[EDITED] Acknowledge that you dashed this off and are leaning on a motherlode of hand-wavium, to take a critical point of view I have no idea what that move could produce in play. What counts as a magical solution? Are marvelous solutions different from other magic solutions? Do I need to find the conundrum or can I just say that I have one? What can I do with a spell once I've designed one (assuming produce = design)? What are the limits if any on the spell effect?
I don't see any handwavium here. This is how DW moves work. All moves must follow from the fiction. Admittedly, I may have gotten carried away with flowery language (because I
never ever do that around here, yeah? Hah!) but the trigger phrase seems solid enough to me.
A magical solution is a spell. I had figured that was obvious, given the lines "The
spell does not take a long time to cast" and "It's always possible to improve a
spell you've designed through
Hit the Spellbooks" (bolding added) and the fact that it's called "
Hit the Spellbooks." Does it really have to be so pedantic? I like colorful, evocative text.
I just wanted to play up the fantasy of it. Is this really such a big deal? If it troubles you so, just replace the whole trigger phrase with the lifelessly barebones "when
you spend time designing a spell." I genuinely don't understand why the wording I used is such a horror.
This is Dungeon World. You must,
in the fiction, already have a conundrum you need to solve in order to try to solve one. That's just how the system works. If you've played Monster of the Week, I cannot believe it does not have a similar "start and end with the fiction" requirement.
You can cast it like any other spell...so you'd use the Cast a Spell move if it is one of the spells you currently have access to, and if it isn't, you could prepare it by whatever move you use to do that. Given how I wrote this, it is for Wizard(-like) characters whose magic comes from study. I would do something else for someone whose spells were rooted in the Cleric playbook (or any other spellcaster concept that wasn't built around academia.)
The limits are (a) what you don't choose from the list, and (b) what seems reasonable, as judged by the GM and the group. Same as the official Ritual move which the DW Wizard possesses:
Ritual
When you draw on a place of power to create a magical effect, tell the GM what you’re trying to achieve. Ritual effects are always possible, but the GM will give you one to four of the following conditions:
It’s going to take days/weeks/months.
First you must ________.
You’ll need help from ________.
It will require a lot of money
The best you can do is a lesser version, unreliable and limited
You and your allies will risk danger from ______.
You’ll have to disenchant ________ to do it.
If that's okay, what is wrong with the move I proposed?
We've been playing quite a bit of MotW. I enjoy playing the Spooky.
Then I'm not really sure why things need to be so legalistic.
Use Magic is situated within a complete text. Your move can't exist outside much other game text.
....yes. Because that's literally what I was doing with it. As I explicitly said I was going to do in the post where I wrote it. I explicitly said
Dungeon World lacks for a certain move that feels like it would make sense to exist as a move (spell research), so I would demonstrate that
Dungeon World is flexible by doing it and timing myself.
In 5e I can design a balanced new spell following advice in the DMG. That might take more than 14 seconds.
There may be a mixup here. I said 14
minutes. But yes, I would 100% expect it to take more time. That was the whole point of timing it! And this move, purely by existing, now makes
any new spell something that can be at least
initiated, in the rules, with full and appropriate move-based consequences and drawbacks. N matter what you do, nor how well you roll, you cannot avoid choosing at least one of the drawbacks: casting time, expense, imprecision, or side effects. Only by then making an
adventure out of improving it could you possibly make all the flaws go away, because you would need secret knowledge, special tools, or the aid of someone else who is unlikely to offer that aid without cost.
It helps make the world fantastic, fills a character's life with adventure, and in being rolled and open-ended,
requires that both sides play to find out what happens. It follows the Agendas, and thus, if used according to the Principles, is a perfectly valid move. It might need a little bit of playtesting (perhaps one or more restrictions are auto-picks or too easily skipped), but that would be slight refinement over time, not "this is flatly unworkable."
I genuinely don't understand why you're bringing up all the "this requires other text." Of course it does! I never said or even implied otherwise. If you were going to invent rules for how a Wizard could research brand-new spells on their own in D&D—
any edition thereof—those rules would take forever to make
even for the first draft and be frightfully complex by comparison. That was my core point here.
I've designed class features on the spot, in play. Is adding a spell or a move the sort of flexibility at issue here? How much does time to execute the design matter (would it matter if it were 56 seconds instead of 14, really?) I think Use Magic took considerably more than 14 seconds to design. That's disregarding the contextual design that makes it work, and connected moves like Hex.
[I've deleted earlier text here on design process, which I think in the end wasn't relevant.]
See above. And, as noted, 14 (nearly 15)
minutes, not seconds. I'm not THAT fast.
I guarantee you that designing a "build your own spells" rule for literally any edition of D&D (even the one I like best!) would take ages and ages to write, be dramatically more complex, and outright
require extensive playtesting before it could be put into use, long before any of the minor-tweaking refinement I mentioned above.
