A New Magic System (per encounter and per day)
- Thread starter Khuxan
- Start date
erf_beto
First Post
why not have both?
spells slots per encounter AND spells slots per day.
Every spell would come with yet another descriptor stating wether it's a per encounter or per day spell. Blasting and most combat spells recharge every encounter, but healing and gamebreaking spells recharge once in a day. You could use your per day slots in an encounter (perhaps even preparing your blasting per encounter spells on per day slots) but they would be gone soon.
Someone posted a house rule for tokens and spellcasting that was a little bit like that (dont remember the name of the poster, though... kudos to him/her BTW). Seemed to work properly without giving access to unlimited healing or teleportation.
spells slots per encounter AND spells slots per day.
Every spell would come with yet another descriptor stating wether it's a per encounter or per day spell. Blasting and most combat spells recharge every encounter, but healing and gamebreaking spells recharge once in a day. You could use your per day slots in an encounter (perhaps even preparing your blasting per encounter spells on per day slots) but they would be gone soon.
Someone posted a house rule for tokens and spellcasting that was a little bit like that (dont remember the name of the poster, though... kudos to him/her BTW). Seemed to work properly without giving access to unlimited healing or teleportation.
Croesus
Adventurer
erf_beto said:
That might have been mine, or you might have seen the original thread that I stole my ideas from. Unfortunately that original thread was lost in the crash, so I can't provide a link.
In a nutshell, casters get a limited number of spell points. The points regenerate very quickly (1 per round) and spells cost 1 point per spell level. The difficulty for the caster lies in these limitations:
1. Very few spell points. A 1st-level caster has 4 points. A 20th-level caster has 28 points. You *never* have enough points for everything.
2. Spells with a duration hold the spell points used to cast them. In other words, if you have bull's strength active, you can't recover those two spell points. Makes a caster think twice before casting a bunch of defensive/buff spells.
3. Spells with duration: permanent hold their spell points until the caster rests for 8 hours. (No creating infinite walls of iron, etc.)
4. "Problematic" spells are treated as duration: permanent. The GM defines what spells are problematic - common ones would be spells like teleport and divinations - pretty much anything that, if cast all day, causes problems. If a group wants to limit healing, those could be defined as problematic. (My group likes infinite healing, so it's not a problem for us, but other groups really like the challenge from having characters get into fights with less than full hit points.)
Basically the caster has one resource (spell points) to manage, but the variance in recharge times recreates the OP's idea of spells per encounter + spells per day. It also keeps a good resource management challenge for casters.
I tried expanding the idea from just spells to most feats/class abilities, but the system starts to get a bit cumbersome at that point. For spellcasting tho, my own group finds this a lot easier and more fun than the RAW spells per day.
I still remember the first time a player said "Well, I guess we better hole up somewhere and rest..." and the rest of us looked at her and said, "Why?" She just assumed we needed to rest after the first few encounters, because that's how the game always played before. YMMV
Last edited:
Reaper Steve
Explorer
Khuxan said:
Thanks for the Ironcarnum referenece...that looks like what I need!
Spatzimaus
First Post
I know some of you are getting sick of the plugging, but I'm again going to refer to my homebrew on this one. We had the same basic issues, because we had three "magic" classes, each of which addressed this differently:
> The "Mutant" class can buy Spell-Like Abilities, useable at will. A lot like the Warlock, but less casting-centric; most Mutants take the class for the inherent boosts (stat boosts, natural armor, damage reduction, etc.) to support weapon fighting, with maybe a single SLA for flexibility.
> The "Channeler" class is a spontaneous caster class that damages the caster depending on the relative levels involved (low-level stuff is free, mid-range stuff is manageable, and your top spells are very draining). The damage is "mental" damage, which can only be healed slowly over a period of a few minutes. (To compensate a bit, the class has a d6 HD and light armor.)
Imagine a Psion who has a small power pool but heals a few power points per round, and you've got something pretty close to the Channeler. In the OP, the #3 option (Corruption) is closest to what we use here.
Given a couple minutes between encounters, a Channeler can always be at full strength for the next one. But, he simply can't unload tons of high-level stuff at once; he has to pace himself. In fact, you really can't use more than one or two high-level spells per encounter, period.
> The "Wizard" class is a slot-based caster with some swapping ability like a Cleric, and is basically a typical D&Dish "per day" class. He CAN unload all of his heavy stuff in a single encounter, but if he's smart he'll pace himself. Wizards really shine in boss fights.
So anyway, we ran into this exact discussion, because we were mixing a "per day" class with a "per encounter" one with an "at will" one. Frankly, most of our players preferred the "per encounter" setup, even though it was weaker during the "boss fight" encounters, probably because they KNEW they had control over their resources, instead of hoping the DM had spaced out the encounters enough to allow 8 hours of rest. But the fact that each side had at least one player who felt it was the "best" was a good sign.
Anyway, if you ARE going to switch to a per-encounter system, I'd really advise against trying to make everything "X uses per encounter", because that still just favors the alphastrike (unloading all your big stuff at the start of the fight) and if you've got a bunch of high-level spells, each with 1 use per day, you STILL come out better than in a normal slot-based system. This is where drain-based systems really shine, IMO.
> The "Mutant" class can buy Spell-Like Abilities, useable at will. A lot like the Warlock, but less casting-centric; most Mutants take the class for the inherent boosts (stat boosts, natural armor, damage reduction, etc.) to support weapon fighting, with maybe a single SLA for flexibility.
> The "Channeler" class is a spontaneous caster class that damages the caster depending on the relative levels involved (low-level stuff is free, mid-range stuff is manageable, and your top spells are very draining). The damage is "mental" damage, which can only be healed slowly over a period of a few minutes. (To compensate a bit, the class has a d6 HD and light armor.)
Imagine a Psion who has a small power pool but heals a few power points per round, and you've got something pretty close to the Channeler. In the OP, the #3 option (Corruption) is closest to what we use here.
Given a couple minutes between encounters, a Channeler can always be at full strength for the next one. But, he simply can't unload tons of high-level stuff at once; he has to pace himself. In fact, you really can't use more than one or two high-level spells per encounter, period.
> The "Wizard" class is a slot-based caster with some swapping ability like a Cleric, and is basically a typical D&Dish "per day" class. He CAN unload all of his heavy stuff in a single encounter, but if he's smart he'll pace himself. Wizards really shine in boss fights.
So anyway, we ran into this exact discussion, because we were mixing a "per day" class with a "per encounter" one with an "at will" one. Frankly, most of our players preferred the "per encounter" setup, even though it was weaker during the "boss fight" encounters, probably because they KNEW they had control over their resources, instead of hoping the DM had spaced out the encounters enough to allow 8 hours of rest. But the fact that each side had at least one player who felt it was the "best" was a good sign.
Anyway, if you ARE going to switch to a per-encounter system, I'd really advise against trying to make everything "X uses per encounter", because that still just favors the alphastrike (unloading all your big stuff at the start of the fight) and if you've got a bunch of high-level spells, each with 1 use per day, you STILL come out better than in a normal slot-based system. This is where drain-based systems really shine, IMO.
