Using beyond the wall's magic system in 5e

[CubicsRube]

So I'm reading over Beyond The Wall, and I'm quickly falling in love with the magic system.

For the uninitiated, a mage has access to 3 types of magic.

Cantrips - mostly minor magics. These require an ability check or they can backfire.
Spells - mostly equivalent to 5e 1st and 2nd level spells. There are no levels to these. You can merely cast a number of spells per day equal to your level.
Rituals - these are more powrful magics that require exotic material components and takes an hour per level of the ritual to cast. These are more equivalent to 3rd level and beyond.

Rituals are wheee it gets really interesting. They have a range of magic such as raising undead, resurrection and causing a common shared dream in a community, but these take nearly a full day to cast. I love this as a mechanism. It allows mages to be powerful without the idea that they can cast wish for breakfast each morning.

How could this be implemented in 5e, if you were to do so?

 

[bedir than]

So I'm reading over Beyond The Wall, and I'm quickly falling in love with the magic system.

For the uninitiated, a mage has access to 3 types of magic.

Cantrips - mostly minor magics. These require an ability check or they can backfire.
Spells - mostly equivalent to 5e 1st and 2nd level spells. There are no levels to these. You can merely cast a number of spells per day equal to your level.
Rituals - these are more powrful magics that require exotic material components and takes an hour per level of the ritual to cast. These are more equivalent to 3rd level and beyond.

Rituals are wheee it gets really interesting. They have a range of magic such as raising undead, resurrection and causing a common shared dream in a community, but these take nearly a full day to cast. I love this as a mechanism. It allows mages to be powerful without the idea that they can cast wish for breakfast each morning.

How could this be implemented in 5e, if you were to do so?

I love a world like this

 

[TwoSix]

Depends...are you trying to put the whole Beyond the Wall system into a 5e skeleton, or convert all of the 5e casters into BtWs "cantrip/spell/ritual" framework? I've mostly been interested in the former (since everyone loves the playbooks).

 

[MichaelSomething]

4th Edition had rituals and they were for the most part ignored

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

As an avid player of BtW, I can only hope you try it and come back to comment on it

I think if you do, you'll need to remove damage cantrip and rework a large part of lvl 3-5 spells into ritual while cutting off most of the lvl 6-9 spells. Then there's the problem that the BtW fighter doest have more than one attack, nor do the rogue have sneak attack; this could lead to a sentiment of unfairness at higher level when the mage can only do minor effects while the fighter dishes out 4 attacks. Also the worlds of D&D work in a way that magic is required to be able to adventure successfully; in BtW, magic healing is rare and damage spells shouldnt be rely on.

Nevertheless, I can see a world where D&D has a wizard being the intelligent master of downtime preparation instead of on-the-fly-I-cast-spell-from-a-100000-pages-book.

 

[Blue]

Fixed that for you:

4th Edition had rituals and they were for the most part used all the freaking time at some tables.

Arcane Lock, Arcane Mark, Brew Potion, Continual Light, Create Campsite, Discern Lies, Eavesdropper's Foil, Enchant Magic Item, Explosive Ruins, Eye of Alarm, Eye of Warding, Farsight, Find the Path, History Revealed ...

I could go on but I think you have the idea. There were so many useful rituals that basically just took coin, but once you were high enough level the coin was so minimal that these were free magic.

We used them in multiple campaigns under different DMs. I remember one campaign where there were these sites of power we were racing to find and so was the big bad. We had tiny balsa wood boxes made in a town. Easily breakable, we'd cast Arcane Lock on them and put them in places they'd be easily destroyed if someone did something like move a sealing boulder, since we'd know immediately if the ward was disturbed and it was permanent.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So I'm reading over Beyond The Wall, and I'm quickly falling in love with the magic system.

For the uninitiated, a mage has access to 3 types of magic.

Cantrips
Spells
Rituals

How could this be implemented in 5e, if you were to do so?

