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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GhostBear" data-source="post: 5956570" data-attributes="member: 6667527">I've never been fond of the Vancian style of spell casting. It doesn't capture the fantasy feel (for me), especially at low levels. Cantrips-at-will don't help. The spell memorization mechanic is also odd, though that can often be fixed simply by not using the word memorization and instead using "preparation".There's also very little mechanical support for "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" style situations. You find a spell book with a high level spell and you can't even try to cast it? Even at the risk of screwing things up?I've been spending the past few days (and a good chunk of change for the source books) looking into different magic systems for the d20 system.So far, my favorite system comes from a system used in both the "Thieves' World" and "Sovereign Stone" campaign books. Essentially, any mage can cast any spell at all - even the very powerful ones. To balance this, every spell has a casting threshold.To cast a spell you roll a d20, add the appropriate skill/ability modifiers, and build up a pool over time. Once your pool of casting points meets or exceeds the amount required for a spell it is considered cast.This is a pretty interesting system; one of the things that it does is force magic users to choose between "a smaller effect NOW" and "a big effect in a few turns".Depending on the system you look at, there's also the application of nonlethal damage, or Bad Things happen if you roll a 1 or something. Metamagic modifies the casting threshold. You can prepare a certain small set of spells for quick casting later. Lots of extra stuff one could add in to balance magic one way or the other (want less magic in game, up all casting thresholds by 5, for example).Haven't tried it in practice yet, but it looks really good on paper.What about sorcerers?Monte Cook's World of Darkness (a d20 adaptation of WoD) uses casting thresholds, but also allows you to build spells on the fly using a combination of tables to generate the spell cost. No pre-defined spell list is necessary; if you can build it using the tables you can try to cast it. This mimics the original Mage: The Ascension mechanics where a Mage can bend reality in any way the player desires if he has high enough control over a certain aspect of reality (like time or life).Not something for the faint of heart, though. You can have your favorites written down of course, but having the flexibility to build stuff on the fly would require a quick and creative mind. There's lots of options.To balance the flexibility, I plan to adjust the tables so that a sorcerer's spell is more difficult to cast than a similar wizard spell. But in exchange for getting exactly what you want, I think that's a fair tradeoff.I have used the spell point variant from 3.5's Unearthed Arcana, and that works pretty well for something simpler.But yeah, down with the Vancian style of spell casting. I know that it's a traditional sacred cow of D&D and all, but I find it to be anti-fantasy in its own way.</blockquote>

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