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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 5030163" data-attributes="member: 813">Remember the boxset will cover combat and skills. Maybe a smaller core PHB containing advanced combat, skills, feats, adventuring, mass combat rules etc. And a "tome of magic" contain just spells and magic item. And a then a DMG/MM comboThere are so many ways to slice it.Obviously the goal would be to split stuff up so that overlapping requirements is minimized.Interesting as a base....That's for material people are already (supposedly) familiar with. And they did not have a lot of magic abilities. Through 3rd edition the wizard/cleric/etc spell list has always be 1/2 the PHB.That's what open design is for. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Do you own/have access to Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Evolved? That magic system is so nice.That's an interesting mishmash you have there. Did you realize that you had folded action points into your mana pool?2e did this the right way but people weren't ready for it in 1990. They are ready for it now I think. Monte's AU/AE closed the circle and showed how to do it going forward.In case you haven't seen it, there are the normal 0-9th level spells. There is a single list of spells shared by all casters. Spells belong to (i forget the term) groups like fire, water, psionic, nature, etc. Spells are further divided by "complexity" into 3 groups: simple, complex and unique. To have a spell "on your available spells list" you need a class ability or feat granting access. For example, you might give druid access to all simple and complex nature spells and simple access to fire spells. If they want more they can take feats to gain all simple of certain kind or one complex spell or one unique spell. Not a big fan of this. I like utility spells taking up spaces that could be used for combat because I like seeing someone use a utility spell during combat in an innovative way. As for moving spells down, I actually think it is damage that needs to be cranked up. 5d6 fireballs are the suck at 5th level when folks have so many hit points. In 1e that 13 average damage kills most 5th level wizards, 50% of 5th level thieves and a decent number of clerics. Today, targets just adjust their hit points and keep fighting as if a raging inferno of flame didn't just surround them.The mechanics of this depend entirely on how you make management of the mana pool work. After all, if there are no spell slots by level then the level of the spell shouldn't really manner if you pump mana into the spell freely.One way to mitigate this is by saying you can feed any amount of mana into a spell but the level of spell is a choke against the speed in which you can do so. So a first level direct damage spell can do 200d6 damage if you spend 200 rounds pumping. A 5th level spell only takes 40 rounds to reach that same ridiculous level of damage. (And there's a skill check of some kind to gather mana for more rounds than you CON score or something like that so that someone isn't gather mana all the time and all fights start with 2000d6 attacks.)As long as you don't intend to remove all "save or cry" effects. I think the removing every single save or die effect makes the magic system wishy-washy. Magic should be able to disable opponents is one shot. That's why it's called magic. (On the flip side, a sword should be able to disable opponents in one shot, too. But changing that changes the game completely.)Simpler, certainly. But I prefer my game more complicated than that. Arguably magic item imbue spell effects so already you make magic useless if the person has a powerful magic item. There are ways to reduce the problems of ongoing effects without nerfing magic so much.Not bad.Me neither. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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