Biggus Geekus: Magic Systems
Since I tend to miss most or all of the Biggus Geekus shows, I'm just going to put my thoughts here.
Around the 13 minute mark I make a comment about how creating a new magic system is good, because pseudo-Vancian magic doesn't make any sense. Joe responds that if you actually read The Dying Earth you see that it doesn't have that structure, and he's correct: in The Dying Earth the system isn't explained in any great detail, but from reading the actual stories you see that not only does it not seem to take a long time, but the way it's described you don't get the impression that Turjan is "memorizing" the spell.
Instead, it's almost like the spell is sentient and wants to leave the confines of the book. Here's the passage:
Turjan found a musty portfolio, turned the heavy pages to the spell the Sage had shown him, the Call to the Violet Cloud. He stared down at the characters and they burned with an urgent power, pressing off the page as if frantic to leave the dark solitude of the book. Turjan closed the book, forcing the spell back into oblivion.
I'd devised a "true" Vancian spell system years ago while working on Dungeons & Delvers, which I'll explain in detail later as the idea of making spells into something that could be replenished after each encounter comes up.
Joe is also correct about the maximum number of spells a wizard could contain in his mind at a time (in the book, even Turjan could only "know but four at a time", and I seem to recall a statement about the most powerful wizards being able to retain all of six). This I don't think is especially important to retain, but if you wanted to just reduce the preparation time and/or adjust the effects of each spell. Again I'll get into this later.
While rewatching the video at some point Randy asks if people would be okay playing just fighters and rogues. Personally I would, though for such a game I would just go classless and make a series of fighting and skill-based Talents and skills, and let players organically develop their characters as desired. You could then of course develop an optional series of arcane Talents and skills, in case you want to permit characters to learn spellcasting abilities, or even impose more stringent restrictions so that players have to work harder to acquire them.
Around the 15 minute mark Randy asks that if there is no magic system what makes a setting fantastic. My answer would be monsters and the existence of magic items and magic, even if the characters cannot meaningfully or reliably utilize it. Conan is mentioned and I could see a setting where magic is quite powerful, but takes a long time to utilize, is dangerous, and/or other requirements that makes it generally ill-suited for use in many circumstances.
About half an hour in, both Joe and Randy express the belief that the monsters should be able to do stuff that the players cannot, and I completely disagree with this sentiment. Mind you I'm not talking about obvious things such as being unable to fly without wings or magical aid, despite a monster with wings or magical aid being able to fly.
I'm talking about the sort of thing I used to read on forums, where GMs would have something like an evil sorcerer performing some ritual, or being able to break or ignore some game mechanic, and then preventing the players from doing so, even if the circumstances were the same, solely because of their player character status is completely arbitrary and ruins any sense of immersion.
For example, if an NPC can build a temple and sacrifice a bunch of people to eclipse the sun, if that's all he had to do then the players should be able to do the same. If an NPC can go through whatever process to become a lich, then assuming the players can go through he same motions they should also be able to enjoy the numerous benefits of lichdom.
Six minutes later and 4th Edition crops up. I can't even say that from a cursory read through you might believe that every class is the same, because every one of them plays differently, even those that shared the same role.
For example, both the rogue and warlock were strikers, which was the 4E term for a damage-dealer. Rogues inflicted bonus damage on anything they flanked, while warlocks had to first curse a target, which took a Swift Action. The greater difference was the fact that warlocks had spells, and so could hit things from a distance, banish creatures to Hell for a period of time, transform into a demonic form, and even drop some area of effect attacks.
This doesn't mean the rogue was worse, far from it: I honestly can't recall any particular class being meaningfully worse than the others, except for perhaps if you were heavy into optimization and focused on builds. But for casual play you could take any race and mash it with any class and it would work more or less as expected.
Really 4E's major shortcoming was the math: if you didn't have your stats at a certain point (at least a 16 for your "primary attack stat" and 14 for your secondary), and pick the various "tax" feats asap (ie, whatever gets you a +x to hit), the game would take even longer than it already did due to the insane amount of hit points everything had. But, if you at least halve the hit points and reduce the math all around it plays much better and faster.
Alternatively, just buy a better game.
I'm inclined to agree with Joe about 4E's presentation. It was too sterile and besides the Wayne Reynolds pics that art wasn't very good. Not that the presentation would have made the game itself any better.
