Harry Potter-Style Wizards

[smootrk]

Treatments I've see (and worked on briefly) used d20 Modern as the base, and made all the magic skill and feat driven. That way you can have Strong hero wizards (Hagrid) Smart Hero wizards (Hermione) and Dedicated Hero wizards (Harry?)

The way I intend to do it, if I ever get around to it, is to make "Wizard/Witch" a feat you have to take at 1st level. You either are one or you're not. Then you could have Occupations like "Muggle-born" and "Pureblood" in addition to using some of the regular ones.

That probably is a better method for dealing with the magic, and also has the framework established for forays into the regular 'muggle world' with standard d20 Modern rules. It makes everything rather interchangeable, eh? I like it.

I'd be up for a collaborative project on this if you start one, smootrk.

Love to, however, I do not actually own D20 Modern materials (but I have looked at them extensively from my fellow gamers), making research rather difficult. It would be fun to look at such a Harry Potter treatment, and I would be available for commentary on such... heck, maybe in the near future I can grab a copy of D20M, if I can find a good deal. I will look into it.

 

[Pyrex]

...The first should probably have a spellcasting system based on skills, with individual spells being something like those spell tricks...

Something like this could work *very* well with the Skill Tricks mechanic that just came out in Complete Scoundrel.

The basic concept being you spend two skill ranks to learn a 'Trick' which lets you do something unique with that skill.

For example: Expelliarmus would be some sort of opposed Abjuration(i.e. Defense Against the Dark Arts) skill check.

Patronus would be a high-dc Abjuration skill check to cast and would leave the caster Fatigued.

Learning the Improved Patronus trick would a) reduce the dc, b) allow you to Take 10 when casting it, and c) remove the Fatigued casting penalty.

 

[Wolv0rine]

Treatments I've see (and worked on briefly) used d20 Modern as the base, and made all the magic skill and feat driven. That way you can have Strong hero wizards (Hagrid) Smart Hero wizards (Hermione) and Dedicated Hero wizards (Harry?)

The way I intend to do it, if I ever get around to it, is to make "Wizard/Witch" a feat you have to take at 1st level. You either are one or you're not. Then you could have Occupations like "Muggle-born" and "Pureblood" in addition to using some of the regular ones.

I'd be up for a collaborative project on this if you start one, smootrk.

That's easily one of the best approaches I've seen suggested.

 

[Wolv0rine]

My own take on wands in the magic system of my campaign world took a good bit of inspiration from Potterverse wands. While I've been holding a great deal of the mechanics created for that world close to my chest, I'll throw out how I did wands just because it fits this thread and might be helpful to people, and C&C are always good things.

Wands: A wand can take many forms, but in essence is a shaft between one and two feet long. A wand’s primary function is to increase the power of its wielder. Before a character may benefit from a wand, she must attune herself to it. This is a process in which she must align her own magical pattern with that of the wand, creating a kind of synergistic empathy between the two. The character must study the wand’s magical pattern in a quiet, peaceful place for 1 day, then make a Spellcraft check (DC: 10+1 per wand’s creator level*). If the Spellcraft check fails, the wand’s pattern is too complex for her to comprehend, and the process cannot be attempted again until the characters Spellcraft skill increases. If the character succeeds in the Spellcraft check, then she must make a Will save to align her magical pattern with that of the wand. If this check fails, she suffers arcane burn, if the check succeeds, then the character and the wand have become aligned. A wand will not function for anyone who has not been aligned with it.
Once the character and the wand are aligned, the wand will increase the wielder’s effective caster level by 1 level for every pt. of Int. bonus of the wielder so long as the wand is held.

* Like Staves in my magic system, the default creator level -- if you don't want to work out the creator, is 8th level.
~The first line allows for wands to take a number of different, but basically themed or similar or recognizable forms. My favorite wand from the Potterverse is Lucious Malfoy's cane-wand in the movie. That thing was All Style.

 

[Pyrex]

What's the purpose of crafting a high-CasterLevel wand? They're harder to attune and don't appear to provide any bonus. It would seem reasonable balance here would be that a wand can't increase your caster level beyond it's own, but that leads to a vicious cycle of upgrading your wand every level, which may not be desireable.

Also, can a caster attune to more than one wand at once?

 

[Wolv0rine]

What's the purpose of crafting a high-CasterLevel wand? They're harder to attune and don't appear to provide any bonus. It would seem reasonable balance here would be that a wand can't increase your caster level beyond it's own, but that leads to a vicious cycle of upgrading your wand every level, which may not be desireable.

Also, can a caster attune to more than one wand at once?

