Mullings Over Magic

[L. Marcus]

I'm contemplating a magic system here. It's for a down-played High Fantasy game, with low end magic (5 to 10 AP, subtle effects like skill boosts and similar) fairly common and high end magic (fireballs, mind control, summoned demons) very rare.

 

There will be several magical traditions -- Wizardry is the usual elemental magic and manipulation of magic itself; Sorcery is all about mental domination; Necromancy regards itself with death and the dead, both spiritual and corpsey; and Hedge Magic as a catch-all term for low magic -- think Wise Woman and Clever Man.

 

Since I don't yet own 6Ed, the mecanisms following will be in 5ER. One Skill per tradition, and spells bought individually as Powers. Standard Limitations to the spells can be bought off, like Foci, Gestures, Incantations, but not Skill Roll; Limitations secific for each spell cannot be touched. As a guideline, the max AP of any spell a character can know would be capped at (the character's Magic Tradition Skill - 10) times ten.

 

The part I'm turning over in my mind is the old Magician vs. Warrior Balance issue. I don't want to go the way of Spell Divisor á la Turakian Age, as that would make very powerful magic too cheap. Instead I'm pondering a point discount of ten to fifteen RPs per spell, with a minimum cost of one point. Has anyone tried this, or something similar?

 

Och Peter, om du ser det här -- lämna gärna en kommentar! ^^

[Markdoc]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

I'm thinking a discount of 10-15 RP will make magic ubiquitous, since a 3 point investment in Magic Tradition Skill gets you a CHAR roll, - so even without any further investment, that's up to 20 active points. Throw on gestures and/or incantations, and you're down to 10-15 real points without any further ado: you can buy 20 active points of stuff, for 1 point a shot. Woohoo! Forcefield, fast regeneration, flight, teleport, etc. Warriors who don't use magic are not going to stand a chance and rogue types would be redundant. Who needs stealth and security systems when you have X-ray vision, invisibility, flight and teleportation? Who needs big muscles when 2 points buys you +20 STR AND Deadly Blow?

 

You gots you some high magic right there.

 

If you want people to have access to "small magic" but rule out fireballs and teleporting parties of adventurers, I'd suggest the following.

 

1. No price break. Magic is so useful, people will buy it anyway, if they are not actively stopped. If you allow frameworks (for example for skill tricks) for non-mages, allow mages to use them too (one per tradition). Otherwise, not.

2. Require a Difficult skill roll (-1 per 5 active points). That makes it relatively easy to buy a good enough skill do 5-15 point spells reliably, but almost impossible to do a 60 pointer, without taking lots of extra time, ritual equipment, etc. It also means that spells are not so reliable than you can dispense with armour and weapons unless you are a specialist spellcaster with lots of points invested in your skill roll.

 

That might not sound like much, but 10 points of flight will get you over any wall, even if you can't cross continents with it, and save you from pit traps and the like. 10 points of HKA is no substitute for a greatsword, but these "magic claws" would let a strong warrior do 2d6 HKA even when totally unarmed. 10 points lets you see in the dark, breathe underwater, climb on the ceiling like a spider, change your face to look like someone else, create images to draw the guard's attention, talk mentally to your comrades wherever they are, create magical defences stronger than plate armour, quadruple your lifting power, increase your chance of hitting a foe dramatically, etc.

 

In games where access to "small magic" is easy, my characters almost always take 10-15 points worth and they've never regretted it.

 

cheers, Mark

 

cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

I'd say I want to keep close tabs on what magics I'll allow, both from players and NPCs. Especially movement magic -- teleportation and flight are Off Limits for this campaign, as they violate the feel I'm looking for. If you want to fly, you need to learn, say, a spell to transform you into an eagle ... And minor spells would be pretty narrow -- no +1 Overall Skill Levels, but +2 to three related skills; Aid 1d6, Standard Effect; and mostly only for the caster's personal use.

 

And for Wizardry, at least, I will impose heavy costs to learn new spells, in both time and money -- say, a week per AP, or a month per RP, spent in secluded meditation over mouldy old tomes, or being instructed by someone who already knows the spell. Personal insights in the nature of a spell is fundamental to have it work.