Around 38 minutes they get into wizards learning spells and not wanting to share spells, and Randy pitches the idea of not having wizard schools and such. I can understand this from the perspective of knowledge being power, but in every edition of Dungeons & Dragons you're either a wizard and so can learn spells, or aren't which makes them useless beyond selling them to other wizards (though in later editions you could multiclass into a wizard, so they might be usable later).
Now in Dungeons & Delvers guarding arcane knowledge makes more sense because anyone can try to learn a spell and cast it, it's just that if you aren't a wizard it takes much longer (10 times as long), Drain costs are automatically maxed out and increased by 4, and you cannot enhance it. You also don't have a magic staff so the save DCs won't be as high.
That said, the greater issue in Dungeons & Dragons is how you can copy spells from a spellbook without destroying anything, but copying from a scroll into a spellbook destroys it for some reason. The whole thing feels so arbitrary, along with the absurd cost due to having to buy special paper and inks and such, as if copying a spell using normal ink will somehow make it unreadable.
46 minutes in and there's a comment about why adventurers would go on an adventure if the rewards won't benefit them. Randy's immediate response is how would they know, and this is valid: in virtually every adventure I've read and written, while the characters may be seeking a McGuffin for whatever reason, there are numerous secondary rewards that they discover along the way.
Should wizards be able to copy spells from another wizard's spellbook? Maybe. It depends on what sort of arcane language/symbols/structure both wizards are utilizing. But presuming both rely on the same or similar enough structure, then sure. Should this be the only way to gain access to new spells? Of course not: someone had to figure this stuff out at some point, and if he did then so can someone else.
This is where spell research comes into play, but I'm a fan of giving wizards access to a new spell every level to reflect study and growing mastery, similar to how other classes improve statistics during a level up, even if they were rarely or never used throughout the previous level.
Turning away a +4 kukri because the character doesn't use kukris: this stems not only from the issue of making mechanics and effects that apply to specific weapons, as opposed to, say, weapon categories, but then also including a million weapons in the first place where they weren't needed (it also begs the question of who the hell invested all that cash and XP into making a magic kukri).
This could first be solved by grouping weapons into categories, something we might do for Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition, though the only mechanic that I can recall which applies to a specific weapon is the fighter's Weapon Specialization, but it only costs a skill point to add another weapon.
Another way to solve or at least mitigate the issue is game math. If a +4 bonus isn't essentially required to hit whatever it is you are fighting at that point in time, then it's not as important. You could also just say that a magic weapon is a magic weapon, which might mean that it never breaks, never needs to be sharpened, and can harm enemies that are immune or highly resistant to mundane weaponry.
Finally, you can give the weapon special properties that are far more interesting than bonuses to hit and damage. A magic sword that grants a +1 to hit and damage ie mechanically useful, sure, but a sword that is essentially the ghost of a destroyed intelligent sword, which is completely weightless, ignores physical armor and shields, and can harm ghosts? That's not only also mechanically useful but sounds way more badass.
(It's also one of many original magic items in Dungeons & Delvers, the shattered echo.)
Nearly an hour in and they get to talking about magic systems, starting off with pseudo-Vancian magic.
What makes pseudo-Vancian bad is that nothing about it makes any sense. And I don't mean that it's difficult to understand, I mean if you analyze it from an in-game perspective nothing about it holds up (and I've written a blog post addressing some of these issues).
It's been a long time since I've even read Arcana Unearthed, but based on Randy's description the wizard class from that game sounds like the 3rd Edition sorcerer with some pseudo-Vancian mixed in (ie, the 5th Edition wizard), and so it is not only worse but also doesn't make any sense.
Spell points work perfectly so long as you properly design the rest of the system. In Dungeons & Delvers there are a variety of spell point systems for spellcasting classes, though wizards and sorcerers have to often randomly determine how much is spent (which makes their magic unpredictable and dangerous).
Sleep is a spell wizards can learn, though they have to first take Enchanter, then learn the Command and Suggestion spells. It has a Drain cost of 1d4, so nothing major, but it only affects a single creature of your level or lower (higher level creatures are instead Dazed). You can burn more Willpower to affect more creatures, but can't use it on more than one creature per wizard level.
