Freeform Spellcasting

[Wik]

Wik,

I think it is just as well I didn't enter the current RPG Design Contest, considering the kind of magic system I was thinking about writing up.

Ha ha. My preferences as a judge are different than my preferences as a GM. For example, I would give SR4E a pretty high grade, but would never run it as GM.

 

[Marius Delphus]

I once had this notion of lumping together 3.5E Psionics, 2E "epic" spellcasting (True Dweomers), Ars Magica, FUDGE Gramarye, Dragonlance 5th Age SAGA, and Elements of Magic Revised into some kind of uber-freeform system that was completely optional and yet totally available to any spellcasting character.

The "bones" of the system were basically this: you simply chose to either prepare a spell in a spell slot you had by dint of your class, or you could leave the slot freeform. When you cast a freeform spell, you "received" a certain number of points (depending on the level of the spell slot you just expended) with which to build your custom effect. All the different aspects of a spell had separate cost tables, and you would just add as you went.

My other intent was to make sure a spell you cast freeform was a little less powerful than a baseline D&D spell.

The system never came to fruition, but I did catalog some of my options at one point.

 

[RangerWickett]

In my opinion, the point of RPGs is drama. Put the PCs in a situation where they want something, but getting it will put them in danger, and then we see how they overcome that danger. Combat was the original element in the genesis of RPGs, so it's pretty well figured out, and I've done it so often I can tweak a fight scene on the fly to keep tension high and lead to a satisfying conclusion. Handling long-term or long-distance challenges, however, has received less attention, and maintaining tension is harder. You've got to factor in how much info the players have, what options they have, how urgent the situation is, and so much more.

When a PC kills a villain in one round or hits a bunch of foes with a fireball and does more damage than a fighter could ever dream, that's just an issue of balancing the numbers (and I'm working on that for my own system). But when a player gets to say, "Okay, my character is going to have influence over the plot, without being in danger," you run the risk of ruining drama.

Basically, taut storytelling is endangered when PC agency extends farther than the threats can reach back. This can be caused by PCs having magic, or high tech, or allies.

So as I try to balance the magic system, my goal is to let spellcasters exercise control on the story, but only at the right scale. Initially I erred on the weak side, but I'm going to try to scale things up. The vague baseline I'm working from is that 'heroic tier' (1st - 10th level) mostly works in the immediate world. You can influence stuff you can touch pretty significantly, stuff within ~100 ft. a little bit, and stuff further away but within sight occasionally. Paragon tier (11th - 20th) extends out farther, so you can easily affect stuff within 100 ft., have mild effects anywhere you can see, and occasionally influence the world miles away. Epic tier (21st - 30th) gives you the ability to affect anything you can see with ease, moderately influence a small region, and occasionally affect any point in the entire world.

Some tricky areas:

Summoning, if you let a creature roam far, is sort of like splitting the party; it's a pain in the neck for the GM, and leaves most of the party bored. (Likewise long distance mind control.)

Teleportation or invisibility or flight can remove the GM's option to include scenes like dangerous travel and evading guards. Also in combat it keeps you from being in danger, which while you might like it, is bad for drama.

Divination, if it lets you learn secrets from the comfort of your home, cuts out the option of having the PCs explore to find important information.

Creation spells, healing, and heat/cold resistance, can make it so starvation, thirst, exposure -- even death -- are never problems.

All these areas I'm trying to make available, but at the right power level so you have tools to make the game more interesting, instead of cheat codes to skip the whole level. I think it's possible to have a non-broken magic system that is flexible, in that you can do all kinds of things, instead of being limited to a handful of spells in a given day, but you have to place careful restrictions of magic that grants narrative agency without hazard.

 

[RangerWickett]

My other intent was to make sure a spell you cast freeform was a little less powerful than a baseline D&D spell.

The system never came to fruition, but I did catalog some of my options at one point.

The cheap solution to that, which we used in EOM-R and Mythic Earth, was that making up a spell on the fly took two whole turns. The action economy is the biggest scale you have available to balance things in combat.

Out of combat, you need a resource that renews slowly, or that actively requires gameplay to replenish, like healing surges or money. Balancing on wealth, though, is tricky.

 

[Marius Delphus]

Well, again, there was no design effort put into the thing, just a collection of different things I was looking at. Casting time was one of the things you could "buy down" by spending points.... if you suddenly needed feather fall for example, and had a freeform 2nd- or 3rd-level slot to burn, you could probably find enough points to buy an "immediate action" casting time and enough "oomph" to do the job in one of several ways. [EDIT: Although something tells me that, after playtesting, the requisite number of points would probably require burning a 4th-level slot.]

I imagine I would've started with a full round casting time, but who knows. Might not have been balanced.

