Too much magic in DnD - Lets fo something about it 2.

[RangerWickett]

How about you just allow cantrips at 1st and 2nd level Magus, and dweomers (1st level spells) at 3rd to 5th level. Then, you can continue to progress at this slow rate (akin to the spellcaster rate of a Bard, minus the song abilities, but keeping scholarly knowledge, and gaining even more skill points), or you can take a prestige class to specialize in a type of magic.

By the way, if you finish concocting this whole schema, please send it as a proposal to Natural 20 Press so it can be published.

 

[wolff96]

That said, I probably won't use the grim-n-gritty for more than one-off games. I'd rather use the vitality/wound system, where critical hits are extremely dangerous, but otherwise they encourage some heroics from the characters.

Well, since nobody in my group owns the Star Wars books, I went with what I had.

Not being familiar with the Vitality Point/Wound System, I still can't comment on it.

The best part of having a TPK from bears? The shocked looks on the faces of the players when they realized they had managed to get their collective butts kicked by a bunch of ANIMALS.

 

[Desdichado]

Star Wars only gets you partly there, as there are no crit multipliers in Star Wars. There are two adaptions that I know of for VP/WP that are free: one at Middle-earth d20 and one in Asgard #2. Both take slightly different approaches to handling how deadly critical hits are. See my other thread for more detail.

 

[bramadan]

"Two things that should limit the spell-caster are time, components and consequences."

That is a great idea, one that fits with the mystical and mysterious theme.

And one that truly demonstrates that mathematicians really can not count

Kenjib, glad to hear you are a neighbour, Vacnouver is at least as gloomy this time of the year...

I do hope we come out with at least a Netbook out of this. There has been a lot of realy good ideas and I am trying to put at least them some of them into game-mechanical terms. I thought I can finish at least an outline of Necromancer last night but did not. It is taking long as I am reworking almost all the spells in the book.

I understand your issues with my "program". While I do appreciate the problem of no-spells on first few levels I believe it is almost essential for the feel I am going for. As soon as PC's can cast magic from the very begining at least a portion of its mystery will be lost for them. I think the solution is to make Scholar class playable, at least on the first few levels. Making them masters of Non-Rougish skills is one way to go about it there probably should be more cool things to be given them. I am looking forward to promised "ways to modify the Rogue class" by MIke Mearls. There might be some good ideas there.

Another thing that I mentioned long ago is the XP progresion. This might be just a personal preference and not that important for low magic game but I do think that it somehow contributes to the feel. I like the XP table of 3rd ed. What I do not like is that the ammount of XP PC's get increases in the same progression as the table so it always takes roughly the same time between the levels. IMC I award the flat XP awards which end up ammounting to somewhere between 400 and 600XP per PC per session, depending on how they played, with extra bonues for out of session character developmnent - logs, backgrounds and what not. That way first few levels last relatively short time and the high ones relatively longer. This not only adresses the issue of low-level non casting, as those levels flee by in only a couple of sessions, but also the problem of achieveing powerfull spells "early" as 13-14th level becomes rather far-of future.

Reason I like to have level/spell level progression is that that way you can achieve what you are looking for: fellow who is realy good in more than one school, within the regular 20levels dnd span. You can have your Necromancer/Diviner who gets the new spell level every second level and still max him out within the scope of the rules.

RangerWicket, thanks for the offer. The project is long from finished but, if ever it is done to satisfaction, I at least would love to see it published in some form.

 

[LostSoul]

2. Not allowing characters to start casting spells until they get to 4-6 level is great conceptually from a DM's standpoint, but I don't think that it sounds very fun from a player's standpoint.

Why not allow characters to use Spellcraft to cast spells directly from a spellbook? There would have to be limitations put on this, of course, but it would allow these "scholars" to have some magical ability at first level.

 

[kenjib]

Kenjib, glad to hear you are a neighbour, Vacnouver is at least as gloomy this time of the year...

Ah, Vancouver is a great town. Darn those groundhogs. We can grumble and shake our fists at them together. Grrr....