Almost all of our spells operate similarly: they have a baseline function, and you can burn more Willpower to boost them (damage, duration, area of effect, range, etc). This helps ensure that they remain useful at higher levels, but a wizard can also gamble a bunch of Willpower (and damage, since he has to pay in hit points if he doesn't have enough Willpower) to unleash an incredibly powerful attack.
Two minutes later Randy mentions powers per encounter and says that it's kind of like 4th Edition. Encounter-powers-by-another-term really got going in 3rd Edition, though I recall something in Rules Cyclopedia about fighters being able to try and frighten enemies once per battle, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar abilities lurking in 2nd Edition. Maybe the Brosr tourists can pretend to discover that, next?
The only issues I've had with encounter-based powers are how they are rationalized in-game (if at all). As in, why just once per encounter? Same for daily powers, which I should also point out have existed for martial/non-magical characters since 3rd Edition (see the rogue's Defensive Roll for just one example).
But I have devised a magic system that functions like this, a way to make a Vancian magic system that actually reflects how magic works in The Dying Earth. Basically, wizards have spell slots based on level, which are not oddly divided up by level. Each spell eats up one or more slots, and during a short rest or 10-minute turn, you can store spells up to your slots, and then cast them later.
You can further tweak this by allowing the wizard to let a spell take up more slots to increase its power, reduce the total number of slots (which would likely require further adjusting spells), and even set it up so that the wizard can retain x number of slots per day, but when he goes beyond that has to start making Wisdom checks to avoid suffering penalties due to the mental stress.
So, a 5th-level wizard would have 5 slots, which could be modified by Intelligence or Wisdom, and he could cast 5 slots worth of spells per day without any sort of issue. Once he starts retaining spells beyond that, he has to start making checks.
An hour and thirteen minutes in Randy states that he thinks spell points are easier on newer players. I don't think they are necessarily easier than using pseudo-Vancian magic, especially if in Dungeons & Delvers where you can spend more Willpower to modify a spell. They certainly make more sense, however, or sense at all, which pseudo-Vancian magic does not.
Spell checks are an interesting idea and something I've also tinkered with. In Cowboys & Cthulhu we tried giving preachers and sorcerers a spell check mechanic. However there needs to be a limiting factor, otherwise you can just cast spells forever. We know in some games you can "lose" spells on a failed check, but this doesn't make sense from an in-game perspective, especially for preachers: what, you try to heal someone and God gets mad or decides to cut you off or whatever, but only for the healing Miracle?
The more sensible option was to have the character use a spell point resource coupled with a spellcasting check, so the preacher would spend Favor and make a check to determine just how effective it was. This adds complications, not only to the game but also to every spell. Something to consider, and here's a barebones method of how I'd do it:
- Roll d20 + Wisdom (for wizards) + maybe relevant class level + arcane focus bonus + an Occultism skill
- Each spell has its own DC, but this can be modified depending on if you want to make it more powerful, cast faster, cast slower, etc.
- If you meet the DC the spell goes off. If you exceed the DC the spell gets upgraded in various ways.
- If you fail you can either suck it up and let it go, or suffer more Drain to add a bonus to your check until it succeeds (or you die trying).
- Natural 1 could be an auto-fail and cause random effects to go off based on spell category.
Randy's idea of a spell adversely affecting you is interesting but I've considered that and think it would be more work than it's worth. Perhaps basing side effects off category, so too many Terratury spells could transform the ground or partially petrify the wizard for awhile and goddamn it now I'm also reconsidering this.
Wild magic isn't as retarded as it sounds, it's just not very interesting or "wild", at least in 4th Edition. In 4th Edition a wild magic sorcerer primarily granted random bonuses and modified thematically appropriate spells you chose. The only potentially drawback si that if you rolled a natural 1 on an attack roll you had to push every creature within 25 feet of you 5 feet away.
Since you controlled the direction of the push chances were good that nothing meaningful would change, or you could move allies and enemies into better positions.
5th Edition is technically wild but is completely arbitrary, up to the DM's whim whether he has you even bother to roll to see if you need to roll again. Worse, the wild surge table is chock full of lolsorandom bullshit that is virtually guaranteed to result in something wholly unrelated to whatever spell you just cast.
