Thought Experiment: How to Magic in a Medieval Fantasy World

[wayfare]

Hey All:

I am currently working on a game where magic is easily available to everybody. However, within this structure, I wanted to preserve some of the aspects of medieval fantasy that I really like:

1) Travel takes time.
Characters have to go on journeys. Magic can speed things up (make your horse faster, but wind in your sails, etc), but it can only completely supplant other modes of travel for very short trips (like traveling a mile).

2) Magic enhances skills, does not replace them.
Spells like Invisibility, Knock and Jump should not replace certain skills. Instead, they should grant a short period where you are trained in the skill and get a +X bonus (maybe +1/3 or +1/2 levels, max +5). This way laymen can get a chance to be stealthy, while masters are almost impossible to detect except by other masters.

3) Magic Takes Time
Magic has either a casting time based on level, or a cooldown between uses, omething like 1 round/spell level. Casters are unusual in that they can lower the cooldown. Even so, this means that 1st, 2nd and 3rd level spells will be most used.

So, my question

1) Would you play this kind of game
2) Can i implement this by modifying 3.5 spells?

[SciChronic]

imo, magic is just too strong in 3.5e for your goals, you'd have to remove/tweak 80% of the spells in order to make it possible.

[Vaz]

If you have a look at Rokugan, much of the fast transport spells (like Teleport) are removed through lack of access to Cleric Domains and Arcane Spellcasters being essentially non-Rokugani.

In place of that, they have restricted/slowed spellcasters like Shugenja (a full caster that many consider to be Tier 3).

Preventing a Caster from improving its action economy (Nerveskitter, Celerity, Time Stop) is one way to stop it.

The UA and SRD includes rules for a recharge timer for spells, but is core only, perhaps look at that?

[Karoht]

@Caster Nerf
It's been suggested before, but I've yet to see an elegant suggestion on making magic harder to use as it's spell level increases. Here are some things I have seen that don't sound aweful, but don't sound amazing either.

1-Spell level cap. Everyone is capped at spell level 6 (I've seen 5 work) for learning spells. They still get access to their higher level spell slots for purposes of metamagic. Knowstones with higher level spells (IE-Timestop) still function, but are incredibly rare and not craftable.
Best if you use some in-game reasons why magic has been crippled like this. Preferably if the party can fix the problem as a story point at a later time. IE-The gods got mad and sealed everything away.

2-All spells take a full round action to cast for every spell level. This cast time can be reduced by sacrificing a spell slot of equal or lower level. The level sacrificed determines how how many rounds are reduced from the cast time.
IE-I want to cast an 8th level spell, it will take me 8 rounds to cast it. If I sack a 7th level spell slot, it will take me 1 round to cast it (8-7=1). If I sack an 8th level slot, the spell can be cast as a standard action. It's a nice idea, but what happens is out of combat, everyone takes the full time to cast something, which really only hurts buffing unless the durations are huge. In combat, everyone burns two spell slots instead of 1, which only hurts the number of spells per day and the number of resources a caster can bring to combat.

3-Don't allow full casters, and make full caster NPC's extremely rare.
Not really a solution, but it solves most of the immediate issues.

4-Level Cap
Things like E6 sort of address this. I would google E6 or get some feedback from someone who has actually played it.

[wayfare]

Thats actually one thing I want to avoid, is making this seem like a caster nerf. I want to reduce the power of individual spells, while still making casters effective participants in the game.

It breaks down like this:

1) Every class has a spell list of spells that it can earn.
a) Every time you gain a new spell level, you gain two spells from that list.
b) The rest of the spells have to be taught by other members of your class.
c) All classes have a maximum number of spells known. This is the same progression for every class.

2) Spells are capped at level 7, with a 3 character level to spell level progression.

3) Sorcerers and Wizards are unique in that they can learn any spell, but they still have a maximum number of spells known.
a) Sorcerers are sort of mashed up with warlocks: they can manipulate raw energy.
b) Wizards can reduce the recharge time between spells

[JusticeZero]

1: play E6. It locks down the weird zone so you never depart epic fantasy.
2: Ban standard spellcasting altogether. Research other classes built around different dynamics and swap them in instead.