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<blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8805585" data-attributes="member: 71235"><p>Great post, lots of good thinking and ideas to chew on. It's also got me reflecting in new ways on my Whisper character in Blades in the Dark, which has tight resource management, but a very nebulous magic "system" indeed, and yet somehow it works. I recently compelled a loose feral spirit back into his animated dead body and turned him into my personal minion (like a Hound's pet). There's no spell for that, I negotiated all that with [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] through play. Said minion has proven incredibly useful, even though he stretches the already-loose rules quite a bit! But I'm definitely not lobbing fireballs around (there is a special ability you can get to hurl lightning, but that isn't my character's style). Even though I have the latitude to come up with more magical effects using the base Attune action, I find I'm doing more of that TB2 thing of using a wide variety of skills, and magic just happens to be part of it.</p><p></p><p>I've got a new character planned for Torg Eternity, who will have 3 alchemical potions (which are a constrained resource) and 3 spells (which are spammable in Torg but require a successful activation roll): open lock, mage dark, and shadow constriction. You can probably figure out what the first two do; shadow constriction basically animates nearby shadows to grapple a target as they envelop it in darkness. One of his potions grants darkvision (the other two are debuff/knockout bombs). I think you can see where that build is going! But that's going to be his schtick and it won't change much for a while, if ever, due to Torg's goofball intersections of the base magic system with perks (very roughly similar D&D feats) and cosm/genre mashup and such. Torg Eternity is just a bizarre roleplaying game in a lot of ways, though.</p><p></p><p>When I was playing a magician in Torchbearer 2, I rarely cast spells and relied on skills a <em>lot</em>, and was quite effective doing so, even in melee combat (but only for defense). Spellcasting in that game is pretty onerous—very true to Vancian casting, as you described—so I was glad the game doesn't have the expectations of D&D in that regard. Torchbearer wasn't quite my cuppa, but I definitely appreciated the system design, and learning it through play was a lot of fun. That is not a game you can just read and figure out what's going to work really well, ahead of time.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="niklinna, post: 8805585, member: 71235"] Great post, lots of good thinking and ideas to chew on. It's also got me reflecting in new ways on my Whisper character in Blades in the Dark, which has tight resource management, but a very nebulous magic "system" indeed, and yet somehow it works. I recently compelled a loose feral spirit back into his animated dead body and turned him into my personal minion (like a Hound's pet). There's no spell for that, I negotiated all that with [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] through play. Said minion has proven incredibly useful, even though he stretches the already-loose rules quite a bit! But I'm definitely not lobbing fireballs around (there is a special ability you can get to hurl lightning, but that isn't my character's style). Even though I have the latitude to come up with more magical effects using the base Attune action, I find I'm doing more of that TB2 thing of using a wide variety of skills, and magic just happens to be part of it. I've got a new character planned for Torg Eternity, who will have 3 alchemical potions (which are a constrained resource) and 3 spells (which are spammable in Torg but require a successful activation roll): open lock, mage dark, and shadow constriction. You can probably figure out what the first two do; shadow constriction basically animates nearby shadows to grapple a target as they envelop it in darkness. One of his potions grants darkvision (the other two are debuff/knockout bombs). I think you can see where that build is going! But that's going to be his schtick and it won't change much for a while, if ever, due to Torg's goofball intersections of the base magic system with perks (very roughly similar D&D feats) and cosm/genre mashup and such. Torg Eternity is just a bizarre roleplaying game in a lot of ways, though. When I was playing a magician in Torchbearer 2, I rarely cast spells and relied on skills a [I]lot[/I], and was quite effective doing so, even in melee combat (but only for defense). Spellcasting in that game is pretty onerous—very true to Vancian casting, as you described—so I was glad the game doesn't have the expectations of D&D in that regard. Torchbearer wasn't quite my cuppa, but I definitely appreciated the system design, and learning it through play was a lot of fun. That is not a game you can just read and figure out what's going to work really well, ahead of time. [/QUOTE]
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