Another thing that I mentioned long ago is the XP progresion. This might be just a personal preference and not that important for low magic game but I do think that it somehow contributes to the feel. I like the XP table of 3rd ed. What I do not like is that the ammount of XP PC's get increases in the same progression as the table so it always takes roughly the same time between the levels. IMC I award the flat XP awards which end up ammounting to somewhere between 400 and 600XP per PC per session, depending on how they played, with extra bonues for out of session character developmnent - logs, backgrounds and what not. That way first few levels last relatively short time and the high ones relatively longer. This not only adresses the issue of low-level non casting, as those levels flee by in only a couple of sessions, but also the problem of achieveing powerfull spells "early" as 13-14th level becomes rather far-of future.

I think that the system should not rely on any drastic custom rules like altering the XP progression. It makes the system less useful to larger numbers of people. This is my complaint with all of the classless d20 systems out there - they overhaul other parts of the game, making them useless to me.

In my opinion it's critical that, unless you just intend to use this as house rules for your own campaign, this project be 100% compatible and balanced without any further modification to the current game rules.

People might want to use this because they want a different flavor to magic - the concept of a mage who studies occult traditions and uncovers ancient secrets. That is all we know about these games and should be the only thing we assume. We should not assume that they want a low level game. We should not assume that they want a grim-n-gritty feel. We should not assume that they want a different hit point system. We shouldn't even assume that they want a low magic game, although this system does provide the flexibility to handle this well. I think that keeping these influences out of this system allows people to pick and choose different components to make a set of rules that suits their individual needs. Does that make sense?

Reason I like to have level/spell level progression is that that way you can achieve what you are looking for: fellow who is realy good in more than one school, within the regular 20levels dnd span. You can have your Necromancer/Diviner who gets the new spell level every second level and still max him out within the scope of the rules.

However, this really breaks game balance. This is part of why I was saying earlier that the prestige class mechanic runs into problems when spell levels are involved.

Just to toss another possibility into the blender, how about something like this:

1. Give the scholar class a spell progression but no spells. They can't use these spells until they take on a prestige class, since they can't learn any spells. Nonetheless, the spell progression is there.
2. Have all prestige classes use the +1 to existing class method of spell advancement.
3. Have all prestige classes give access to lists of spells. Each individual class can determine whether the caster must find/scribe spells or whether they are divinely granted and thus all accessible.
4. Each class might have special restrictions on casting spells: Arcane spell failure in armor, subdual damage, the possibility of attracting unwanted outsider attention, etc. This is specific to each tradition but not required. A tradition can have no limitations if desired.
5. Have all prestige classes share the character's spell progression, but limit access to higher level spells via exclusive occult lore skills for each prestige class. Since they are exclusive skills they are tied directly to levels in that particular class.

This way we have one spells per day progression. Incidentally this allows people to more easily replace it with other mechanics if they choose, like a psionics based mana system or wizard vs. cleric vs. sorcerer. At the same time, access to learning higher level spells is still limited to prestige class levels.

Finally, we can retain the one spell level per class level mechanic under this system. A 12th level character (scholar3/necromancer9) can know 9th level spells via the prestige class, but she does not yet have sufficient spell progression to actually cast them yet since a 12th level caster can only cast 6th level spells. These extra necromancer levels are a waste, so this encourages her to do one of two things instead: Take on another tradition and diversify (i.e. scholar3/necromancer6/oracle3) or if she wants to focus entirely on necromancy continue to take scholar levels and devote the extra skill points toward important areas of knowledge that compliment necromancy (i.e. scholar6/necromancer6). This second option reinforces the notion of magi as very learned people.

Perhaps higher levels of scholar can also give bonuses or synergy bonuses related to spell casting to give an incentive to people who choose to specialize. I like the idea of bonus feats that may be chosen from either skill focus (for non-magi scholars) or meta-magic feats every 2 or 3 levels.

Conversely, another caster might be able to cast 6th level spells in theory because she has a total combined 11 levels in mage classes, but in practice she only knows up to 3rd level spells (and only in the conjurer tradition at that) because she's a scholar3/conjurer3/fatespinner2/necromancer1/theurgist2.