 

I had a thread going years ago on a small magic system I came up with -- Knot Magic. I'll see if I can dig it up.

 

To be trained as a bona fide magician you need to start the game with an extra magical sense (for a neophyte, it starts as a plain Detect Magic, but Adders and Advantages can be added later), and then there's END Reserves, familiars, and possibly other, non-spell Powers a magician can find handy -- all of which gets no point breaks.

 

For magical items, I want them very rare, and mostly the result of mastery of a craft rather than outright enchanting. The Masterwork abilities in Fantasy Hero is a start there ...

 

More as I think of it.

[Markdoc]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

I'd say I want to keep close tabs on what magics I'll allow' date=' both from players and NPCs. Especially movement magic -- teleportation and flight are Off Limits for this campaign, as they violate the feel I'm looking for. If you want to fly, you need to learn, say, a spell to transform you into an eagle ... And minor spells would be pretty narrow -- no +1 Overall Skill Levels, but +2 to three related skills; Aid 1d6, Standard Effect; and mostly only for the caster's personal use.[/quote']

 

All good ideas, but it comes back to the same point: if you give magic a price break - especially one as big as 10-15 points - it won't take players long to work out that for small up-front investment, they can buy 100-150 points of powers for 10 points ...

 

If you want all PCs to use magic, that's cool: they will. If you don't want non-magic users to be at a substantial disadvantage, then I'd rethink the price break.

 

cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

... Food for thought, that. ^^

[Markdoc]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

... Food for thought' date=' that. ^^[/quote']

 

One possibility would be to specify that all magic takes the 6E limitation "unified power" - which means if someone targets you with a dispel magic, for example all your magic does the watusi and vanishes. However, that would give you a little price break, which in most situations wouldn't actually have much of a downside - meaning in turn that magic would be an attractive purchase, but not "must have"

 

A package like "requires a skill roll, unified power, gestures and incantations, concentration" all at the basic level would mean that a 10 point power would run you 4 points, without being crippling in terms of use. That's a pretty good bargain.

 

cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

Have you ever experienced any unbalancing between magic users who buy Powers and pure fighters who buy Weapon Familiarities? Say, compare a Wizard who has a Magic Missile: RKA 2d6, OAF (-1), Gestures (-1/4), Incantations (-1/4), Requires Skill Roll (-½) for ten points and an archer who spent one point on WF: Bows and eight points on +4 OCV with Longbows ... This is essentially what I worry about.

[Markdoc]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

Have you ever experienced any unbalancing between magic users who buy Powers and pure fighters who buy Weapon Familiarities? Say' date=' compare a Wizard who has a Magic Missile: RKA 2d6, OAF (-1), Gestures (-1/4), Incantations (-1/4), Requires Skill Roll (-½) for ten points and an archer who spent one point on WF: Bows and eight points on +4 OCV with Longbows ... This is essentially what I worry about.[/quote']

 

That's not so much of an issue. If wizards only duplicated powers the fighters got for free, it wouldn't be a problem at all: the wizards would be weaker in combat. We've had a lot of experience with FH campaigns and the problems come in two different flavours.

 

1. Instead of buying an RKA, the wizard picks up a bow and buys a spell like "Unerring weapons: +2 with OCV, all weapons" Gestures (-1/4), Incantations (-1/4), Requires Skill Roll (-½) and then WF: Bow and Power skill, 11- for 10 points. He's almost as good as the fighter with a bow and will handily chop him up in HTH combat. He has to make the skill roll of course, but it doesn't cost that much: after a few adventures, he's got that skill roll up pretty high and after that he just starts pulling further and further ahead of any non-magic-users. Using spells to augment his normal capacities, he can do most of what they do, and he can do it better - and he can do things they really can't do as well. All of my most effective spellcasters have been warriors, when it comes down to it.