How is it that different from 5e? Cantrips. Spells which you cast with slots/day, some of which you can cast as rituals? For that matter, how is it different from 4e, with at-wills, dailies, and rituals that cost you copious cash in exotic components?

Rituals are wheee it gets really interesting. They have a range of magic such as raising undead, resurrection and causing a common shared dream in a community, but these take nearly a full day to cast. I love this as a mechanism. It allows mages to be powerful without the idea that they can cast wish for breakfast each morning.

Sounds like you just need to:

• Reduce & simplify slots/day - maybe use the Warlock as a guide: fewer slots, but all of your top level.
• Add a 'fumble' mechanism to cantrips.
• Remove the option of slot-casting spells that can be cast as rituals. Maybe expand on them a bit if you get the right components.

 

[CubicsRube]

[MENTION=8900]Tony[/MENTION] i explained how these were all different in the rest of the post. Cantrips have a chance to fail, and rituals take hours to cast.

Rituals are the most interesting balancing mechanism for me. If in 5e most 3rd level spells and above could not be instantly cast but instead took the better part of a day, you'd drastically change the power level of a mage.

Yes they can make a person fly, but they need 3 uninterrupted hours to do it. They can create a permanent wall of stone, but itll take the better part of a day.

It'd take a lot of reworking of individual spells but it might be doable.

 

[CubicsRube]

As an avid player of BtW, I can only hope you try it and come back to comment on it

I think if you do, you'll need to remove damage cantrip and rework a large part of lvl 3-5 spells into ritual while cutting off most of the lvl 6-9 spells. Then there's the problem that the BtW fighter doest have more than one attack, nor do the rogue have sneak attack; this could lead to a sentiment of unfairness at higher level when the mage can only do minor effects while the fighter dishes out 4 attacks. Also the worlds of D&D work in a way that magic is required to be able to adventure successfully; in BtW, magic healing is rare and damage spells shouldnt be rely on.

Nevertheless, I can see a world where D&D has a wizard being the intelligent master of downtime preparation instead of on-the-fly-I-cast-spell-from-a-100000-pages-book.

I'm really keen to try out the systen for a one shot. Have you run campaigns and how did you find it?

I'm ok with having damaging cantrips actually, as a failure could me they or an ally potentially take the damage themselves. That's a risk that well compensates for the cantrip in my view.

I'd also likely make most spells that scale with spell level instead scale with spellcaster level. So scorching ray might be instead 3 x 1d6 rays at 1st level, but 3 x 10d6 rays at 10th level. This rapidly ups the power level of some spells but keeps from having to rejig other classes to be in line.

Given that btw operates up to level 10, I'd balance to that. Meaning fighters have 2 attacks and casters have 5th level max spells.

I'll have to go through the list of spells and see what i can rework

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I'm really keen to try out the systen for a one shot. Have you run campaigns and how did you find it?

I'm ok with having damaging cantrips actually, as a failure could me they or an ally potentially take the damage themselves. That's a risk that well compensates for the cantrip in my view.

I'd also likely make most spells that scale with spell level instead scale with spellcaster level. So scorching ray might be instead 3 x 1d6 rays at 1st level, but 3 x 10d6 rays at 10th level. This rapidly ups the power level of some spells but keeps from having to rejig other classes to be in line.

Given that btw operates up to level 10, I'd balance to that. Meaning fighters have 2 attacks and casters have 5th level max spells.

I'll have to go through the list of spells and see what i can rework

For the last month I did the contrary: we played HotD and Sunless Citadel with BtW.

I think to import BtW in 5e, you'll need first to remove the ability to cast rituals with slots: they require 1 hour/spell level to cast, but dont need to be prepared. I'd let spells like fireballs and such, its feels magical and with no possibility to upcast and with limited slots/day, it wont be abused. Some spells will need auto-scaling in their description to make them competitive at higher level, as 3.5e did (Magic Missile, Burning hands etc). It could work.

In this system, arcane recovery and metamagic will really become important to maximize the few spells you have.