Mana users & Divine channeling

[Bonedagger]

Sorry. It's a mess right now.


RUNNING PROJECT Newest Change: 8 Dec.
(Suggestion and critic are wellcome! Don't hold back)

I decided to write down how I feel the magic system should be. If you have any thoughts about it feel free to share.

Mana users & Divine channeling


Neither clerics nor wizards no longer have to memorize their spells. They can cast them as long as they can summon the energy required. Sorcerers don't exist anymore as a class. They to have been replaced by the new wizard.



Divine channeling (Former Divine spellcasters):

Priests pray for their gods intervention when they cast spells (Or pray sacret prayers as the cleric would call it) and the priest then funktion as a channeling divice for the gods will. In order to channel, the priest need to maintain a good contact with his god. That is maintained through rituals and daily praying.

He also need to know the specific patterns of the spell he need to channel. This knowledge has to be discovered by the channeleer/cleric himself. If he cannot adjust the spell his essens/soul will block it. This requires studies. In other words. A cleric need to learn how to cast his spells. Not even the gods know how a person have to adjust his spell. It is something uniq. The secret of the soul. Something the cleric only can discover by himself.

Teachings exist for commen "sacret prayers". They make it more easy for the cleric to reach his understanding. [In game therms the cleric need to learn his spells like a wizard but with one exception. Spellcraft is in this specific case tied to wisdom instead of intellingence. Not having a teaching makes a sacret prayer hard to understand. The cleric would need to create the spell in the same way that you invent new spells. The cleric this way gets a lot of the wizards penalties. I always found the clerics huge spell selection choice unreasonable but here it is also meant as a balance]

The cleric also need channeling energy. This is represented by channeling points (CP). The number for CP a cleric have is discovered by comparing his spellcasting ability in the PHB with the table A below. The PHB also allow spellcaster bonusspells. That is also the case with channeleers but the CP has been toned down in comparisment with the PHB. That have been done to compensate for the new flexibility of the spellcasters compared to the nonespellcasters. Table B shows how.



Mana users (Former arcane spellcasters):

Mana is your inner magic. The flame that burns in all of us. It burns in everything. The stuff that makes reallity be real.

You, as a wizard, have learned how to draw upon this energy and shape it. You don't truely understand it. You more feel your way. Therefore you need to resort to words, gestures and in some cases components in order to force the flame to shape/new shape. No one understands the flame as well as the gods. But not even they have full control over it. It is older than even them.

Like the cleric have CP the wizard have mana points (MP). To know your wizards manapool you need to look at table A and B below. Like with the cleric the wizard now gets less bonus to counter their new flexibility. They do this way work similar to a sorcerer just with notabel fewer spells per day but with a potential unlimited spellselection. The spellselection should reflect that spellbooks are now harder to come by. There are no need to carry them around anymore.


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Table A

Table A

CP/MP pool & Spell cost

0 / (0/1)
1st / 1
2nd / 3
3rd / 5
4th / 7
5th / 9
6th / 11
7th / 13
8th / 15
9th / 17




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Table B

Bonus CP/MP

Int/Wis (Bonus CP/MP)
9-10 (0)
11-12 (1)
13-14 (2)
15-16 (3)
17-18 (4)
19-20 (5)
etc.

I'm still uncertain about this one. Copying psionic might work


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Spellcasting feats are used the same way as the sorcerer from the PHB do.

CP/MP are recovered when you sleep (Meditate in the case of elves). It requires 8 hours of rest for a complete recovery [Divide your total CP/MP pool by 8 to find out how many points you recover per hour of rest].

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Limits for spells:

Your spellcaster level will still limit the highest level spell you can cast similar to the corerules. So a 4th level wizard can not cast a 3rd level spell. It also count for metamagic.


Wizards are limited to knowing 200 spell levels of spells. The feat spellmastery can increase this number by 10 points every time it is taken.

Clerics limits on knowen prayers is 10 spell levels per level or 50. Whichever is higher.


