The Owlbear said:
What are some of your house rules conserning the creation of spells by players? Some of mine are:
- Must have own private study/labratory. It's kind of hard to spend hours crafting and perfecting spells in the woods while your teamates are fighting.
-Can still only learn two spells per level, including player created one. You can't make 10 then learn them all at once; your head would explode.
-Cannot be all-powerful. Must have at least a few drawbacks, like short-lasting or requiring spell components.
-And, of course, DM approval.
Comment on #1: If you have no downtime your spellcasters are screwed in creating new spells. You are also biasing this towards wizards; a wizard could have a workbook where he works on designing new spells which he travels with him (a lot of good works come from places which you wouldn't expect), a bard could work on a new magical song/chant while on the road, a sorceror is most likely just going to discover some new unknown power, a cleric could have a divine insight into the creation of a new spell, a druid could contemplate a new spell from something he saw in nature and develop it in nature. These are all easy examples for on the road spell-design. Sure they'll usually take some time, but if your adventure runs with an hour or two of gametime every day (say for food/whatnot), over the course of a week or two I could see a character developing a new spell.
One way to limit this decently would be to say the number of hours a spell takes to develop is equal to the spell level plus one squared. Thus a first level spell would take four hours, and a ninth level spell would take 100 hours of time. You could also use some standard price guides for researching a spell (spell level squared x 100), but I think in a lot of cases they could be unnecessary or just a meta-game restriction. Also, different classes manifest magic differently, thus I'd say for a sorceror, there is no research time, they just boom manifest a new spell (so long as they have a free spell-known slot).
Comment on #2: Do you limit a character only learning two spells per level regardless of the source? If a character wants to take the time to craft a spell and learn it, they're taking a legitimate amount of resources (time, etc.) to do so and really shouldn't be limited to what they can create solely by not "going out and leveling up". Can weaponsmiths only create so many weapons before they have to go out and gain a level before they can make more? I doubt it, and they're definately not getting enough experience per weapon to level up quickly enough so they can make more. Sure a character might have to work on only one spell at a time (or even better a maximum number of spells researched at any time equal to their spellcasting stats' modifier), but that shouldn't limit them to the number of ones they can learn in a given level unless they are restricted by other things like a number of spells known (as per sorcerors and bards).
Comment on #3: Well, this is a pretty silly requirement since it's basically built into the way the level-based spell system works. The DMG has charts for maximum damage caps for spell levels, and it also advises you to compare spells to ones of equal level. This is just a common sense factor
Comment on #4: Yes, absolutely, just like almost anything else, the DM usually gets final say on what goes and what doesn't go.
Final Comment: Creating spells is often times a meta-game area of adjudication. If a wizard character wants to create a spell for when his character levels up, that his character has discovered/created, work with the player to develop it, and then give it to him as one of the two he gets automatically when he levels. This usually makes the characters more interesting and encourages uniqueness and greater involvement in ones character, rather than just always taking what is handed out of the book.
