Custom Spells

[jedipotter]

So, DMed for a new group. The set up was 3.5E rules, By-the-Book. This was a Pick Up Game. There was no character creation, no mega setting or any of that. The five players each had a 5th level wizard character. The setting was magic school, and the plot was a simple Harry Potter rip off: The PC's were advanced students at the school, and an evil undead (ex headmaster) was piloting to attack the school (and recover an evil artifact locked away in the Vault of Secrets, but the players did not know this at the start).

So, as DM, I decided to add Custom Spells. Spells I made up myself. It makes sense that most, if not all, spellcasters in and round the school would make their own custom spells. It even makes sense to say a wizard must make a new spell to graduate.

But instead of just saying ''each wizard has one Custom spell'' , I went the other route: ''Each wizard has mostly custom spells''. This was easy to do with 2,000+ some homebrew spells I have to pick from.

So the game starts, and right off the bat: Spellcraft is all but useless. The players can't identify the Custom spells. Even the ones that were ''known around the school'', had DC's higher then the low DC for the common spells listed in the PH. Though, plenty of the custom spells were secret too: wizards made them and did not tell anyone about them and did not show off the casting of them.

So a couple players started to get frustrated that they ''could not figure things out'' . I helpfully pointed out that ''not knowing what spell NPC cast '' did not really alter the game. But the players complained that it did, ''somehow''. The game continued, with the couple players complaining and sulking and being depressed, but eventually they defeated the undead and saved the school.

Then the two players told me how ''wrong'' they thought it was to have ''so many'' Custom spells. They did, oddly, agree that it was ''ok'' for a Custom spell to be secret and/or have a high DC to know for Spellcraft. But I still used ''too many''. I, of course, asked how many was too many...and they were not sure. But they thought it was wrong and it ''ruined the game for them'', in a way they could not exactly explain. They both said they would need to ''think hard'' before ever gaming with me again.

On the positive side, one player did really love all the Custom unique spells. I even gave her copies of the ones she liked.

So, thoughts? Was it ''too far'' to have ''almost all'' the spells Custom?

[Telok]

Nah, magic can be mysterious and strange. Thats good, it keeps it from being a mechanical macro button.

I perhaps would have had it 50% custom spells and a sliding scale of identification though. Something like the normal check gets you the school of magic of a custom spell and every so many points over that gets a bit more info. But I'm not a big fan of the all or nothing skill checks or players trying to leverage encyclopedic game knowledge of spells and monsters. As a player I am quite happy to come across the weird and unknown as long as things are pretty fair and not a screw job.

[Aegis013]

By-the-Book. ... ''Each wizard has mostly custom spells''.

It was probably just simple betrayal of expectations. They expected by-the-book, you provided something that was not what they believed was by-the-book.

If a person is blindfolded and someone says they're going to put chocolate in their mouth but proceed to put cheese in their mouth of a similar consistency, even if it's a cheese they normally like, most people will react poorly and say it didn't taste good. I suspect this is no different.

[Milo v3]

Was it ''too far'' to have ''almost all'' the spells Custom?

Yes because of:

The set up was 3.5E rules, By-the-Book.

[oxybe]

Well, you offer up a game "by the book" then proceed to make every major class option (spell selection) some not found in the books (nor can they choose these spells). Doubly so since you made the use of a default skill often used by the wizard class, Spellcraft, useless with the DCs being far higher then what the players could reliably make to figure out what these custom spells do. Do the characters actually have points in spellcraft, because otherwise you setup all the characters with options that don't work.

Not knowing what NPCs cast after interacting with it makes a very big difference: Wizards are a class that's based entirely around planning your spell slots (a bad prepration requires a night's rest to reset) based around what you think you might need. If there is no way to figure out what your enemies are casting and are capable of, you have no way of preparing for encounters with that person since you don't know what their abilities are.

So the party of wizards are preparing their spells blindly and are unable to use their skills to find out what the enemy wizards are capable of and this school of wizardry seemingly has no records of commonly used spells that have been studied and dissected for the students to reference and learn because each student and teacher only knows the spells they created for themselves.

