EoM: Thoughts on spell duration and effects

[NeonWolf]

Watching a commercial for Snow White I got to thinking that the sort of magic you read in fairy tales or other fiction does not work well currently with any game magic system I've seen. So I thought I'd toss out a few ideas and see what people thought.

Most of the magic we see is generally of a very short term nature. What if the magic could have it's duration extended, or even area of affect expanded by increasing the SP cost and casting time. This could lead to a "curse" of changing a person into a frog for years. But the spell might take days to cast, and use up all of the caster's SP during that time.

To got even further with this curse idea. HOw about flaws in the spell? The cursed frog can only be changed back by a kiss. An expanded area of effect could have the flaw of being donut shaped and thus not attacking those nearest to the caster.

So what does everyone think?

 

[scholz]

Custom Spells?

I think, thuogh I don't have my EoM handy, that the more major curses are permanent. And the structure of the spelllist system seems to encourage minor modifications. You could make a curse which had a simple, perhaps ironic solution (like being kissed), but maybe had penalties to saves, or maybe used the victims CHA bonus as a penalty to the save or something (in the Snow White case).

There is a more philosophical issue here though, and that is whether such modifications need systematic support from the rules. I am ambivalent about it. On one hand, many build your power systems (HERO, GURPS, etc..) have standard power advantages and limitations that balance the various effects. A spell that can be deactivated by true love might get a small cost reduction, or be able to be fitted with some small advantage (save penalty).

But, many people prefer the more arbitrary D&D type system for spells that balance the classes overall without trying to balance single spells by affect. Spells like Polymorph Other, Magic Jar or Mirror Image are notoriously hard to build on point systems, but reasonably well balanced for the D&D. (Though not perfectly).

If you go too far over to the point buy system, which EoM could easily do, then the effects become too generic and balancing becomes too important.

So I am not sure what should be done. I think an interesting requirement for EoM spells would be some customization. If a DM required a Mage to customize each spell or spell list so that her spells were really different from another's that could be pretty cool.The DM would be responsible for balancing the minor tweaks to the spells. I do wish there were more examples of how spell lists could be tweaked, and modified. It isn't entirely clear from the text how we ought to adjudicate such issues.

Well, that didn't help at all. Sorry.

steve