Try to charm someone? Whelp, DM decides to make you roll, you get a nat 1, roll on the table and...a modron appears! Why? What does accidentally conjuring a modron of all things have to do with charming someone? Or you cast burning hands and then your skin turns blue. Or a random creature is poisoned. Or you can't get drunk for 5d6 days. These are the sorts of tables I despise, some lazy hack pretending to be a game designer just shoehorns in whatever vapid idea pops into zim/zirs/zippity-do-da's head.
It would have been much better to create a more focused concept for the sorcerer and then develop a table around that. I know it mentions the elemental planes, Limbo, and Far Realm, but stick with one for now, create a series of effects thematically tied to it, and then in another book or as a free download add in tables for other places, but require the player to pick an origin and just stick with one table.
Of course, it would have also been better to create thematic spell lists, but that would mean WokeC would have had to put in some actual work instead of merely recycling 3rd Edition with some renamed 4th Editionisms thrown in the mix.
For freeform systems I remember enjoying the idea of Mage: the Ascension, just not the actual game itself. Mostly it was due to the flavor supporting it, how everything interacted, but you also played a wizard who mostly wasn't supposed to use magic. Kind of defeats the purpose. The downside is that due to the freeform nature a lot of it game down to player creativity and what the GM would let you get away with. Dresden Files was in a similar boat, but you could also pregenerate "rote" spells that I think were easier to cast.
There was also a d20 game with a sort of freeform magic system. In that one you basically built spells on the fly and that determined how long the spell took to cast or something like that. Better, because you had hard rules determining what you could do and any related costs and drawbacks, but it could drag the game to a halt if you tried to essentially min/max a spell during combat or other tense situations.
An hour and twenty-three minutes in a fatigue system is brought up. Dungeons & Delvers has something similar to this, where you can Drain Vitality Points, which is supposed to represent the fatigue side of things and recovers very quickly and easily. Willpower for wizards recovers somewhat quickly, 1 per level during a short rest (which you can only take three times per day).
Someone mentions not liking Numenera, and I'm right there with him. Unlike Randy I think the cyphers are incredibly stupid, both in terms of effects (none of them did anything particularly innovative) and the very gamey, arbitrary cap that is never adequately explained in-game. The setting was also incredibly shallow, and didn't at all feel like a strange world however many years into the future. It just felt like bland fantasy world but with a few somewhat futuristic trappings tacked on here and there.
Oh and the whole spending points to get a bonus, but then three reduces the difficulty, which you have to triple to get your target number was phenomenally retarded. It would have worked better to just say +1 per point, and make target numbers the fucking target number but then Monte Cook is a pretentious hack that hires equally unqualified diversity hires and some chick whose entire personality is going on about being into bondage.
On the topic of spell access, Joe considers the cleric to be an oddity in Dungeons & Dragons, following it up the belief that it should just be the paladin. Really the cleric is an oddity because it shouldn't be an adventuring class at all. What, your god grants you the gift of being able to channel miracles, which you use to...slum around in ruins looking for loot? Loot that you probably won't even donate to your church or whatever?
Paladins make a bit more sense in that they are expected to donate most of their swag, so you could at least justify that to a degree. But then they don't have access to all the clerical magic and are warriors, so you'd expect them to go out and about smiting evil as well.
Joe also thinks that the cleric should be renamed healer, but then I think Dungeons & Dragons should just be reworked so you don't need all that healing, anyway. This is why in Dungeons & Delvers we split hit points into Wound Points and Vitality Points, and why mending potions exist. That and because not all clerics had access to healing miracles by default (you had to specifically choose the Healing Domain, first).
This would also be more inline with all of the media that Dungeons & Dragons was allegedly inspired by, where you didn't have clerics following around heal-poking everyone and utilizing the gifts of the gods largely or even solely for personal gain.
So, axe the cleric and rework hit points and recovery so magical healing isn't necessary much of the time. Make it so that characters have to instead donate to temples for access to healing. This would also solve the issue of easy resurrection: if the characters don't have access to it, period, and temples won't usually do it just for cash, makes death more impactful.
Rolling back to paladins, I wouldn't give them cleric-type spells, anyway. I'd just give them largely passive blessings and call it good. Maybe some sort of ability where they could make a round-by-round prayer check for minor buffs, similar to how we handled cleric Hymns in Dungeons & Delvers.