 

2. If you forbid mages from going the warrior route (for example, by making it impossible to cast spells in armour), they don't just buy simple damaging spells, but (for example) for 10 points you can get 13 STR Telekinesis. Grab your opponent, haul him well up into the air and then just drop him. Flash. Entangle. Invisibility. Tunneling, usable as attack 1 pip HKA, AVAD does body, continuous uncontrollable ... etc.

 

Approach #2 leads to equivalence of some sort: fighters are better at dishing out straightforward damage and wizards are better at dishing out exotic damage and doing non-combat stuff, but it's only really appropriate for high fantasy campaigns. If you forbid the mages armour and weapons and then stop them using exotic spells as well, then they are pretty much useless.

 

What I have done in the current game, to keep parity is simply require all spells to take the following limitations:

Full phase (-1/2)

Skill roll (-1/2),

Concentration (0 DCV, only to turn on, -1/2)

Requires Mana (-1/2) - this is a custom limitation - spells use Long Term END, not regular END, so mages can only cast a limited number of spells before they become exhausted (and that affects their ability to do other things: several times the mages have become so exhausted that they had to be carried by the other party members, because they had no END left). If you cast a lot of spells, you can literally knock yourself out as you start to burn STUN in place of END

 

Most schools of magic also take:

Gestures (to start, -1/4)

Incantation (to start, -1/4)

 

The combination of full phase and concentration means that a spellcaster is vulnerable in combat - if a warrior gets close to him, his chances of casting a spell are pretty minimal: at DCV 0, he's going to get a sword in the head if he tries, unless he's very careful. The "Requires Mana" stops spellcasters from casting spells and then keeping them going, all day, or casting attack spells over and over. Skill roll (with a penalty to the roll) means they either have to sink points into their casting roll, avoid high powered spells or accept the extra time needed to get a bonus to the roll (or all three).

 

This has - for me - the desired effect. I don't forbid casters from using armour or weapons. There are no "magic specific" restrictions on what players can do at all, and both mages and non-mages can use frameworks. That allows mages to have lots of spells - making them flexible - without making them overpowering in combat. Interestingly, we have two PCs in the current group that have sunk a lot of points into spells and they are designed quite differently. One of them is an old priest - most of the time he carries no weapon other than a staff and wears no armour. The former because he doesn't want to waste points on the physical stats and CSLs needed to make effective use of weapons and the latter because armour is encumbering and he doesn't want any minuses on his skill roll or movement. He gets by entirely on his magic. He does cast in combat (and his most effective spell is a telekinesis attack that does exactly what I described - a tornado spell that picks up enemies or occasionally friends and moves them) but he relies on the others to protect him while he's doing it. In our last big fight, one of the fighters stood in front of him with a sword and shield focusing just on intercepting attacks against him. He's a powerful spellcaster (he has a 60 point multipower) and has saved the whole party many times - but he doesn't overshadow the non-mages in the group: he's actually pretty helpless without them.

 

Mage #2 has no combat spells at all, wears armour and relies on sword and shield in combat. He doesn't even have a great magic power skill roll. However, he has very high healing capapcity and some useful non-combat spells. Given some out of combat time to get extra time bonuses, he can heal the whole party back to full health after a big fight in a day or two. He also is key to the party's survival - but again, doesn't overshadow the others in the group.

 

Despite the presence of two powerful magic users in the group, when the fight starts, it usually comes down to arrows and bladework.

 

Note: I didn't build these characters to these styles - as the game developed, they went their own ways, of the players' own choices. We have had three mages and 5 non-mages in the group over the course of the game - and we've been playing for years now. Right now, there's two characters who are warriors and are now learning magic. That suggests I have the balance right - the mages are happy with their magic and don't feel the rogues or fighters are getting all the fun, the fighters are happy with their blades and generally don't want to give them up to be mages and the group as a whole does best when they combine their different strengths.

 

The trick is to work out what you want in advance, and then design to fit. And it seems to work. If you could suggest the specific "flavour" you want and the kind of power level you want, it should be easy enough to generate a system to do that.

 

cheers, Mark

[tesuji]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

In the Fh campaigns i ran i did the following

 

Each "school of magic" represented a style and each style had a pre-defined set of limitations that applied to every spell.