Now see, no one's asked that yet. Interesting... interesting. While I don't have a fully-fledged answer for that off the top of my head, I'd offer this as what I do have.
As far as high caster level wands, you create the wand at whatever level you are. You can't create a wand at a higher or lower level than your actual, current level. So really, you craft a wand at your level, the only question is if you find or purchase (purchase? Gods no) a wand, what level was it's creator? That only matters insomuch as how hard it's going to be for You to attune to Their wand.
Granted, the wand is written for the magic pt. system I'm working up, not a spell slot system, although I've tried pretty hard to make the current thought patterns work fairly well enough. Meta-magic still works fine, far as I've seen so far, and all that.
But yeah, it hasn't been strongly play-tested yet, I expect little hiccups like the ones you asked about. Did any of that answer the questions, or does the hiccup still stand out for you?
(Yes, I'm trying to keep this about wands, I don't want to hijack the thread. heh)

 

[Sigurd]

"The wand chooses the wizard Mr Potter!"

I'd say wands raise you power by 3 levels, 300%. Rare wands 500%. There is no rhyme or reason why a wand chooses what wizard except that two wizards casting with the same wand construction cause unexpected results eg Harry & Voldemort in the graveyard.

You would have to look at all of wizardry from the point of view of the wands to make sure it all worked. Remember a wizard is accorded as disarmed when he\she is without their wand.

I imagine you could even express the whole potter magic universe as a creation of Olivanders (and other wand makers) who want more magic, to have more magic, to create more wands.


S

 

[trav_laney]

All this speculation and design work is fun, but has anyone collected the ideas and produced a coherent and complete design for the basic classes involved in a HP World?

I've been copying down a bunch of notes from this thread, and pasting them into sort of a crib sheet for whenever I get time to do it. (Which might take a while; the new semester started.) But I am not aware of anyone trying to combine them into a complete game design.

I think that Aperion has a pretty good idea: maybe we could set up a Wiki-type forum, an online document that everyone could edit and contribute to. It would need a registration process, to keep track of contributors and to keep hacks from jumping in and messing everything up...but other than that, I think it would be fairly simple to set up.

I will look into it this week, and hopefully have some kind of online editable document set up by next weekend. Does anyone have any experience with setting up and moderating a wiki?

 

[trav_laney]

Treatments I've see (and worked on briefly) used d20 Modern as the base, and made all the magic skill and feat driven. That way you can have Strong hero wizards (Hagrid) Smart Hero wizards (Hermione) and Dedicated Hero wizards (Harry?)

This is an excellent idea. Although the idea of school kids casting spells gives me a really bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer vibe, I think it could be tastefully done.

I picked up a couple of the D20 Modern books on eBay last week, and I've been thumbing through them looking for ideas. There is a lot of good stuff in there.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Treatments I've see (and worked on briefly) used d20 Modern as the base, and made all the magic skill and feat driven. That way you can have Strong hero wizards (Hagrid) Smart Hero wizards (Hermione) and Dedicated Hero wizards (Harry?)

That's exactly what we did for my homebrew. The six Basic Classes were just the d20Modern classes, tweaked slightly to be more D&Dish (no medium saves, no class defense bonus, some weapon/armor proficiencies, etc.), and you could unlock one of the three magical Advanced Classes as you went.

To unlock an Advanced Class, you had to take an Affinity feat. For instance, the WIS-based one:
Ritual Affinity:
req WIS 13, good Will save in a previous class/race
Benefit: gives about half of the cantrip-level ability of the Wizard class.

And then the Wizard class (which is a WIS-based Wizard/Cleric hybrid) simply requires the Feat to enter, meaning you can qualify after only a single Basic level, if you picked one with a good Will save. Since our spellcasting is somewhat skill-based, there's not much of a penalty if you want to take more Basic classes before entering.

Our other two affinities, Freeform and Innate, unlock the Channeler (INT-based psion-like class) and Mutant (CHA-based class with lots of innate bonuses and spell-like abilities) in similar ways.

(IMC, every race has 1-2 Racial Levels. The Human racial level allows you to pick one save to be Good for that level, which makes it easy to qualify for these Feats. If you don't do this, you could change the requirement to "+1 Base Will save", meaning the +1 must come from your classes, like BAB does.)

It's worked beautifully. A couple people never took an affinity. One of the fighter-types only took an affinity to get a few weak spell-like abilities, and then never entered its class, but most of the others took at least a couple levels of one of the classes. (Most of the non-Human races are LA+1 in our world, and most of them get one specific Affinity for free, so practically everyone has a little magical ability.)

The way I intend to do it, if I ever get around to it, is to make "Wizard/Witch" a feat you have to take at 1st level. You either are one or you're not. Then you could have Occupations like "Muggle-born" and "Pureblood" in addition to using some of the regular ones.

See, we did it the other way, because while the talent for magic is rare, we simply assumed that those people who'd join the party are those who had the talent, whether they took advantage of it or not. Sure, it's a bit too convenient, but we really disliked forcing players to decide whether they ever wanted magic or not at level 1. That's one of the things we loved the most about the jump to 3E; multiclassers could change their minds down the road.