I can see why they would be frustrated. I probably wouldn't show up the next week either.

[Douglas]

"Custom spells are common" - just that much, not necessarily any additional detail - is the sort of thing that I would expect to be announced up front to any player whose character is highly knowledgeable about magic. Which in this case means every player because they're all 5th level Wizards. It is also the sort of thing that specifically goes against the description of a game as being "by the book".

I would have no problem with playing with this game element (assuming the spells seem reasonably close to balanced), but as described it was a violation of implicit promises about the game's nature and should have been declared in advance.

[Erik Vale]

Hello Harry Potter.
*checks*
Sorry, Jedi Potter, the plot had me confused :p.

No, as long as the option was available to players.
Making the spells unidentifiable by the rules however, was. Perhaps give a success gradient for the spellcraft check similar to knowledge, however you should have let the players know beforehand.

[prufock]

So, DMed for a new group. The set up was 3.5E rules, By-the-Book.
Researching spells independently takes 1 week + 1000 gp per level of the spell, and a DC 10 + spell level spellcraft check. NPCs have a wealth by level chart. Your players were level 5. At level 5, an NPC would have enough wealth for 4 levels worth of custom spells if they sunk all but 300 gp into their custom research. Even a 12th level character (the highest a party of level 5s would be expected to face) would have enough for only 27 levels of spells if they blew ALL of their wealth on it. This should be significantly less than "mostly custom spells."


So the game starts, and right off the bat: Spellcraft is all but useless. The players can't identify the Custom spells.
Can you cite a rule that states custom spells can't be identified? The DC to identify a spell being cast is 15 + spell level. You get +2 if it's of your specialty school, -5 if it's of a prohibited school. No clause regarding "custom" spells. Even if they don't know what it's called, they should be able to identify from the somatic/verbal components what it does.


''not knowing what spell NPC cast '' did not really alter the game.
Yes it does. Knowing what an opponent's spell does gives you an idea of how to defend against it, especially if they are going to be recurring villains. Counterspelling requires identification.


But they thought it was wrong and it ''ruined the game for them'', in a way they could not exactly explain. They both said they would need to ''think hard'' before ever gaming with me again.
You misled them going into the game, and it wasn't what they were expecting or wanted. You said it would be by-the-book, and it wasn't. If they had been told that the game would involve many custom spells, and that they could create their own, they likely wouldn't have been so disappointed.

So yes, "too far" and not "by-the-book."

[Larrx]

I do pretty much the same thing (usually, I rarely run two campaigns in the same setting). It's mostly for wizards, but the other caster classes get in on the action a bit as well. Typically it's a status symbol to create a line of personal spells. They are often available to the players. Bob the wizard gets respect and renown every time someone sees Bobs Face-melting Terror cast, so he has incentive to teach others for a reasonable fee. Enemy casters leave behind scrolls or books with their unique spells when defeated. Also, the players are encouraged to create their own custom spells, and sell/trade them, to make a name for themselves.

PCs and NPCs are on the same footing, and it makes casters less cookie cutter. Since the whole world basically has spell thematics cranked up to 11, the spell someone casts can speak to their history, personality, and station. It's a nice, organic, way to inform the players about a character without dry exposition. My players love it.

[atemu1234]

The problem here is the promise of a by-the-book game and then not informing them of differences.

Your players want to identify the spells, what's so harmful to the plot about them being able to, y'know, identify them?

[Tohsaka Rin]

Yay civil discussion. May it continue to remain so.

I'd like to second what prufock said, making it so hard to identify what the spells did/are.

Custom or not, magic works like magic. They are playing spell casters, whose sole purview is magic. If they cannot, with their own magical expertise, comprehend what magic is/does, then I think you're very clearly misunderstanding part of the problem as they see it.

Knowing what a spell is/does, isn't the same as suddenly knowing how to cast it, if that's the reason why you've jacked-up the DCs for all spells... Unless that's how it works at your table.

In either event, you need to sit down with your players, and discuss outside the game what their expectations were, and how they differed from your own. Ideally, you'll all be able to wrangle a solution that'll let you resume the campaign without much effort at all.

