dm_fromscratch
Explorer
In my home game, just like the post title says, all magic is cursed. I’ve homebrewed a few options for representing this setting-wide curse on magic, with varying successes and lessons learned (some of which I include below and detail further in the spoiler text), but I want to hear from the community on what would make sense at your table.
The biggest wins and challenges I’ve run into so far:
Win: Players enjoy the idea of the setting.
Challenge: Maintaining a balance between how the curse impacts casters vs non-casters is tricky.
Challenge: How often does the curse immediately impact a specific instance of magic use?
Lessons: I started with a simple meta-mechanic called the cursed numbers of the day.
(TL;DR It works best when paired with good player-GM communication and alongside a variety of other manifestations of the curse at work in the world.)
Thoughts? Or examples of curses you’ve used or seen before?
The biggest wins and challenges I’ve run into so far:
Win: Players enjoy the idea of the setting.
It’s not a unique concept (see ABC’s Once Upon a Time tv series for just one of many takes on the “all magic comes with a price” theme), but it is a powerful force in helping players consider their choices for character creation, roleplay and actions, and generally how they approach and interact with the game world.
Challenge: Maintaining a balance between how the curse impacts casters vs non-casters is tricky.
Introducing a curse that affects all magic might easily make playing a caster less fun if every cool thing you can do automatically comes with a downside. At lower levels, this is skewed harder against casters since martials don’t typically have easy access to magic items at lower levels. IMO this helps reinforce the theme, but at the same time, the negative consequences are also quite harmless at lower levels. However, the greater the magic, the greater the curse’s effects. In this way, by the time casters are really taking big risks, so are martials at higher risk with greater access to (and perhaps even a perceived reliance on) magic weapons, ammunition, armor, and other enchanted items etc. Not sure if this offsets the negatives of casting cursed magic, so this balance is something I am often revisiting to see if players are all still having a good time regardless of whether they’ve chosen a magic or martial class.
Challenge: How often does the curse immediately impact a specific instance of magic use?
This is probably the biggest one in my opinion. How to keep the curse a constant threat and reminder without it becoming a burdensome task either for the players to track or the GM to implement. Combat in turn -based TTRPG can already be quite time-consuming without adding extra elements to remember or introduce on the fly.
Lessons: I started with a simple meta-mechanic called the cursed numbers of the day.
Each session, up to 3 randomly chosen numbers are cursed. Whenever dice are rolled in conjunction with the use of magic, and a die lands on a cursed number, then the intended magical effect is accompanied by another, unintended negative magical effect, typically one that harms the magic user.
A few design intentions here.
A few design intentions here.
- Its occurrence is randomized. A party might have several encounters or interactions where no negative effects occur at all, possibly an entire session. Or the party might experience several cursed effects in a row. It ostensibly creates tension with every use of magic since you never know when the curse might hit next.
- It’s an extra step at the beginning of a session, but in theory doesn’t bog down active play since there aren’t extra dice to roll. It’s just a response to dice that would have been rolled anyway.
- Cursed numbers of the day are a fun novelty to introduce and include, and the randomness can indeed create tension and complications for both ally and enemy alike. However, in practice, it can be tough to maintain that sense of novelty over time, and even if play isn’t bogged down by extra rolls, random negative effects every session can become tiresome for players to constantly have to deal with and/or for GM’s to constantly invent and manage on the fly.
- there’s at least some dialogue between player and GM as to what the cursed effect is, with the understanding that the GM has the final adjudication
- it’s not the only manifestation of the curse, i.e. there are other cursed magic things at work in the world, some much larger and potentially more dangerous in scope (a broken portal that only transports in one direction), others more mundane (magical storms that defy the natural seasons, but only for a few minutes or hours)
Thoughts? Or examples of curses you’ve used or seen before?