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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="curiosity" data-source="post: 1701215" data-attributes="member: 22000">In my brewing campaign world, arcane magic will be impossible without the assistance of a powdered metal, called Catalyst (imaginative, no?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ). This substance will be mined in a specific area of the campaign world, and control over the the mining and distribution of Catalyst will be a hot issue (think Dune/'spice').I like this concept fluff-wise, and I think it helps to explain a magic-rich society (which I want) where there still isn't a heavy reliance on magic (because no-one wants to waste precious Catalyst). I also want to make getting enough Catalyst a bit of a challenge for PC mages.So the question is how best to implement this rules-wise. At the least extreme end, I could just ban Sorcs, and say that any spell with an M component requires a pinch of Catalyst per spell level.At the most extreme end, I could toss the entire Vancian magic system for one based just on character level and Catalyst. Probably too difficult to balance something like this though.In the middle, I could say that all spells require their spell level in pinches of Catalyst to work (so 0th level are free). Simple but effective. But then I am still tempted to mash Wiz and Sorc together to form just one class, I think because I want to integrate Catalyst more closely into spellcasting - tie it to learning/memorising as well...Now, to make this not a total bummer for mages, I figured that they would be able to choose to burn more catalyst than needed in order to get some benefit - perhaps in order to heighten spell level, like the feat (mimicking metamagic feats in general might be the way to go). But maybe there would be some risk associated with this (a la wild magic).Incidentally, Catalyst will be a necessary part of creating magic items as well. However, I was thinking that because Catalyst is present in low amounts almost everywhere, it would be possible for mundane items to 'spontaneously enchant' in suitably heroic circumstances - I really like this idea, saw it in a feat here: <a href="http://juergen.the-huberts.net/dnd/urbis/feats.html" target="_blank">http://juergen.the-huberts.net/dnd/urbis/feats.html</a>I HUMBLY REQUEST COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS ON MY IDEAS. Thanks!</blockquote>

Verification