[Sliver]

I would go by the example that is given by Spell Thematics. The spell looks or is unusual or unique? DC +4. I wouldn't give the name of the spell or actual numbers, but I would tell my players the school and effect of the spell if they pass the Spellcraft check.

[afroakuma]

Yay civil discussion. May it continue to remain so.

It would feel a lot more civil without the overuse of sarcasm quotes in the topic post attempting to load the question.


So the game starts, and right off the bat: Spellcraft is all but useless.

The game has already stopped being by-the-book, then. Players have a fair expectation that their skills work as intended, and the use of Spellcraft sets a fair DC for a spell to be identified on the basis of being able to analyze a spell in the process of being cast. If the game had a few custom spells and this was prior knowledge, then an ad-hoc +2 to +4 to DC would be perfectly reasonable. In a setting where most spells cast are custom, Spellcraft should be expected to account for that as the default. "All DCs are higher all the time" isn't circumstance, it's "I think this part of the game should be harder."

Spellcraft isn't limited to spells you know; it's not a skill to say "that ball of fire... is fireball!" Instead, it's a skill used to analyze the structure of magic such that you could evaluate the nature of what's being cast and deduce what's coming, whether or not it's a spell you know. You can keep the name secret - there's no reason to tell them it's Melf's acid arrow if they don't know Melf - but they should be able to get the full description of the spell's text as well as all its parameters, including spell resistance, saving throw, range and level.

Now of course, given your usual play preferences, I'd expect that's precisely the information you didn't want to give them, but if that's the case then it is your obligation as a DM running for a new group to communicate those preferences in advance to the players, and their reaction is appropriate.


So a couple players started to get frustrated that they ''could not figure things out'' . I helpfully pointed out that ''not knowing what spell NPC cast '' did not really alter the game.

It does alter the game, a great deal. Players cannot counterspell or be sure that effective countermeasures are available for the kinds of magic they should expect to face. They don't have a benchmark for determining how the effects they will be seeing match up with the kind of spells they are working with. They may see a spell and determine that they'd like to learn it, which I doubt would have been encouraged.


The game continued

That was good of them. Some groups would have just stopped the game dead.


I, of course, asked how many was too many

From a purely social dynamics standpoint, since this is a social game, that was a dishonest question to ask.


But they thought it was wrong and it ''ruined the game for them''

Well no, it didn't "ruin the game for them," it ruined the game for them.


So, thoughts? Was it ''too far'' to have ''almost all'' the spells Custom?

I'm getting shades of Joey Tribbiani at this point. :smalltongue:

[Threadnaught]

If it was a by the book game, then why the house rule to make the one lesson everyone in the school should have learned, effectively teach nothing and use so much homebrew?


You cheated. That is why your players were so upset, you defined the parameters for the game, the rules everyone including you would play by, then went and broke them. Your players saw you cheating and they're annoyed at you for breaking your own rules.

Yes, it's possible for a DM to cheat, no being the DM doesn't stop it from being cheating.

[Telok]

What part of custom spells isn't in the books? Also, the set up was by the book but that may not mean that the entire setting is by the book. Actually I don't think that a magic school can be done "by the book" because in the DMG the biggest cities top out at around 50 total wizards in the whole city. Even assuming that there are similar numbers of sorcerers and bards (there are) and all first to fifth level arcane casters are kids in school then you barely get past the number of students for one or two single room schoolhouses.

So "by the book" I don't think you can have a magic school.

For spellcraft lets run the numbers. Identifying a spell as you watch it being cast is 15+ level and in place magic effects are 20+ level. An unusual, unique, new, or secret spell might impose up to a -5 circumstance penalty and feats like Spell Thematics or such can increase the DC by +2 to +4. So we are looking at a range of 16 to 36 (fourth level spells are reasonable). The Spellcraft of a 5th level wizard is 8 + 4 (int) + 2 (specialization) and another +2 for synergy from Knowledge: Arcana. So the wizard has a +16 if the spell is in his specialization, which pretty much auto identifies the common spells that they see being cast every day. Figuring out a unique fourth level spell or effect never seen before is a 15 to 20 roll if it's within the one of eight magic schools that the wizard specalized in.

