Making magic feel "Dangerous"

[AbdulAlhazred]

HoML's implementation of this is:

At-Will powers are as they say, same as 4e.

Intermittent powers are free to use once per encounter. You can pay a 1 VP (HS) cost to re-use them if you want, but of course they are less powerful than Vitality powers, usually.

Vitality powers ALWAYS cost one VP (HS). There is no free use of these powers. All PCs have 8 HS in this system, and could have up to 10 at Mythic levels (Epic Tier). There isn't a refresh system, you simply have to be careful and husband your resources. Utilization rates come out similar to 4e. You're not likely to use your Vitality powers more than a couple times in a day. APs are also subsumed in this VP system, so taking an extra action to unleash a Vitality power is a significant cost! Definitely worth it though in a climactic scene (and you can do some things to increase your effectiveness, like spending your inspiration).

 

[Garthanos]

One option would be to introduce danger to ritual casting rather than normal spells. Here you will have the risk of failing an arcana check with dire consequences. You could introduce rituals related to summoning, animation, necromancy, divination where you might have great benefits, but also side effects if you fail. These spell areas is more powerful in 5th edition, so you could convert some but then add failure conditions.

Well with some of my house rules the cost of rituals may often be variable and dependent on a skill check ... adding some sort of crit fail which created curse style aflications

Yes I am including some Zombie creating rituals too so now you have a hand that is zombified yippie.

 

[Garthanos]

This has an incredibly positive benefit on play. Whenever a player wants to cast a spell, it's up to the player to bring the mechanics of the spell into play and resolve them. The DM basically has no mental or mechanical burden when spells are used.

Ah so martial abilities that the player can simply decide to use and which subsequently happen must be awesome too. Or is the above just a pile you made up as an excuse in support of tradition?

 

[Celebrim]

Ah so martial abilities that the player can simply decide to use and which subsequently happen must be awesome too. Or is the above just a pile you made up as an excuse in support of tradition?

I don't have a clue what you mean, but I guess that makes us even because you don't seem to have a clue what I mean either.

Have you ever taken a typical D&D player's handbook, flipped it to the start of the spells table, and really considered how much of the rules of D&D are in the spells? Without spells and spell-like effects, D&D borders on being a rules light engine. The fact that D&D spells are highly specific individualized pieces of narrative force is a major part of the game of D&D.

But, since I know you to be a 4e player, then yes, in the case of 4e's "everyone is a spellcaster" model of the game, the vast majority of the game rules are in the powers of the classes. If all the details of remembering what the 4e powers did was moved onto the DM's side of the screen in order to keep those powers numinous, eerie, dangerous, and frightening, then yes the same logic would apply.

For the record, martial abilities a character can decide to use are just fine - grapple, circle, clinch, push, trip, tackle, flail, thrash, throw, or whatever. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

 

[Celebrim]

I think what you describe is ONE option, not the only one. Ask anyone who ever played a caster in Dragonquest, it is VERY VERY possible to make a simple, even dull and boring, and incredibly dangerous, magic system.

The question is more like "why would anyone run a PC who risks death every time he exercises his ability?" If magic is really hazardous enough to SEEM hazardous, then it is pretty much a given that it will have to ACTUALLY be pretty hazardous, at least over the longer term.

I think that's all true. But the problem with that approach is not one I think a game from 1980 would have particularly concerned itself with - balance. Imagine we have a simple system, and we give the player an option of two classes - warrior and mage. The warrior is 50% more potent than the mage, but the mage has a power where he can be twice as potent as the warrior only there is a 1 in 6 chance he'll die. The two classes are not balanced, and tables will evolve to one of two positions - characters aren't disposable so always play a warrior, or else characters are disposable so always play a mage. IMO, games balanced on random chances of death where the player has no input in what happens just aren't balanced and don't really present any interesting choices. Making the math more complex just obfuscates that problem.

(Incidentally, I have the same problem with many complex critical hit/fumble systems that produce random, "You behead yourself with your sword." results. They take control out of the hands of the player and guarantee in the long run no matter what they choose to do, they lose.)

You could introduce that sort of thing into D&D and the same sort of logic would follow. If wizards and warriors were roughly balanced to begin with, why would you now ever play the wizard? Or if they weren't balanced, then wizard play would evolve toward the most potent actions they could take which didn't involve significant risk, along with the option to 'nova' with a high risk maneuver when the odds strongly favored defeat anyway. And this still wouldn't feel balanced, nor would I think it feel "dangerous".

We've seen magic that is dangerous in D&D, it's just never the province of the player in traditional play. Gygax loaded up his writing with dangerous magic. He just silo'd it off into magical traps and special magical tricks that tended to have immediate obvious consequences. Gygaxian dungeons are loaded up with dangerous magic that can make for play as paranoid as any Call of Cthulhu investigator opening up a musty tome or peering into some dark space. Or think about the Deck of Many Things or the artifacts from the 1e DMG. I think it is a critical difference that the player doesn't know what is going to happen, not even in a broad sense. Gygaxian special magic can do anything, and I think Gygax understood the importance of keeping that safe and secret when he wrote the 1e artifacts with fill in the blank powers selected secretly by the DM.

Now, a COOLER system might be one that really let you trade off effectiveness for danger in interesting ways. That would almost surely start to get into your 'DM workload' though.