Wizardry -gryphon school - had extra time and concentration and foci but were the safe cautious spell academics

 

sorcery - phoenix school - used side effects and extra end - represeenting the RAW TALENT less training more wild off the cuff style of magic.

 

Thaumaturgy - peacock school -used a big OAF lim - representing mages who invested their power into a device, well made, personal device liie swords or staves as a control rod kind of thing.

 

etc...

 

all required skill roll

 

Then for buying magic all mages had a MULTIPOWER and each spell was a slot in the Mp.

 

The big up front costs was the MP pool which limits both the size of any single spell and how many spells that can be run at once. Being able to cast small spells is cheap, to cast big spells not so much. The SCHOOL LIMS and skill roll lims apply to this pool cost but other "spell sopecific" lims do not. The usual total lim value for a pool was -1.5 (skill roll plus -1 in schools lims)

then each spell was a typical Mp slot with the same lims as well as any specific to the spell.

 

So any given spell was only a couple points. But the POOL cost was big and up front.

 

That seemed to balance fine against warriors without any real shenanigans like "just cut the price down"

 

but again, whatever you do for spells, also encourage by npc examples, "warrior tricks" and "rogue dirty fighting" where the non-magic users can also buy "powers" using similar costing schemes. Also encourage racial traits like venom spitting for lizard folk or "stone telling" for dwarves or super tracking (postcognition) for hunters and the like.

[Cancer]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

To simulate curses and evil eye and whatnot, you might allow higher AP limits on Suppress and maybe Drain, and allow those to apply to Skills.

[Old Man]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

Since I don't yet own 6Ed, the mecanisms following will be in 5ER. One Skill per tradition, and spells bought individually as Powers. Standard Limitations to the spells can be bought off, like Foci, Gestures, Incantations, but not Skill Roll; Limitations secific for each spell cannot be touched. As a guideline, the max AP of any spell a character can know would be capped at (the character's Magic Tradition Skill - 10) times ten.

 

The part I'm turning over in my mind is the old Magician vs. Warrior Balance issue. I don't want to go the way of Spell Divisor á la Turakian Age, as that would make very powerful magic too cheap. Instead I'm pondering a point discount of ten to fifteen RPs per spell, with a minimum cost of one point. Has anyone tried this, or something similar?

 

The fundamental problem is that you're taking Hero, which was designed to scale way up, and disallowing the top end of the scale. Which is fine, but low-end magic has a lot of granularity. As a self-admitted powergamer, let me assure you that I can get a lot of mileage out of a multipower slot that costs 1.49 RP.

 

Off the top of my head I would approach this with a multipower, which already helps cap your active. But I'd also count fractional points in the slots (to the nearest tenth) to prevent one of my favorite abuses. You'll still have the jack-of-all-trades multipower issue, though. Don't know if that's a problem for you or not.

[Old Man]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

To simulate curses and evil eye and whatnot' date=' you might allow higher AP limits on Suppress and maybe Drain, and allow those to apply to Skills.[/quote']

 

Or you could blaspheme and try altering the actual costs of the powers. One of my greater annoyances with FH is that all the powers are costed for Champions. Flight and forcefield are too cheap; drain and transform are too expensive. IMO.

[L. Marcus]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

*quotes hedley lamar re. plans, without anyone to say ditto*

[Bodkins Odds]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

Ditto.

[L. Marcus]

Re: Mullings Over Magic

 

Just an update -- I've decided on the magic system -- a Mutlipower per magic tradition, with a Can Draw Power From Character Or END Reserve advantage if the player wants an END Reserve, and a Requires [Magic Tradition Skill] Roll limitation (-1 per 10 Active Points); the size of the MP is limited to (Skill - 10) * 10 Active Points (of course, if the player wants to, he can have a higher skill roll than the MP indicates ... Maybe Skill Levels will be appropriate -- haven't decided.) Each slot is Variable.

 

And I think I'll go with Old Man's suggestion to track slot costs to the first decimal point -- sounds pretty reasonable, old sinner that he is. ^^