D&D General It's all Jack Vance's fault

[Oofta]

What is "the D&D style" in this context?

You're asking "what are the alternatives to Vancian magic?". So if you're asking that in good faith, you presumably are willing to accept a non-Vancian system as being in "the D&D style", yes? Is the "D&D style" just being roughly compatible with existing D&D spell lists? Or is it something else?

But you listed a set of possibilities, and it's obvious from other games that those are very far from the only possibilities, and several things you seemed to think were inherent, are not.

As for "does it better", well I didn't really say that, did I? I think what I posted was a pretty helpful look at some other approaches, and I think you suggesting I'm not "adding to the conversation" is a bit odd, frankly. I'm saying "here are different approaches, many of them work well" (not all of them, to be sure!).

I do agree that I should probably have some kind of degree-equivalence though Then I could get some damn respect (I am quite sure I would get none!)

EDIT - So if we assume in "the D&D style" means you cast mostly fire-and-forget spells, that are individual and well-defined, we could certainly adapt a system like Dungeon World, where you make a test when casting a spell, and get a result between you cast the spell and keep it, cast the spell and lose it, and just the spell fails. This is pretty different to D&D because it eliminates the biggest non-combat issue with spells - that being that they can't fail, they always succeed. Or we could adapt a spell-point system that didn't have the flaws you noted. Obviously we'd want to redesign D&D's spells a bit, but it wouldn't have to be drastic, fireball would still be fireball and so on (far less drastic than 4E, for example, perhaps less drastic than 2E to 3E).

By style I was just referring to the fact D&D has very effective but constrained magic that is useful in and out of combat. It's 100% reliable in that you can always cast the spell, the effectiveness of the spell is almost always based on the target not the target. So I don't see how a system to see if you can cast a spell is better than a wisdom save by the target to see if they're dominated is that much different. It feels like the 4E "caster rolls all the saves" which had it's own issues. Or maybe it's not at all the same because you don't explain.

Many, if not most people don't have the opportunity to play multiple different systems. If you're going to say "Game X does it better" explain how. If I were to say that a bubble sort is better than a merge sort for a particular operation that doesn't really tell you anything unless you know the technical terms and mechanics of sorting, right? Why would saying that "a spell point system designed from the ground up..." be helpful if you can't explain what that means or how it would be different from the spell point system option for the DMG?

Maybe it's asking too much to ask people to actually explain how such things would work.

EDIT: I admit this is kind of a pet peeve of mine. People saying some other system does something better (or different anyway) happens a lot. It's also meaningless to people that do not know those systems.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The issue with (most) spell point casters is that they get spamtastic - either dropping as many of their points as possible into high level high burst spells to finish combats ASAP or dropping them into low level spammable spells like Shield. Whichever way it works it gets spamtastic compared to spell slots.

 

[dragoner]

Honestly back in the day, we just used magic points for spells converted off the tables, so spell casters could "rapid fire louie" as the Beasties used to say. Vance's way is great for the novels, though in reality, simpler just flows better.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

By style I was just referring to the fact D&D has very effective but constrained magic that is useful in and out of combat. It's 100% reliable in that you can always cast the spell, the effectiveness of the spell is almost always based on the target not the target. So I don't see how a system to see if you can cast a spell is better than a wisdom save by the target to see if they're dominated is that much different. It feels like the 4E "caster rolls all the saves" which had it's own issues. Or maybe it's not at all the same because you don't explain.

I'm sorry, but I did explain. See below:

So if we assume in "the D&D style" means you cast mostly fire-and-forget spells, that are individual and well-defined, we could certainly adapt a system like Dungeon World, where you make a test when casting a spell, and get a result between you cast the spell and keep it, cast the spell and lose it, and just the spell fails. This is pretty different to D&D because it eliminates the biggest non-combat issue with spells - that being that they can't fail, they always succeed.

If you're going to say "Game X does it better" explain how.

Why would saying that "a spell point system designed from the ground up..." be helpful if you can't explain what that means or how it would be different from the spell point system option for the DMG?

So just to be clear, unless we explain an entire spell-point system, with examples, from the ground up, you're not interested? But it's okay for you to make a couple of flip assertions about spell-point systems, you don't need to do the same? Or am I misunderstanding? I'm hoping I'm misunderstanding.

If I were to say that a bubble sort is better than a merge sort for a particular operation that doesn't really tell you anything unless you know the technical terms and mechanics of sorting, right?

