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View Full Version : Original System Help with original spell ideas?



Milodiah
2014-11-30, 01:13 PM
Howdy Playground,

I'm currently in the process of designing a system, because I'm stupid and make poor decisions. I'm currently trying to fill out the various spells, and I've found that it's a bit hard once you swear off the simple ones like "launch damage at enemy"...

The way it's working so far is that spells more or less range from first to tenth level, but even at tenth level they don't have the wallop of a 9th level 3.5 spell, and aspiring magicians only have a pool of points with which to learn all spells (i.e. one tenth-level spell takes up as much space in their mind as ten first-level spells). That said, first-level spells are literally parlor tricks, like suspending one ping-pong ball in the air or plucking a string instrument from across the room. Even if the various functions of Prestidigitation were broken into separate spells, most would end up as second level. Even the higher level spells are more along the lines of realigning the pull of gravity in the area to fall across a canyon or to drop enemies into the sky, rather than save-or-dies and roll-a-whole-bunch-of-d6s.

In addition, spell success is a range, so rolling below the success numbers means it simply fizzles, but rolling above the range of success (about 16+ on 3d6 on a challenging spell) makes it fail spectacularly and catastrophically...i.e. healing spells continuing to regenerate tissue far past being "healed", a fireball spell misinterpreting the range from caster to target as its new diameter, etc. etc.

So, with those things in mind...any interesting spells you could think of that

Are less bland and more situational than Magic Missile,
Have ways to explode horrendously in the user's face,
May require a bit of lateral thinking to determine a potent use,
etc. etc.


Thanks for your help!