A commenter thinks that wizards should get free spells at level up. Again, I agree. I do think that it should require that the character have constant access to his spellbook, and also eat up random pages (for Delvers I'd probably make this a roll equal to the spell's base Drain cost). This would also make it more likely that the wizard fills up his spellbook and needs a new one (or at least have access to sheets of paper).
Vampires draining levels is stupid as hell. Just have them drain blood and reduce maximum hp for a period of time. In Delvers they can reduce maximum Wound Points, which recovers a bit each day. I'm more okay with mummies and mummy rot. You could argue that there's at least some tenuous connection between the two, though I'd add on some other abilities and curse effects.
Shortly after Randy starts talking about his homebrew game called Mudsword and gets into initiative, expressing the desire to have it so that spells can be reliably interrupted. This is difficult to do in later iterations of Dungeons & Dragons, though in 3rd Edition if you were adjacent to a wizard you could hit him with an opportunity attack to disrupt his spell.
Some things I've devised while working on Dungeons & Delvers are:
Keep Opportunity Attacks in the game, and make them work similar to 3rd Edition so you can attack someone that tries to run away and cast spells.
Make it so that many spells take more than 1 action to cast, but you can suffer more Drain to speed it up. This works well with the fact that between recovering up to 75% of spent Willpower throughout the day (assuming three Short Rests) and randomized Drain means that a wizard can cast more spells than expected.
Break up combat into phases (Movement, Missile, Melee, and Magic) and go back and forth between both sides. So both sides roll initiative: the winner Moves, then the other side. Then the winner resolves Missile attacks, then the other side, etc. Players must declare actions first, so a wizard casting a spell declares this before the round starts, meaning that he begins casting and finishes during the Magic phase. However, this means that he can be struck during the Missile and Melee phases, potentially disrupting his spell.
(This is something we tried doing but ultimately bogged things down too much and it wasn't worth the benefits.)
Everyone rolls a d10 or d20 or whatever (depends on how much potential deviating you want). They declare actions, and each action has a point cost that is added to his. The count starts at 1 and goes up, with actions being resolved at their initiative total. At that point, they can declare another action, which adds to this, and so one and so forth. So more complex actions take longer to resolve, and initiative is rolled only once per fight.
For example, a fighter rolls a 9 and an orc rolls a 7. The fighter's attacks cost 5 AP, while the orc is using a big axe that costs 6 AP. So the fighter acts when the initiative count ticks up to 14, but the orc gets to go at 12. At that point they declare actions and things tick up again. You could also give things randomized point values, so an arming sword might have a modifier of 1d6, while a bow has a count of 1d8. Warrior classes could reduce these amounts (replacing multiple attacks), or roll twice and use the lower value.
However you do it, wizards start casting when actions are declared, and during that time the spell can be interrupted. I actually like this idea and might run with it, though not sure if I want to give specific spells an AP value. Might be a bit too granular.
Downside is that if the AP costs are too low and the initiative die is a d20 or something, some characters might get multiple attacks, which is fine if that's what you intend. I think it's better to keep the die lower however and the AP costs narrower so that this is possible but not too commonplace.
Going back to spells, a commenter around an hour and fifty-three minutes suggests learning only a handful of spells but being able to alter them as you level up. This is something we did in Dungeons & Delvers, and are doing more in 2nd Edition.
For example, you can take Scorching Ray, which is a high-ranged, high base damage, single target fire spell, and can then take a Talent later called Scattered Rays, which lets you divvy up the damage dice between multiple targets. Another example is the Cloud of Fog spell, which can be modified in a number of ways via the Solid Fog and Corrosive Mist Talents.
It was suggested that Randy approach it by developing the setting, then combat, then magic. I disagree. While setting can help inform various elements of the game, it doesn't need to be front and foremost. For Dungeons & Delvers we focused primarily on the combat aspect, as that's mostly where you can make and break the game.
Because of this magic should also be tackled, so that you avoid wizards doing more or less than you anticipated, and any related mechanics such as spell point costs, recovery, spell mishaps, etc are working as intended.
Lastly, spell reagants. I don't think these should be necessary to cast spells but enhance them. This was something that was featured in Dungeons & Delvers: Black Book, where you could use power components to enhance spells. It didn't make it into "Red Book", but will be featured in 2nd Edition.
Related, some more art for Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition: a wizard rocking a gambeson, because there's no logical reason why wizards can't wear armor.
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