Andor
First Post
I've been persuing the Magic section of the basic rules and some thoughts occur to me.
Concentration is a commonly used mechanic, although it's less limiting than in any previous edition of D&D. Basically you can't cast another spell that requires concentration and you don't want to get hit. Movement and combat are fine. It's used as a gating mechanism to control how much nifty stuff you can do at once. Probably these limits will fade with the coming of the splat books.
They seem to have reduced the quadratic wizard problem by giving spells flat damages with increases paid for by consuming higher level spell slots. Seems like it will work although I fully expect splat books to eventually reintroduce (lvl X d6) spells.
Spell balance seems ... off. Compare guidling bolt with magic missile. Not neccesarily a bad thing, I think balance as the holy grail has become a major hobgoblin in RPG design and needs to die a gruesome death. Which is not to say that balance doesn't matter at all, just that it's not sacred.
Magical Healing seems fairly limited, even compared to 2e, which is compensated for by the generous resting healing.
Commercial magic seems to be limited. IE. Wall of Iron, Shape earth and stone. Spells that would reshape commerce seem to be gone. Even fly is gimped.
OTOH "Detect plot" spells like find the path and divination are well supplied.
Arcane foci serve as variant spell component pouches, seems like purely a nice bit of flavor.
Wizard spell book rules are much less onerous than they have been previously. Most GMs that I played with always ignored them before, maybe they'll see some use now.
I don't see any animate dead type spells. Moved to NPC realm or just not in the basic spell list?
On that note there is an interesting bit of cosmology tucked away in the "Speak with dead" spell.
So by implication all (sentient?) beings have a soul and an animating spirit. The soul is responsible for learning, comprehension and thought, the animating spirit does movement and either does memory or holds a copy of memory. It reminds me a bit of the chinese hun and po souls idea.
Concentration is a commonly used mechanic, although it's less limiting than in any previous edition of D&D. Basically you can't cast another spell that requires concentration and you don't want to get hit. Movement and combat are fine. It's used as a gating mechanism to control how much nifty stuff you can do at once. Probably these limits will fade with the coming of the splat books.
They seem to have reduced the quadratic wizard problem by giving spells flat damages with increases paid for by consuming higher level spell slots. Seems like it will work although I fully expect splat books to eventually reintroduce (lvl X d6) spells.
Spell balance seems ... off. Compare guidling bolt with magic missile. Not neccesarily a bad thing, I think balance as the holy grail has become a major hobgoblin in RPG design and needs to die a gruesome death. Which is not to say that balance doesn't matter at all, just that it's not sacred.
Magical Healing seems fairly limited, even compared to 2e, which is compensated for by the generous resting healing.
Commercial magic seems to be limited. IE. Wall of Iron, Shape earth and stone. Spells that would reshape commerce seem to be gone. Even fly is gimped.
OTOH "Detect plot" spells like find the path and divination are well supplied.
Arcane foci serve as variant spell component pouches, seems like purely a nice bit of flavor.
Wizard spell book rules are much less onerous than they have been previously. Most GMs that I played with always ignored them before, maybe they'll see some use now.
I don't see any animate dead type spells. Moved to NPC realm or just not in the basic spell list?
On that note there is an interesting bit of cosmology tucked away in the "Speak with dead" spell.
This spell doesn't return the creatures soul to it's body, only it's animating spirit.Thus, the corpse can't learn new information, doesn't comprehend anything that happened since it died, and can't speculate about future events.