So yeah, hard to use spellcraft on custom spells can be frustrating. Doesn't mean that it's broken.

[Urpriest]

If you were running a "wizard school" type setting, then you would have encouraged the analysis of custom spells via spellcraft, as it would reinforce the idea that these are students whose knowledge of the rules of magic is an important element of their progress through the plot. It encourages Hermione-type characters, which tend to be more engaging (witness the popularity of fanfics like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and Harry Potter and the Natural Twenty). So I think if you actually intended to run a magic school-type setting, you would have chosen to make custom spells analyzable via spellcraft. That being established, why do you dislike magic school settings? I would have thought with a name like jedipotter you would enjoy that genre.

[Barstro]

You cheated. That is why your players were so upset, you defined the parameters for the game, the rules everyone including you would play by, then went and broke them. Your players saw you cheating and they're annoyed at you for breaking your own rules.

I disagree with the characterization that this was cheating. I think a better statement would be that the DM did not fully disclose all of the rules ahead of time and gain consensus from the players. He appears to have honestly thought that such spellcraft checks would not matter (a stance I agree with, so it may be clouding my judgement).

Whatever the reason, I think the players were correct to be upset. But, I think they should have been better able to explain why or at least what the fix could have been.

[afroakuma]

What part of custom spells isn't in the books?

The part where Spellcraft can't identify them, per the OP.


Also, the set up was by the book but that may not mean that the entire setting is by the book.

But was that communicated to the players? Their reaction suggests that it was not. House rules should be discussed in advance, especially if you at any point claim "by-the-book" is a feature of the game. Everyone should be clear about what game they're playing before they start, which is one of the DM's responsibilities.

[Flickerdart]

What the hell does this wizard school teach, that every wizard uses mostly custom spells? When I took physics, everyone was using the physics taught in the curriculum. At the very least, the "advanced students" would know that everyone mostly uses custom spells, even if their players didn't. Your failure to inform them of the fact (and further deceive them by putting pregen skill points into skills you knew were useless) is not their fault.

[oxybe]

Honestly speaking, if I were to create a "magic school" I would say that the magic schools actually just prepare kids for proper magery for most of the formative years. You don't send little Billy to kindergarden and he comes home that night knowing burning hands.

I would say most of the formative years would be spent teaching the very basics of spellcraft, arcana, planar knowledge, religion, crafting items and the basic principals behind the various schools of magic over a period of several years.

This would make sense since within that same minimum timeframe, 16 years which is most of a human's formative ones, a sorceror can get all his level 1 skill points. After learning the basics along the sorceror, the "learned" caster is likely to being apprenticing under an older caster for a few years and get to use his spells proper, while the sorceror is likely refining his innate spellcasting capability during those 16 years in a safe environment.

The last few years would likely be spent preparing the student for their final field of study, be it an apprenticeship under another wizard, time spent better focusing their innate casting or just self study while rounding out their curriculum, even in the case of a student who lacks proper casting capabilities (rogues, fighters, barbarians and whatnot), have them spend those last two or so years focusing more on an entirely different field, like swordsmanship or tactics if they plan on going into a soldiering or mercenary profession, being able to better coordinate the needs and capabilities of their caster allies and their fellow non-caster troops as they understand the former much better.

In short, it might be a called a mage academy, but that's only because it stresses teaching the arcane over other fields, but I highly doubt all they study is magery. It would likely have optional courses in non-wizarding to create more well-rounded students capable of dealing with a wider variety of issues and being worldlier as a whole (which would benefit a wizard-type greatly, not being stuck with able to see things from a single perspectives, but rather several different perspectives), otherwise we're looking at something that's closer to a 2-4 year college/university course that focuses entirely on that one thing and one thing alone.

