Wulf Ratbane said:
What do you mean? Other folks have managed.
If it must be private, email is fine. Otherwise I'm agreeable to a discussion here (and you'll likely get as good or better help from the braintrust here as you would from me).
I didn't want to hijack your thread, honestly, but since you're cool with it, I'll toss out the basics.
The original draft worked this way:
D20 Modern is the base ruleset.
There are 10 magical skills - Attack, Charm, Create, Cure, Defend, Divine, Illusion, Move, Summon, and Transform. You must take a 'tradition feat' to gain these as class skills, and each tradition feat gives you a few magical class skills and then maybe a special rule for spellcasting.
For example, the 'Christian Miracle-Worker' tradition feat would give you access to magic that is traditionally Christian - Charm, Create, Cure, and Defend - and you'd gain a +2 bonus to your Cure skill checks. The 'Aztec Blood Magic' tradition feat would give you Attack, Summon, and Transform, and you'd be able to get bonuses to your spells if you sacrifice a creature as you cast the spell. The 'Psychic Sensitive' tradition feat would give you Charm, Divine, and Illusion, and you would always act as if you had a 1st level Divine spell active to let you sense psychic impressions.
Magical skills don't have associated ability scores, and you cannot take Skill Emphasis or any other sort of feat to enhance them. Your ranks and your tradition feats are all that affect your spellcasting checks.
You can create spells on the fly, and spells are measured in levels from 1 to 20, roughly equal to twice what the core rule version would be. So a charm person would be ~level 2, a fireball would be ~level 6, and so on (some costs are increased though, especially if being able to cast the spell repeatedly would be abusive). There's about 30 pages on how to create spells, and you can create a great diversity of spell effects using those rules. You cannot cast a spell that is higher level than the number of ranks you have in a magical skill, though you can spend an action point to raise this cap by +5.
To cast a spell, you roll with the appropriate skill against DC 5 + spell level. If you succeed, the spell works. If you roll a nat 20, the spell is an auto success and the target automatically fails its save (if any). If you fail, the spell doesn't work, and you suffer a -1 penalty to all spellcasting checks for the rest of the day. You also fail on a natural 1.
If you fail by 5 or more, the spell mishaps in a classical fashion. It might just deal damage to you, or it might rebound, drain your health, cause you to become possessed, curse you, etc.
This scale of DCs was designed so that if you cast a spell that is the same level as you have ranks in that skill, you cannot cause a mishap, though you can still fail about 1/4 times, which will cause you to get accruing penalties, so eventually it will become too dangerous to keep casting spells. Once you're 3rd level, though, you can safely cast all the level 1 spells you want, with no chance of spell failure except on a natural 1. What ended up happening, though, was that the PC in the game I'm using to playtest this was able to fire off 5 charm persons and a ton of cure spells in one day at 2nd level.
He was a 2nd level Smart Hero, and you took the Christian Miracle Worker feat. He has 5 ranks in Charm, Create, Cure, and Defend, and took 2 ranks cross-class in Attack because, hey, he's an adventurer. He has a +7 bonus to cast Cure spells, so unless he rolls a nat 1, he can safely succeed on any spell that is level 4 or lower (mind you, a level 4 Cure spell only heals 1d6 hp
[This was so that I don't have PCs going to hospitals and just firing off Cure spells, upsetting the 'normal world' feel of the game]). Even if he fails on a nat 1, he can safely heal about 40d6 in one day before he runs the risk of a mishap.
I'm thinking of upping the DC to 10 + spell level, which will make magic a much rarer thing at low level. Then, when you're 4th level and have 7 ranks in a magical skill, you can safely cast level 1 spells with no risk of mishap, and a 85% chance of success. Trying to cast a fireball (Attack level 6) at 4th level is possible, but you'd have about a 60% chance of success, and a 15% chance of getting yourself killed.
Any suggestions? I think raising the DC should do it, though I'm afraid 1st or 2nd level PCs will either never risk using magic because they can kill themselves, or they'll take the risk, and end up killing themselves.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
