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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AeroDm" data-source="post: 5743642" data-attributes="member: 13650">My last campaign world involved an idea that all magic derived from a force (think The Force) but that it had an agenda that no one was aware of. As a result, too much magic at too early a level or too long steeped in magic led to insanity. I created a "magic score" which had the effect of moderating how much magic you had or equipped or whatever. So wizards would have a bunch of spells but avoid magic items because items weren't an efficient use of their magic score. Fighters stuck to items and so faced less risk of being corrupted, but it could still happen from time to time.On the core question of the OP, the problem I've found is two fold. First, it requires too much subtle variance to work well. Most really neat approaches I've seen require a lot of bookkeeping. Things like magic zones where a first level spell increases the zone by 1 for 1 round, a second level spell by 2 for 2 rounds, and so on with different levels of saturation having different consequences. Even from this little example, you could see how it spirals annoyingly. The second problem is that if you want to make it matter, it happens too frequently. The 5% miss chance idea is a great point. Say you want magic to backfire on that 5% so that it might literally kill you and your party... well, you just seriously weakened the casters. If a BBEG battle goes 5 rounds, that means one-in-four BBEG fights will have the caster hit the party with a big spell instead of the enemy. That could completely swing a combat in a way that is just going to tick a lot of people off.</blockquote>

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