I mean, I'd know what you meant, and it's relatively easy to explain the difference. You seem to asking for rather more than that re: magic systems.

In broad terms, spell point systems have a lot of variables you can tweak.

1) How deep the pool is relative to the cost of the spells.

You could have a very deep pool, which is effectively same as all the maximum possible slots a caster of X level in D&D could cast right now, or could go for really any depth less than that. Going for the "full depth" is unlikely to be balanced, because realistically, most casters end the day with a lot of spells uncast, and the flexibility of pools needs to be accounted for.

2) How the spells are costed relative to their power. If you wanted D&D-style spells, you could choose a wide variety of different cost models.

3) How the spells work and scale.

4) How many spells you know/have access to.

5) When and how the pool refreshes. Does it refresh constantly? On a Short Rest? Every X hours? On a Long Rest? These all require different balancing/design concerns.

The issue we've seen typically in D&D is that most spell-point systems presented in official work are extremely low-effort things not intended to be used, and with apparently little/no effort being made to balance them. In professional 3PP products, a better job is sometimes done. Homebrew systems run the gamut, but most people homebrewing are indeed amateurs with little grasp on (and often little interest in) balance or preventing exploits, because they're intending to just house-rule out exploits.

If you want to be educated about TTRPG magic systems, we can do that, it's a lot of work but it can be done, but here's my issue with asking for that. In my experience, when a person asks to be educated about a certain thing, in a post, online, approximately 80% of the time, unless they're extremely positive, they either:

A) Just leave the thread, and never show any evidence of having read what they asked for.

or

B) Literally ignore the post(s) with all the information in, and just try to nitpick some unrelated point.

So essentially asking to educated tends to turn into a form of trolling. I'm not saying you're doing that or intend to do it, but I am leery of putting a lot of effort into in-depth explanations of magic systems because I've been burned this way before. It's often not entirely useless - often someone else finds value in it, but it is a little vexing.

The issue with (most) spell point casters is that they get spamtastic - either dropping as many of their points as possible into high level high burst spells to finish combats ASAP or dropping them into low level spammable spells like Shield. Whichever way it works it gets spamtastic compared to spell slots.

What spell point systems are you basing this assertion on? There are ones which have this flaw, but you can design shallower pools and steeper spell costs, or just redesign specific spells to prevent this being an issue.

 

[RealAlHazred]

By two "levels" of spell you mean two categories, right? Since later on you explain spells do not have levels. So a wish is 1.5 levels of memorisation while an affect normal fires is 1 level.
Perhaps there are other requirements necessary to cast certain spells - INT score, class level...etc


And once cast, can they relearn them during a short rest?
By them not being "equal in power" the trick then comes into how casters acquire new spells.

In the document I made for my table, I call them "types" of spells. The only levels I refer to are class levels. Since there's no multiclassing, it means the word "levels" refers to just one thing on the character sheet, which is nice. And Vance doesn't generally do "dungeons," so I don't expect to need to refer to "dungeon levels." Really, TSR should have invested in a thesaurus.

Well, this is in OSE which doesn't do short rests. And OSE also generally doesn't have spells like wish and time stop -- in the core rules magic caps at 6th level spells.

And my system also doesn't have spells like wish, because that wasn't in Vance. It does have the Spell of Temporal Stasis (also called the hiatus) which freezes Material-plane corporeal creatures nearby in time, while the caster is able to move as normal; ghosts, and summoned creatures like demons and such, are able to move freely during this time. It's one of the formidable spells.

 

[RealAlHazred]

The obvious retort would be "If I memorize Jabberwocky, and then recite it, it doesn't disappear from my memory. In fact, the act of reciting it will if anything solidify it in my memory, making it easier to remember and recite again without having to study it again. So it seems this is not analagous to this spell-casting system."

Sure, you might remember the words, but the charged power has been spent. Vance implies mental exercises and the like. It's like a super-Saiyan charging up a Kamehameha blast -- except it doesn't take multiple sessions where the only thing players are doing is standing around talking while the magic-user is starting to glow and grows his hair.

 

[chaochou]

Runequest offered a brilliantly flexible, interesting, tactically nuanced magic system which didn't overshadow martial characters or relegate the usefulness of skills in 1977.

I'm astonished at the claims being levelled at magic point systems in 2022, and the willingness to make them without evidence of any kind, but while demanding evidence to the contrary. Standard hypocrisy.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Back in the my college days, my DM had his own magic point system for AD&D 1E. I've lost touch with him, and tried to find where he got it from -- he was in the Navy, and a lot of his stuff was West Coast stuff, foreign to our East Coast ways.