That and the Harry Potter-style Hogwarts school had a horrible history of graduating students who were unable to cope with a non-magical world. Ron's dad was in charge of the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office. He was the man in charge of handling non-wizard culture items that wizards tampered with illegally. And for the most part he didn't understand them... and these are objects that could be found all around England, not some weird Japanese exercise machine that looks like a duck or something. This lack of knowledge is likely because Hogwarts focuses on wizarding studies almost exclusively, to the point where I don't think they even know any math more complicated then that used to measure spell components.

for the first few years when Harry and Hermoine visited the Weasleys he was asking them, preteen schoolchildren, for help on how mundane machines worked. This is terrifying and impractical. We also see that other wizards are equally clueless when it comes to interacting with muggles in basic ways (like casual dress attire). Muggles that outnumber them and are their neighbours. Scary stuff.

[Flickerdart]

You don't send little Billy to kindergarden and he comes home that night knowing burning hands.
These are 5th level characters. It's not kindergarten.

[ellindsey]

If you are going to give all your NPC Wizards custom spells, make sure to detract the cost of developing those spells from the items and gear carried by those wizards to keep them within WBL. Otherwise, you're effectively giving them resources beyond what they should have for their CR.

[oxybe]

@Flickerdart
Yes, but 5th level anything also assumes some form of experience or training and age rules assume the characters, if human wizards, are 15+2d6 years old, so 17 minimum, so i am rather aware that Billy the mage is likely a bit older then kindergarden age.

The kindergarden thing was just a tongue in cheek comment to lead up to the rest of what I wrote about schooling and education, in that the knowledge to cast and understand spells has to comes from somewhere rather then just a spontaneous thing that happens once you hit your spot on the age bracket and that there should be some understood body of material for the students to study and learn from.

[Karl Aegis]

Presumably, a mathematician that has been studying math well into his thirties and onto his way to getting his doctorate in math can find the acceleration of an object that travels x5+2x2 feet in x seconds. But, a wizard studying magic well into his thirties can't identify basic spells cast by a pilot? Isn't he in the advanced class? Is it because you aren't using the part of the Player's Handbook dedicated to magic?

[Threadnaught]

I disagree with the characterization that this was cheating. I think a better statement would be that the DM did not fully disclose all of the rules ahead of time and gain consensus from the players. He appears to have honestly thought that such spellcraft checks would not matter (a stance I agree with, so it may be clouding my judgement).

He cheated. He told the players the rules, then used a whole bunch of stuff that the players should be able to access themselves, without allowing them to access any of it.
While making it impossible to access via house rule.

He told them the rules, then proceeded to break them. He's a Cheater.


It would've been perfectly okay if he'd allowed the players to create their own custom Spells and discover the effects of the ones he'd used, but there's no evidence to prove he did.

[kardar233]

If you're in a wizard school where most spells cast are custom, then that should have some ramifications.

Since you're basing it off Harry Potter, let's use an example:

Say, in Hogwarts, they teach you a couple of basic spells, but pretty much everyone has their own custom spells that they made themselves. If that's the case, then custom spell making must be safe, accessible, and fairly easy. This implies that there's some level of predictability and consistency to the spellmaking process, so that people who are making their first new spells don't accidentally invent spells that blow themselves up or such.

If that's the case, the components should be recognizable. If a spell opens with a wand swish (like Wingardium Leviosa) it probably deals with movement of an object. If it involves a slashing motion, it probably invokes force. It's not an exact science, but someone experienced in the mechanics of spellwork should be able to hazard a pretty accurate (though general) guess as to the effects of what someone's casting.

[Telok]

The part where Spellcraft can't identify them, per the OP.

Reread the op, the characters couldn't hit the DCs. Spellcraft works fine.

[Flickerdart]

Reread the op, the characters couldn't hit the DCs. Spellcraft works fine.
You may wish to take your own advice - jedipotter divides the spells into two categories, ones "known around the school" with DCs too high to identify for the pregens that he himself built, and "secret spells" for which Spellcraft did nothing at all.

[afroakuma]

Reread the op, the characters couldn't hit the DCs. Spellcraft works fine.

If you set DCs to the point where a 5th level character can't identify even the most common, low-level ones, then no it doesn't. Which of course OP knew.

[dascarletm]

Eh, I think it would have been fine.

