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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SnowDog" data-source="post: 774356" data-attributes="member: 2225">Counterspell argument is very validThe way I've played it is that there are two categories of "new" spells in the game world.The first, and more common, are spells that are new to the character but not the world.  For example, someone buys "The PDF of Wizardry and Woe" and decides he likes the spell "Increase Woe" (can you tell I'm making these up? <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=":)" /> ).  He points it out to the DM, who agrees, and says, "But your character has never seen this spell."Later, said DM slips it into a scroll that the party finds when they loot the lair of the Perilous Foobar of Doom.  Lost arcane lore from another age?  Or just from across the ocean?  Who can say?  It's new to the character, but not to the game world.  Someone who sees the character casting it might make a spellcraft roll to determine that it is, in fact, the ancient spell "Increase Woe" that they read about in some book once.  This gives the opposing force a chance to counter the spell, to learn something about its characteristics, etc.The much rarer form is when the character actually comes up with the spell (whether it's an original player-designed spell or one from a sourcebook).  In this case, the character is the first one to put magic together in this way.  No spellcraft roll can determine what spell this is.  Nobody can counter it, except by Dispel Magic.  Nobody knows how long it lasts, etc.  That's a huge benefit.Part of the balance of D&D is that wizards, being all scholarly and having high Spellcraft skills, can figure out magic that they see in action.  The way D&D handles this is that the vast majority of magic falls into specific spells that are commonly known.To shift the world such that customized magic is more common, you'd want to take a very close look at the spellcraft/counterspell system to make sure you aren't giving your players a huge advantage.As an example, imagine the player comes up with a spell very similar to Magic Missile -- maybe even a little weaker.  There's no denying it's "balanced" right?  Not really.  Every caster in the world knows Magic Missile.  They know what absorbs it.  They know it's force-based.  They probably have MM memorized themselves and can counter it.  But they have no idea what "Bobby's Magic Boom-Ball" is, what spells work against it, and how to counter it.  They don't know if it does D4 damage or 10D6.  Should they run for their lives, or just shrug away the annoyance?If you were to change spellcraft such that it would tell the person using it: "This is a custom spell, it can be blocked by X, countered by Y, it isn't much more damaging than magic missile, etc..." then I'd feel more comfortable allowing more custom magic.Again -- as others have said -- you begin, when you do that, to seriously stray from the D&D magic system.  There are games with much more flexible magic systems (Mage: The Ascension and Ars Magica come to mind immediately) that you might be interested in looking at for ideas.Good luck, and I hope you and your players have fun.  After all, that's the whole point.  Everything else is just icing on the cake, right?</blockquote>

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