Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5030220" data-attributes="member: 22424">I do. It's been a very long time since I read it, though.The thought had occurred to me. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not: on one hand, it allows the game to use one mechanic where two would have sufficed; on the other it 'overloads' a single mechanic to do multiple things, which might not be ideal.Sure. I didn't mean to turn all 'utility' spells into rituals. However, there are quite a lot of the existing spells that would be better suited for life as rituals, because they have very long casting times, they more traditionally involve collaborative casting, or they simply don't have any combat application (meaning that the adventuring Wizard will either have a scroll to hand, or the party will have to stop and rest for a day so that the Wizard can prepare the spell to cast).This is distinct from utility spells that might be of use in combat, with a creative player. Those I would leave as spells.(However, I do understand that greatly reducing the number of slots the Wizard has will have the effect of causing them to prepare only the 'obvious' combat spells, which is an issue. On the other hand, in 3e I have very rarely seen Wizards preparing or casting those utility spells in a creative way anyway - they have typically had enough slots that they can stick with the 'obvious' spells throughout, and when they run out the party rests anyway.)Certainly, a Wizard using his most powerful spell in its most maximised form should often be an encounter-ender. Of course, I was planning on sneakily setting up the system so that that "big gun" doesn't become the automatic choice for starting every encounter as well. <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=":)" />Ah, part two of my genius scheme for handling save-or-dies:Most spells of this sort would automatically apply some condition to the character (for example, flesh to stone would automatically apply a slow effect). Additionally, the spell would do damage to the character's mana pool (with the save reducing this by half - and some spells would do the damage in one shot, while others would do so over time). If the character is reduced to 0 mana, they suffer the full effect of the spell (petrification, death, whatever).Some other spells, such as hold person would instead apply their condition to the character with the "save ends" qualifier.There are two weaknesses with this approach that I can see: one is that it overloads the mana pool mechanic with yet another application - in addition to being used to "do impossible things" (and, as you said, Action Points) it also represents the character's resistance to arcane attacks. The second is that it means that a character who over-exerts himself magically is suddenly much more vulnerable to arcane attack himself (this is the same problem that Jedi faced in the first version of d20 Star Wars).Still, I do think it deals with the big problems of save-or-dies (and also save-or-sucks): there would be no more "all or nothing" spells of this type, characters aren't simply eliminated from the game by a single dice roll (at the very least it's two - save and damage - which is equivalent to melee). Also, it means that these spells can remain a part of the game, and still have powerful effects.You're probably right here. Certainly, in the case of magic items, my intent was that they would either provide a permanent modifier to the character (and so not be considered as the one ongoing effect), or they require activation and provide a temporary ongoing effect (exactly as a spell). Still, it's obviously an area where more thought would be required.</blockquote>

Verification