken has extracted from the corpses of participants that lost the Grail War. For example, the doll-magic of 3rd!Assassin's Master.
...I don't know how much would be known from 4!Caster's skills, but compared to Zouken, the similarity is extremely high.
However, magecraft is intensely personal. Rather than teaching people specifics, his goal has been to give them solid foundations, and then provide excellent tools to develop your own unique abilities. Well, from a combat perspective, having an eclectic and personalized system with weird strengths and weaknesses is an advantage from Kayaba's perspective; making it so that there's no "SAO magecraft" that they can be categorized in, that everyone is unique, that diversity means that it's more difficult for the Enforcers to develop SOPs to handling them.
Basically, he's going to deliver everything he knows on a silver platter, with certain exceptions (in particular the theory and operation behind the spells trapping everyone in the game); I expect his "knowledge lead" would be completely exhausted in one year. Which segues nicely to...
Unique Skills? No, Unique Spells!
The [Unique Skills] system from the original game has been removed. If you want to become a special snowflake, rather than unlocking the [Unique Skills], you should develop [Unique Spells].
[Dual Blades], for example, isn't a unique skill, but [Dual Wielding] can be accomplished simply by equipping two [Weapons Skills] and then equipping a [Weapon] in each hand. It's a pretty unremarkable build; it's unpopular because it's a relatively difficult way to fight once you've done it, not because getting there is something difficult or secret. Since Kayaba doesn't want to waste any effort, he turned [Dual Blades] into an extra skill that can be unlocked just be [dual wielding] two [one-handed straight swords] long enough. Well, in a similar fashion, what would have been Heathcliff's [Holy Sword] can be unlocked by equipping a [one-handed straight sword] and a [shield], although it's not as OP as the canon version.
Well, that's a tangent, but to basically sum up, [Sword Skills] are less important than [Spells], and Kayaba's attention and efforts, as well as the changes and incentives he's built into the patch, reflect that. [Sword Skills] are more like a conceit to support the venue of [fight monsters], whereas [Spells] are the reason the whole venue exists.
In terms of frequency, there are NPCs that say if a player doesn't develop even one [Unique Spell], then they fail as a magus. Kabyaba's assumption is that as a category [Unique Spells] will become wide-spread, rather than remain rare, although they will be individually unique.
A little earlier, I said [Unique Spells] are "developed", rather than "unlocked". Kayaba launched when the platform was ready, not necessarily when his magecraft knowledge was ideal. Dealing with his own ignorance and limits are accounted for in Kayaba's plan like this:
If you want to do something the game doesn't have rules for, Kayaba re-purposed the [
Mental Health Counseling Program] to access the hypnotic knowledge from [Spell Assist], at which point Yui will compare the imagined parameters to the complete Spell Database of "everything Kayaba knows about magecraft and what can be done with it" and simulate the [Spell] appropriately. If Yui's confidence in the simulation falls below a certain threshold, Kayaba will be asked to intervene, and he'll buy time by creating a [Quest Arc] for the player. The [Quest Arc] will be, rather than pointless fetch quests, as much of the research and development that Kayaba can have the player do in the simulation, while he fills in gaps IRL. In short, exactly the same way he continuously improved [Circuit Activation] as he accumulated more data, he'll support the players' research behind the scenes.
Once the method has solidified and become something repeatable, a [Unique Spell] is changed to an [Extra Spell] and you are free to share or sell it to other players however you wish. Generally speaking, the accumulated knowledge called [Extra Spellbook] or so is a Guild's most valuable asset.
...In short, Kayaba is moderating the crowd-sourced development of magic, rather than simply delivering it as a complete package to the user-base.
Shirou and Tracing
Well, from the start, Shirou's spell of Tracing IRL is too different from normal Projection, so in SAO, if he tries to do it with [Projection], then he'll automatically fail when his method diverges too much from the [Spell Assist]. Well, from the beginning, Fate!Shirou is someone who hasn't realized (yet) that Rin's assessment of "Noble Phantasm Projection is a magic beyond your limits" was flat-out wrong.
...Well, someone creating a [Unique Spell] is already possible, though, so if he completely ignores the [Spell Assist] and just forces it...?
That being said, I'm not sure the Cardinal System's [Automatic Game Balance] feature will handle someone spamming things like [Noble Phantasms] with any grace or equanimity at all. Well, the monsters' numbers will already be inflated dramatically by the players all being as HAX as they can, so it might not be too remarkable. But someone like Thinker that's deeply aware of the programming guts of SAO might ask Shirou to treat [Tracing] as a [Forbidden Magic] just so the game doesn't become murderously hard. Of course, that's assuming it can interpret the data transmitted from UBW without crashing in the first place? So reproducing weapons from inside the game would certainly be possible, but reproducing things from IRL might be too hard on the Common Sense of Aincrad, because [Real World] things are too alien.