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Table C / The wizards progression:

Level / Basic Mana (Specialty bonus) / Max spell level

1st / 1 (1) / 1st
2nd / 2 (1) / 1st
3rd / 5 (3) / 2nd
4th / 8 (3) / 2nd
5th / 13 (5) / 3rd
6th / 18 (5) / 3rd
7th / 25 (7) / 4th
8th / 32 (7) / 4th
9th / 41 (9) / 5th
10th / 50 (9) / 5th
11th / 61 (11) / 6th
12th / 72 (11) / 6th
13th / 85 (13) / 7th
14th / 98 (13) / 7th
15th / 113 (15) / 8th
16th / 128 (15) / 8th
17th / 145 (17) / 9th
18th / 162 (17) / 9th
19th / 179 (17) / 9th
20th / 196 (17) / 9th


Note: Specialty bonus points can only be used for the specialists chosen school of specialization. (I know. But it had to be mentioned)

BTW. A 20th level wizard in the slotsystem would have 324 base points by direct translation. Int bonus would increase that rapidly.




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New magical items:

Source Items. Source items are items that you can draw mana points from that can only be used to power a special school, or type, of spells. They can go a long way for setting the flavor of the campaign.

Eksamples:

-Staffs of Flames (School fire / +12 mana per day).

-The Jesters Coin (School Illusion / + 4 mana per round or - 4 mana per round. You need to flip the coin before you can draw from it (Standard action). It is fifty-fifty what effect you will get. But you will know since the face on the coin will reflect it. Smiling (Good) or evil grin (Bad). The coins effect is stuck on you for the rest of that encounter no matter if you lose the coin)


The secrets needed for making source items have been lost to time. So have many of the Source Items. Therefore they are considdered prestige items and have no set price.


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Clerical Spontanious Casting (Being able to transform magic into healing or destruction) is gone.


[Added. 8 Dec.]


The spellcost and progression was changed after the princip in the psionic rules.

Important note: Since similar spelleffects in the psionic system are lower level and therefore have lower cost the sytem cannot be copied to wizard. It is a question about when certain powers become avalible.

It is close to being done now. (All I need is the time)

A more free number of spells knowen are kept for now.

 

[Bonedagger]

So nobody would mind playing with these rules?

Have all this been suggested before? Better?

Or maybe people just don't care.

 

[Randolpho]

Why not use the 3e psionics system replacing with magic spells? Seems to me like it's an easier 'port than trying to fix all that was wrong with the Players Option stuff.

 

[Bonedagger]

Why not use the 3e psionics system replacing with magic spells? Seems to me like it's an easier 'port than trying to fix all that was wrong with the Players Option stuff.

Uhm.. I don't really know how the psionic system of 3rd ed. works.

I therefore also don't know if a psionic variant would allow the same number of spells as the old slotsystem. That is an important factor here since I didn't want to mess to much with the precious gamebalance.

I also wanted to base the rules on a background that IMO had a more mystical feel. I have the feeling that spellcasters in the core rules really just are scietists. I believe that the only reasons psionics made it into the game in the first place was because something was lacking from spellcasting.

Well. If the rules are ok that's fine and it's not like they were difficult to make. I basically made them up as I wrote so I do considder this easy work.

 

[Xylix]

Generally you should be more consistant in your algorithms. This would be very important when choosing say a 16th level spell's cost, say an intensified meteor swarm.

It also keeps things more consistant. I would suggest something along these lines of :

level   Cost    Gap %
0th:   1          -- 
1st:   4          300%
2nd:  7          75%
3rd:  11         57%
5th:  16         45%
6th:  22         37%
7th:  29         32%
8th:  37         28%
9th:  46         24%

if you are wishing for a increasing cost gap for leveling, and lower gap % deteroration rate. In this case it starts at one and increases by +1,+2,+3,+4,+5 ... and persumes that the gap between 0th and 1st is actually a 2 spell level gap, not all that unrealistic.


However stiking with a 2x level -1 for cost, or better yet a 2x level +1 for cost is a good idea. The gap is very consistant and spell costs are easy to calculate. On the other hand the differance between 8th and 9th level spells is a mere 12% half of the other ystem.

*The 2x+1 takes care of 0th level, instead of having an odd implementation like psionics did.*

That also works fairly well. It does encourage always casting the higher level spell though, instead of a couple lower equivelent, especially when the spell packs more power.

As for spell choice, I would if I where you put some limit on it. You could implement two things, first Intelligence effects the number of 'spells' gained, and charisma the extra power points gained.

Max level could be removed, or implemented for the highest of the two statistics.

 

[Bonedagger]

Generally you should be more consistant in your algorithms. This would be very important when choosing say a 16th level spell's cost, say an intensified meteor swarm.