 

[Set]

It sounds like Elements of Magic would rock on toast for playing an Ars Magica or Mage: the Dark Ages style (everyone is a mage) campaign using the d20 rules. (Either of which I'd kick puppies to play in!)

I wonder if mashing it up with Iron Heroes or the Book of Nine Swords classes (both designed to make sexier martial classes) would allow one to have some fun martial types alongside some EoM spellcasters...

[I have EoM, but I don't have Bo9S or IH, so I'm not real familiar with what sort of scale they operate on.]

 

[Afrodyte]

In my opinion, the point of RPGs is drama. Put the PCs in a situation where they want something, but getting it will put them in danger, and then we see how they overcome that danger.

So as I try to balance the magic system, my goal is to let spellcasters exercise control on the story, but only at the right scale.

A criticism I've had of most magic systems, freeform or no, is how effortless it is. I really don't mind powerful magic. I actually like it. What I do mind is magic that just happens . . . because. I guess I could blame lazy design, since so many magic systems detail what you can do rather than how it works.

It'd be great to come across a magic system that really dug into the nature of magic (at least in the context of the game world). What if magic was simply raw possibility shaped through the will? What if the various symbols and rituals and practices, far from being innately magical, are just ways of focusing the will through actions, words, ideas, and symbols that have mythic, cultural, and personal resonance?

What if the measure of magical power is not the scale of an effect but how close it comes to pure will-working (the most powerful form being doing something with a mere thought)? It's one thing to cause a thunderstorm by using complex rituals and incantations. It's another thing to make a tornado simply by spinning your finger in the air.

What if the main difficulty of magic is not pulling it off but controlling the outcome? Maybe summoning a demon is pretty straight-forward, but the reason why people don't do it all the time is because demons are frickin' dangerous and very hard to control. Perhaps zapping your enemy with a bolt of lightning is pretty simple, but the problem is that it might cause a city-wide blackout.

I'm not sure how I'd do this with D20, but with new!Mage, I'd change the system drastically. Instead of using Gnosis + Sphere the primary dice pool for casting magic, I'd make that Resolve + Sphere. Resolve measures your innate desire to make things happen while Sphere represents your understanding of a particular aspect of reality; your Sphere rating doesn't limit how you can use it. Foci such as incantations, props, symbols, etc. add to dice pools for casting spells. Given enough time, knowledge, and resources, there'd be little that a magician could not do.

Which makes mages pretty scary.

 

[Krensky]

It sounds like Elements of Magic would rock on toast for playing an Ars Magica or Mage: the Dark Ages style (everyone is a mage) campaign using the d20 rules. (Either of which I'd kick puppies to play in!)

I wonder if mashing it up with Iron Heroes or the Book of Nine Swords classes (both designed to make sexier martial classes) would allow one to have some fun martial types alongside some EoM spellcasters...

[I have EoM, but I don't have Bo9S or IH, so I'm not real familiar with what sort of scale they operate on.]

EoM has the Mage (pure caster), the Mage Knight (fighter caster), the Task Mage (skill ehnacing caster), and Lyceian Arcana has the Arcanist (a more book oriented pure caster, a wizard to the Mage's sorcerer), the Exalten (think bard), the Godhand (cleric or paladin), and the Longwalker (sort of druid or ranger like). It also has rules for converting the Bard, Cleric, Paladin and Ranger to the EoM system.

Oh... I almost forgot.

It has the Anima class. Think Super Hero. It has little in terms of BAB, Saves, HP, Skills, or anything else, other then it's only class ability. Basically, you build a spell and the character gains it as a permanent enhancement. If you're not familiar with EoM this doesn't sound impressive. If you are you know how nifty it could be. The example character is a Halfling Anima 9/Fighter 3 with a STR of 26, a CON of 20, Move of 50, DR 5/Cold Iron, +4 AC, and a pile of boosts compensating for it's low progressions.

I'd say there's enough between that list to cover your needs for martial characters with some careful multiclassing with fighter, rogue, or similar classes.

 

[Vicente]

Generally (again, IME), freeform magic systems result in the most creative player becoming the most powerful, with the rest of the group watching from the sidelines... or a group of players that can custom-make "I-win" buttons - whether you're an improv GM or a railroader makes little difference.

The first point can be a problem depending on your players, but the I don't see the problem with the I-win buttons: the players had a problem and solved it in a clever way. They enjoy it (or at least mine do) and I don't care if they needed 5 or 45 mins to solve the situation I had planned. I say yes and move on, and everyone enjoys the moment (I learned to say yes a lot more with Elements of Magic).

 

[Vicente]

I'm working on a 4e-ish version of EoM, which I'm currently playtesting in my newest campaign. Last night was the first session, and I was actually kind of proud of myself. For once, the players complained that my magic system was too under-powered!

I would buy this on a heartbeat, just letting you know