However I would have politely asked if spellcraft could at least hint as to what the spell would do, and perhaps give insight as to what spells may counter it (as others have mentioned).

I mean isn't the point to duel with spells? Dueling isn't fun when it is a slug-fest, the interest comes with the finesse and moves/countermoves.

It's like going to see a MMA fight, and instead of fighting you see them standing there trading punches in order.

[Invader]

I pretty much agree with the majority about playing by the book and then using all custom spells Yada yada yada.

I'll play Devils advocate though and say that if something as simple as not being able to make spell craft checks on spells (even in a magic heavy game) is enough to completely ruin the game for you and make you never want to play with that DM again, perhaps you're a bit to particular and high strung or rigid.

Also to be transparent, I personally don't like a simple spell craft checks that are usually very easy to pass to instantly identify every spell cast. I prefer it to be a bit harder and not almost succesful so I might be a bit biased.

[Oddman80]

If in wizard school, the students are learning about all of the standard non-custom spells, ghen there is no reason the spellcraft skill should be all but useless. Custom spells may be custom - but that doesn't meant they are 100% unique and unlike any other spell known. Think about the inventions we have in our own world. They are usually adaptations of existing things. The new self parking feature on a car can be understood because parallel parking is understood and robotics and computers are understood, even though the first time someone saw a car do it they though "huh! Never saw that before!"

At the very least, a spellcraft check should have provided the name of the common spell to which the custom spell most closely resembles. The player then might make a correct guess on how to defend against it, or they may not... But it's at least a good clue.

[Grod_The_Giant]

There's nothing wrong, in and of itself, with a setting using tons of custom spells (assuming they're balanced). I agree that it helps make magic fresher and more interesting when you're not running into the same dozen "good" spells all the time. I understand not giving the players custom spells of their own in a pick-up game-- that would only slow things up, and there's nothing to say that these familiar-to-us spells aren't as fresh and original in the setting as all the homebrew. I'll even agree that "ruining the game" is taking it too far.

But.

Unless you made all this clear ahead of time-- that most characters will use custom spells, that no-one understands each other's spells-- you betrayed their trust. You let them believe the game would work one way, then had it go another. You said "by the book," and then used homebrew. Lots of it, apparently. (When you take a bunch of casters, whose primary class features are spells, and then change all the spells, you are effectively using a different class. It's like a player saying "I'm going to be a wizard" and showing up with a wu jen. When the class was forbidden). Whether or not it was good homebrew isn't the point. Trust is a key element of a game, and you threw that away.

I will also note that, if your players are unhappy, the game is ruined. If that unhappiness is a result of your choices and actions as DM, then the ruination of the game is your fault. That doesn't mean you have to bow to their every whim, as I'm sure you'll suggest-- I don't think any players really expect that.

[ericgrau]

1. You should have made this very clear ahead of time.

2. The campaign was all about wizards. Nearly every spell was custom. Spells more or less contain all the rules for wizards. So basically every rule used in the entire campaign was made up off the top of your head or from some random homebrew you pulled off the interwebs. That has a 99% chance of being both incredibly confusing or unfair. I don't know the details but I imagine everyone was frustrated by the sheer arbitrariness of every action foes took. They probably felt they had no idea what was going on nor how to react to it. Maybe you were even forced to railroad them to not TPK them out of sheer them not having a clue what to do. Or maybe not, but they were still confused out of their minds and the whole thing probably felt like being tossed about.

A DM that is unclear and throws random nonsense at his players is a major hallmark of a bad DM so that might be why they were pissed off. Keeping the effects simple could have helped, as could letting the players know exactly what was going on with only a slightly harder spellcraft. +2 DC perhaps. Maybe they don't know the official name of the spell but they figure out what it does based on the incantation and so forth. Even then playing with 500 rules that have never playtested is next to impossible to pull off.

Having mainly normal spells with even 10% custom spells would still have brought in plenty of interesting custom spells. This could also let you nerf the custom spells slightly compared to regular spells without worrying about nerfing the player too hard. That way they don't trump the normal spells and possibly ruin the game, yet they still have some small advantage due to being unique.