To clarify - this last, very unfocused, character has the following spell slots (using wizard as base): 4-4-4-4-3-2-1

She may choose from spells in her book of the following spell levels to memorize into these slots:
Conjurer spells: Levels 0-3
Fatespinner spells: Levels 0-2
Necromancer spells: Levels 0-1
Theurgist spells: Levels 0-2

As per standard rules, she may fill up her "unusable" higher spell level slots with lower level spells of her choosing.

How does that grab you? I think it expands flexibility and preserves game balance at the same time. It seems like this would work very well mechanically.

I like the idea of spells not being limited to spell slots but I would like to make ideas like this variant rules, as the more of the existing system we can use, the more useful the system is to the widest number of people. We can provide cool variant rules like this in the netbook and accomodate for their extra needs with additional headings for them in each spell description (i.e. if you are using the unlimited casting variant add this material component: The fresh blood of a calf born under a new moon no less than 3 months ago and increase the casting time to 2 hours), but I think that by default the system should use the wizard rules. I don't even like the wizard rules but I still think that's the most solid way to handle it

 

[kenjib]

Why not allow characters to use Spellcraft to cast spells directly from a spellbook? There would have to be limitations put on this, of course, but it would allow these "scholars" to have some magical ability at first level.

That's a great idea. I like that. In addition, if we use my concept of still giving them a spell progression it gives them something to do with that progression. Perhaps casting from a book should do drastic things to the casting time as well.

Maybe give them Use Magic Device as a class skill as well.

 

[kenjib]

We shouldn't even assume that they want a low magic game, although this system does provide the flexibility to handle this well.

I think that I should pre-emptively clarify this point, as it seems counter to the intent and spirit of this thread. It's relatively apparent that there are many different ideas behind exactly what "low magic" means. With that problem, it's too hard to define a system that can capture all of them. I think that it's better to design a system that's flexible enough to easily handle many different ideas behind what magic is. That's why I think that we shouldn't assume that people want low magic - because inherent in doing so is an assumption of what someone means by that. This is different from person to person, however, and would result in a system which is useful to a few people, but not flexible enough for everyone else who wants something kind of like it but a bit different.

 

[willpax]

Some further considerations

I like many of the ideas presented here. In my own system, I use a combination of feats (allowing spellcasting in a certain school) and skills (each rank allowing the caster to learn one effect, and giving a bonus against difficulty class of the effects being cast). I do not like spell slot systems, and use vitality points to power spells.

What I was thinking, given the variety of opinions and desires voiced over these two threads, is that we might organize it in some kind of cookbook/options fashion. There are some ideas that deal with controlling spell availability, ranging from changing spell levels to totally changing the maigcal framework. there are some options that change the amount of magic available to a character, wihch range from changing the spell slots to adopting some other method of limitation (rare components, mana points, vitality points, or progressively higher difficulties on spell rolls being four such options). Some options deal with a desire to make magic more dangerous or unpredictable, such as unplanned spell effects, corruption rolls, damage saves, and the possibility of detection by other magic users. Some options deal with the nature of the classes.

I am interested in changing the magic system because I have a particular vision for how magic fits into my campaign world, and the mechanics of the current system don't reinforce that vision. I think many others have the same issues. However, we don't all have the same worlds, so we don't necessarily need a "one size fits all" approach so much as a kind of brainstorming session that helps flesh out possibilities, stengths, and weaknesses involved in our various options.

 

[mmadsen]

Why not allow characters to use Spellcraft to cast spells directly from a spellbook? There would have to be limitations put on this, of course, but it would allow these "scholars" to have some magical ability at first level.

That's exactly what I was getting at earlier:

There's no reason Read Magic has to be a spell. Anyone with any skill in Spellcraft, for instance, could be expected to read a spellbook. Or, to fit the scholarly theme we're going for, anyone who can read the language the book's written in and makes a Spellcraft roll can decipher what the spell is.

Then, with some research, he can cast the spell from the text -- but only with the book in front of him, taking plenty of time and automatically failing any forced Concentration checks.

Only when he gains another spellcasting level can he add it to his spells known and cast it normally (whatever that may be in your "low magic" game world).