From what I've been able to reconstruct from my character sheet and what I remember, only magic-users and illusionists used it -- divine spellcasters got their spells the normal way. Your arcane caster had a pool of spell points equal to his level, times his Intelligence, divided by a factor derived from his Intelligence. So, for instance, if you had an 18 Int, at 1st level you had 18 spell points -- 1 times 18 divided by 1 (the factor for an 18 Int). If you had a 17 Int, you had 8 spell points -- 1 times 17 divided by 2 (the factor for a 16-17 Int). Races and stats were rolled randomly, although you did get three rolls for race and got to pick one.

My character was a Gray Elf magic-user with a 19 Int. The factor for a 19 Int (which only NPCs and monsters were supposed to have) was 0.5. So, I started at 1st level with 38 spell points, breaking the game.

It cost you a number of spell points equal to the spell level to memorize a spell, and then it cost you a number of spell points equal to the character level you wanted to cast it at to cast the spell. So if I only wanted a single magic missile to hit somebody as a 5th level caster, I could just spend 1 spell point to cast magic missile at 1st level, I didn't have to spend 5 spell points each time. It was a nuanced system, because you would have to balance "Do I want to memorize all these spells?" versus "How much power do I need to reserve for later?"

Unless you broke the game at 1st level like I did. I even multiclassed as a druid for a truly powerful character...

 

[chaochou]

What do you think about Jack Vance's Dying World, and its magic? What do you think about how it's influenced roleplaying games?

I've only read a couple of Dying Earth stories (not books) - they were idiosyncratic, and not my cup of tea particularly. The magic of the books is strange and unintuitive, which is fine.

But what D&D takes is not strange and unintuitive - it's a fire and forget system where the authors then took every magical thing they could think of and like diligent book-keepers assigned them a level and some components and a range and area of effect and packaged them up and stacked them on the supermarket shelves for purchase.

So petrification is no longer the preserve of the dreaded and mythical basilisk or medusa - it's in aisle 7. Need a wish? You don't need a genie in a lamp, you need aisle 18. You might need the stepladder. This, for me, is the worst aspect of the system - the spell list doesn't respect the uniqueness of myth, magic or legend, it commodifies it.

(And this, as an aside - may help explain its popularity. What the magic system represents isn't magic, it's consumerism).

I find the magic of Runequest, and later HeroWars and Burning Wheel - and in fact other systems which don't turn every last heroic, mythical or magical thing into a spell - to be more satisfying and evocative, even if people will tell me they were less commercially successful (yawn).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Back in the my college days, my DM had his own magic point system for AD&D 1E. I've lost touch with him, and tried to find where he got it from -- he was in the Navy, and a lot of his stuff was West Coast stuff, foreign to our East Coast ways.

From what I've been able to reconstruct from my character sheet and what I remember, only magic-users and illusionists used it -- divine spellcasters got their spells the normal way. Your arcane caster had a pool of spell points equal to his level, times his Intelligence, divided by a factor derived from his Intelligence. So, for instance, if you had an 18 Int, at 1st level you had 18 spell points -- 1 times 18 divided by 1 (the factor for an 18 Int). If you had a 17 Int, you had 8 spell points -- 1 times 17 divided by 2 (the factor for a 16-17 Int). Races and stats were rolled randomly, although you did get three rolls for race and got to pick one.

My character was a Gray Elf magic-user with a 19 Int. The factor for a 19 Int (which only NPCs and monsters were supposed to have) was 0.5. So, I started at 1st level with 38 spell points, breaking the game.

It cost you a number of spell points equal to the spell level to memorize a spell, and then it cost you a number of spell points equal to the character level you wanted to cast it at to cast the spell. So if I only wanted a single magic missile to hit somebody as a 5th level caster, I could just spend 1 spell point to cast magic missile at 1st level, I didn't have to spend 5 spell points each time. It was a nuanced system, because you would have to balance "Do I want to memorize all these spells?" versus "How much power do I need to reserve for later?"

Unless you broke the game at 1st level like I did. I even multiclassed as a druid for a truly powerful character...

This sounds like it might be one of the versions "Caltech D&D" which I was referring to earlier, aka Warlock. I haven't been able to find a complete rules-set for it - ironically the link someone set up in 2012 to preserve the 2000 version of it is now dead.