Not necessarily. The 'DM Workload' part comes from the fact that the player doesn't have perfect information. He's carrying for example several magic items with strange quirks that work in special circumstances or are triggered by unusual things. If the DM can remember all that, the player is left in a world were strange things happen and they are not entirely sure why or what it means. But remembering all of that is difficult. Likewise, you can make spells work like unidentified magic items with clauses and features and side effects that the players don't know about, and which might horrify them if they did. But then you have the burden of storing all those rules texts and resolving them secretly. That halts play. You are almost going to have to certainly flip to the appropriate entry, whereas by contrast it is a table rule in my game you can't cast a spell unless you have the rules in front of you, so spellcasters generally do that flipping on other players turns so they can be ready to go.

Still, it would at least have the virtue that it would be a choice as to how much this was engaged.

Absolutely.

a character could ping around with 'at will' type level powers and be modestly effective, without invoking any of the real big danger/mystery part of things. Or they could dig down and do crazy stuff, making dire promises, sacrificing souls, whatever, in order to have a more serious impact. Some of that could involve "well, if you fail that Arcana check then the demon is going to break loose..." etc.

Truly dangerous magic causes the demon to break loose and you are not necessarily immediately the wiser that it has. It involves the recognition that lighting the candle with the flame might be giving yourself cancer or causes a hag to snatch a baby in the nearest village or that your eyeball might mutate and sprout from the tip of a tentacle. You can do that with random effects, but that ultimately isn't that interesting, because there is no choice in the system. Dangerous magic gives the illusion of control. You think you can figure it out and use it, but there is always this nagging part that thinks, "What don't I know? Is that weird red glow a fairly harmless side effect, or am I really going to regret this in the long run?"

I still do that sort of stuff, but I have to confine to a couple of instances per party and Gygaxian style weird locations, because its otherwise just too much to keep track of.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well with some of my house rules the cost of rituals may often be variable and dependent on a skill check ... adding some sort of crit fail which created curse style aflications

Yes I am including some Zombie creating rituals too so now you have a hand that is zombified yippie.

LOL!

HoML treats rituals in a wholly different way, though they NARRATIVELY fulfill the same role as in 4e, they are 'positioning devices'. A given ritual allows the player to substitute a different narrative explanation into the situation, which provides a substitute skill. Thus, for example, 'Detect Magic' allows the character to utilize arcana instead of some other skill check in a perception situation, or other situation for that matter, where the player can explain how 'seeing traces of magic' would be a possible resolution of the current fictional position. The player can either make a check, or pay a higher 'boosted price' (often a vitality point) to achieve an automatic basic success.

This is different from your variable cost depending on a check, but similar in some respects. Players decide what the stakes are by their descriptions of how the fictional position accommodates the ritual use, and then either throws the dice or pays for advancing the plot in the desired direction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, there can be a lot to keep track of if you do it that way. I don't disagree that this is sort of the 'ultimate extreme' in terms of making things crazy and 'magical'. Actually if you think about it, this was D&D 1974! I mean, I was there, NOTHING was known. If you found ANY item it might or might not be magical, it might or might not have almost any effect, good or bad. Mostly DM's had, or made, a list of things and then just put on your sheet 'dagger of venom' and they had that in their notes/dmg/whatever. Player still knew next to nothing about it. It was only later that everyone read the books and things got more cut and dried. Artifacts were just an answer to that, a new way to make crazy stuff again.

 

[Garthanos]

OK

Have you ever taken a typical D&D player's handbook, flipped it to the start of the spells table, and really considered how much of the rules of D&D are in the spells?

arguably a significant amount or even a majority but in some sense I see them as exceptions to the rules.

People move this speed and jump this far EXCEPT when someone digs deep and and uses a special maneuver which allows them to strain himself in a very extreme well timed leap which doesnt draw opportunity attacks OR except when the mage uses a specially triggered frogs blood *jump utility spell.

If all the details of remembering what the 4e powers did was moved onto the DM's side of the screen in order to keep those powers numinous, eerie, dangerous, and frightening, then yes the same logic would apply.

D&D doesn't really achieve numinous or eerie (see cleric miraculous abilities for an area that I used to find annoying because of that lack)

Heck 'truly" dangerous or frightening seems largely intentionally suppressed to enable and encourage heroic genre conventions.

D&D can hit unpredictable which is what the dice are for and spells often lacked that (there are exceptions).

AND D&D dangerous includes increasing the danger of failure in the situation with effects that impair the one using them making them more vulnerable to subsequent harm (even to varying not entirely predictable degrees)

Yes it is indeed valuable to have significant number of the exceptions be player side. In earlier editions most of those exceptions or complications were caster controlled.

There were a lot of people complaining because martial abilities in 4e including ones which simply worked because the player decided so, were moved to the player side. Instead of requiring dm adjudication and overhead often with "is it realistic" being the parameters ... it's not traditional to let the player choose when his martial type gets to pull out the stops and get a more extreme effect etc etc.

So I was making assumptions

 

[Psikerlord#]

What about a "Dark & Dangerous" Magic Table, which you make a check for every time you cast a non-at will spell (chance of going off is 1 in 20 for the first spell, increasing by 1 for each subsequent spell until it triggers).

https://lowfantasygaming.com/2016/05/29/dark-dangerous-magic/

 

[Garthanos]

HoML's implementation of this is:

At-Will powers are as they say, same as 4e.

Intermittent powers are free to use once per encounter. You can pay a 1 VP (HS) cost to re-use them if you want, but of course they are less powerful than Vitality powers, usually.

If that is the case I would considering using a mechanism like i implemented for martial practices a skill check is used to sometimes avoid the VP cost on a reuse of an intermittent power.

You might very flavorfully use power appropriate skills depending on the power perhaps Insight/Perception, or Diplomacy, Bluffing or Endurance or Arcana or Nature or Religion checks or whatever