Rules Magical Magic

[Macbeth]

I've been working on a little rules plugin that attempts to make magic a little more magical. Seems like magic in books and films always has little clauses, where a blood mage's spells hit a little less against those that refuse to spill blood, or something like that.

So I wrote up some rules I've been playing with. I'm calling them Erudite, and they're available here.

It's more or less system agnostic, but I've been pairing it with 4E. It's been a while since I've been on ENWorld, but I figured if I have some 4E material, I might as well make it available here.

Hope it's useful to someone beyond my group.

[Alex319]

The rules say you check the caveats left to right when casting a spell, but you fill them in right to left. Is this intentional?

Anyway, it seems like this is a very interesting system that is simple enough to be usable but could add a lot of interesting and fun dynamics. My main concern with applying it to 4th edition is that this system seems to be better suited to systems where magic isn't used nearly as often as it is in 4e - it seems like it would bog the game down a lot if used in 4e. Casters are casting 1-2 spells every round, and every time, several conditions have to be checked. It seems like games would go "OK, I'm casting my scorching burst, I'm not going to call the fire god because that will give me my apprentice caveat bonus and I want to go for the higher ones, but I don't want to risk Transcending on this spell because I want to save my world changing power for the main boss". Also, it seems like Transcendence would happen sooner than you might want it to. If you assume, for example, that each caveat is something that applies on average to 1/3 of all spell castings, and they're independent, then on average (according to my calculations) Transcendence will occur after about 120 spells. Assuming one spell per round, 5 rounds per encounter, and 10 encounters per level, a typical spellcaster will cast his 120th spell in the middle of 3rd level.

A suggestion to fix this, if necessary, might be:

- At-wills can only be affected by apprentice caveats. If all the apprentice caveat boxes are filled and none of them match, then no caveat occurs and none are added.
- Encounter powers can only be affected by apprentice and journeyman caveats.
- Dailies and Rituals can be affected by all caveats.
- Transcendence can only occur when you cast a Daily or Ritual of paragon tier or higher. (This also solves the problem of things being anticlimactic when you get a Transcendence when you cast a thunderwave on the last two minions in a combat.)

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But you did say you've used it with 4e. Has your experience using it matched my analysis?

[Alex319]

The rules say you check the caveats left to right when casting a spell, but you fill them in right to left. Is this intentional?

What I meant to say is that you check the caveats right to left, but the example on the last page has them being filled in left to right.