It also keeps things more consistant. I would suggest something along these lines of :

level   Cost    Gap %
0th:   1          -- 
1st:   4          300%
2nd:  7          75%
3rd:  11         57%
5th:  16         45%
6th:  22         37%
7th:  29         32%
8th:  37         28%
9th:  46         24%

if you are wishing for a increasing cost gap for leveling, and lower gap % deteroration rate. In this case it starts at one and increases by +1,+2,+3,+4,+5 ... and persumes that the gap between 0th and 1st is actually a 2 spell level gap, not all that unrealistic.


However stiking with a 2x level -1 for cost, or better yet a 2x level +1 for cost is a good idea. The gap is very consistant and spell costs are easy to calculate. On the other hand the differance between 8th and 9th level spells is a mere 12% half of the other ystem.

*The 2x+1 takes care of 0th level, instead of having an odd implementation like psionics did.*

That also works fairly well. It does encourage always casting the higher level spell though, instead of a couple lower equivelent, especially when the spell packs more power.

As for spell choice, I would if I where you put some limit on it. You could implement two things, first Intelligence effects the number of 'spells' gained, and charisma the extra power points gained.

Max level could be removed, or implemented for the highest of the two statistics.

I can see you missed 9th(4th) level in that code. So that last gap would be 22%.

Admitted. I just copied the code from Players Option 2nd ed. without much thought. I do like the idea of a more balanced costsysytem.

The cost of metamagic should not be an issue however since I'm trying to relate the cost the spellslot system. Casting a 16th level spell would have to be impossible unless you where epic since there still should be a max spelllevel as the wizard in the PHB have. (E.g. A 4th level caster can't handle 3rd level magic. It doesn't matter if it is a fireball or a metamagiced Magic Missile)


Of cause you need to be aware of the fact that many would prefere using only high level spells for the reason that the power level of spells as mentioned seem to increase eksponential. However don't forget that the spells avalible also plays a role in that question. I'm still not set on that one.


Your code looks good. It could work.


I do however not see any reason to limit the spellselection. IMO that should be handled through roleplaying.

 

[Xylix]

Limiting through story has always been my perfered choice.

However, a system can be nice in that it prevents accidental GM infavortism, high limits on spell selection accidently and thus flows in and out.

However, all around spontanious casting would not break the game. In fact it would make wizard duals more interesting.

 

[Skarppsey]

Sorceror Issues

Just thinking about the proposed mana point system for arcane casters and my question is this:

Wouldn't this invalidate any advantage that Sorcerors have over Wizards in 3e? A sorceror gets more castings of low level spells but sacrifices ability to learn spells from books/scrolls and has fewer spells overall. So would a sorceror be compensated with more mana points per level but be restricted from learning more spells, or what? I'm curious to see how you would deal with this.

 

[Xylix]

He is throwing out sorcerers. Which pretty much solves that problem.

 

[Bonedagger]

As Xylix said that class do not exist here.

This is a way to get rid of the fire and forget system.

I'm mixing the sorcerers spontaneous casting with an potential lower "spells per day" pool than the wizard (In the case of bonus spells for high stats). This way a wizard does not forget his spells. It's only a question if he has enough energy to cast them.


I'm not ruling out that you can have make a sorcerer variation to these rules but I don't see the point. If you really miss the extra firepower of the sorcerers "many spells per day" you can give the wizard an item (Maybe a staff) that increase his manapool. That's the way similar systems usually handle that problem. But in the spirit of D&D it could also be done through a prestige class or feats and then leave the staffs to the charges (Either way charged items would still be important).

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BTW. Maybe it could be interesting to use a system similar to the limits on spellbooks for determine how many spells the wizard (And cleric) can know (So that you can know a certain number of spell levels (E.g. Fireball is 3 spell levels).

Maybe a set number so that it only should become an issue at the higher levels. That would also limit the number of highlevelspells a wizard would chose.

It would keep those very highlevel spells rare. It should however be possible to forget your spells so that you can learn new ones.


Added: 200 spell levels? Then the feat spellmastery could be taken to increase that pool with 10 points.

Added:

[More specific:

Wizards are limited to knowing 200 spell levels of spells. The feat spellmastery can increase this number by 10 points every time it is taken.

Clerics limits on knowen prayers is 10 spell levels per level or 50. Whichever is higher.]