Variant Skills/Weapons/Armor system

[BarkingDeathSquirrel]

Oh, scary way-out-there idea. Spells are to wizards as weapons are to fighters, right? So what if wizards had to buy proficiency/expertise in, say spell schools? Each school had basic & expert spells, and you could cast basic spells with proficiency and expert spells with expertise. Skill level would replace caster level. This would tone down the fighter multiclassing into wizard problem, since a fighter blowing all his skill points on weapons won't have any left over to learn spell schools (except the two he'd gain for multiclassing into wizard).

Crap. Could this work?
Nell.

Arcana Unearthed's magic system has a spell system with simple/complex/exotic spells, similar to the simple/martial/exotic'ness of weapons; not to mention a bunch of other nifty things, including great flexibility and a no-book keeping way of handling spell knowledge. There aren't specialist wizards (at least in regards to schools), so you'd have to balance out the schools nicely to make it fair if you intend to keep that part of DnD. Honestly, I'd rather let feats spell out a specialist rather than dropping a few schools for an extra spell per level.

As for the skill-based casting, that's pretty simple, really. Caster level could potentially be replaced with character level and the skill would just simply handle the spells per day (if you even want to include that, I'd rather have/casting of the spells DC 15 + 4x Spell level is what I was intending for my campaign, at least for Complex spells, simple spells would be only 10 + 4x spell level, and ritual spells (replacement term for exotic, I use exotic as a descriptor term, for both weapons and spells (ie: you can have an exotic martial weapon, or an exotic simple weapon, or an exotic ritual. Not too much of a strech) having a DC
20 + 4x spell level. You might want to tack on a "risk" for spellcasting, something to make it WORTH being proficient in spellcasting; subdual damage equal to the spell level (fort save DC 20 to negate) with it being lethal damage if the check fails (I use Vitality/Wounds, so having a failed spellcasting check deal wound damage is pretty nasty) is what I use.

One last thought: I don't really think having a skill for each individual school would be best, too many schools to allow a generalist wizard easy access to every spell. If you REALLY want individuals to be better at a certain school, again, I think feats would be a better idea than splitting up their school proficiencies.

That's my notes and thoughts on the subject. Take it for what it's worth.

 

[Nellisir]

Arcana Unearthed's magic system has a spell system with simple/complex/exotic spells, similar to the simple/martial/exotic'ness of weapons; not to mention a bunch of other nifty things, including great flexibility and a no-book keeping way of handling spell knowledge.

Yeah, there's alot of great stuff in AU/AE...but Monte's OGC statements are very unclear, and I've given up on using any AE material that isn't very explicitly called out as OGC (and the Magic chapter isn't clear at all).

Thanks for the thoughts -- I'm letting this stuff stew in the back of my brain for a few days, then see what comes out. I like the idea of tying everything together, but realisticly it probably isn't the best thing for my game, nor the best use of my time. Still, I'm having fun kicking the idea around.

Cheers
Nell.