PDA

View Full Version : What spells would you miss?



Xuc Xac
2018-08-09, 03:16 AM
I'm working on putting together a magic system and I think it covers everything that I would like. I'm not sure if I'm missing something obvious though. I thought I'd do a little informal survey to double check. If you were to sit down and make up a new wizard PC for a game, what would you miss that made you say "Wait. Why is there no spell that can do X?" What are your "go to" abilities when playing spell casters of any flavor?

Mordaedil
2018-08-09, 03:30 AM
For me, I think anything that allows you to levitate or fly, speed up your party and blasting enemies by targetting specific weaknesses are quintessential to being a caster.

Though I don't hold to that the optimized D&D wizard to be my optimal way to play.

Eldan
2018-08-09, 03:38 AM
Utility, illusions and mind control, mainly. And there I have more of a love for the weirdly specific stuff than the general. (If there's a spell that forces your target to blink their left eye, but only on a tuesday, chances are I'll love it.)

I want spells that can be applied to things other than combat. Helping with farming, or construction, or travel. Spells that have use in worldbuilding.

Yora
2018-08-09, 03:38 AM
It really depends a lot on the overall flavor of the setting. In my current setting, magic can only do divination, mind-control, and summoning and nothing else. Players who don't know the setting might be surprised that there are no fireballs, but I think once they are used to it should no longer feel to be missing.

Satinavian
2018-08-09, 04:13 AM
Spells (or abilities) that allow to analyze existing magic (or magic items/magic beings). A spellcaster has the role of magic expert and thus needs to be able to understand magic he encounters during adventure.

Narwhalz
2018-08-09, 04:17 AM
I always liked the shape shifting stuff both for yourself and on others, but you could make design choices that would make you want to avoid that.

Also you want to cover simple practical things like carrying stuff, dealing with the weather and making food and water, and sending messages and writing stuff down.

Only kinda related but why have I never seen a spell that just writes stuff down for you, like if your in wizard class and need to take notes or if you need to make a shopping list but don't have a pen and paper it would do it for you.

Xuc Xac
2018-08-09, 04:17 AM
For me, I think anything that allows you to levitate or fly, speed up your party and blasting enemies by targetting specific weaknesses are quintessential to being a caster.


To fly, you could grow wings, shapeshift into a winged creature, or maybe use telekinesis to haul yourself around by moving your clothes. Telekinesis doesn't work on living tissue, so you would look like you were flying on wires in a cheap kung fu movie. Speeding up or slowing down is not complicated: there's a "school" dedicated to time and a haste spell is just altering the flow of the present time. There's a lot of blasting possibilities: heat/cold, lightning, poison, acid, rust, and more unusual things.


Utility, illusions and mind control, mainly. And there I have more of a love for the weirdly specific stuff than the general.

I've got physical illusions (controlling light and sound) as well as mental illusions (hijacking someone's senses to make them see and hear what you want). There's a "school" for mind magic that includes control over emotions, thoughts, and memories. What kind of utility spells did you have in mind?


It really depends a lot on the overall flavor of the setting. In my current setting, magic can only do divination, mind-control, and summoning and nothing else. Players who don't know the setting might be surprised that there are no fireballs, but I think once they are used to it should no longer feel to be missing.

I don't have any true corporeal undead, so necromancy is more limited. For example, vampires would be living creatures with unusual powers, weaknesses, and diet. And there are no outer planes full of celestial or fiendish badgers that can be grabbed at random and sicced on enemies. If you want to teleport a creature to you to fight for you or serve you in some way, you need to arrange that ahead of time (such as stocking a private menagerie full of monsters that you can teleport onto your foes). I have plenty of divination and mind control though. There's a school of mind magic and every school can do "sensing" spells in its area of focus.

Knaight
2018-08-09, 04:23 AM
That depends entirely on the setting. Going in I have no particular expectations, and will happily work with basically any magic system (in terms of concepts and what is included or excluded, there are all sorts of mechanical implementations I'd work with a lot less happily). Once the setting sets expectations though, spells can start being missed. If you repeatedly go on about exorcism being a big deal in setting, then there's no way to actually do an exorcism we have an issue.

System-wise I do have a soft spot for noun-verb systems, and would consider that structure (with a carefully selected set of nouns and verbs) a good one to look at for the spell categories of interest when picking what spells there are. This can include just not using certain noun-verb combinations.

Eldan
2018-08-09, 04:35 AM
I've got physical illusions (controlling light and sound) as well as mental illusions (hijacking someone's senses to make them see and hear what you want). There's a "school" for mind magic that includes control over emotions, thoughts, and memories. What kind of utility spells did you have in mind?



Depends a bit on what magic can do in your setting. But humans would try the same things that they try with every new tool they discover. Can it help grow food? Can it help in construction? Can it help with health issues? Can it protect us from natural disasters? So you'd have magic that finds ores, or splits stones, or blesses fields, or calms rivers, or cures diseases. Or helps with these things, depending on power level.

Pleh
2018-08-09, 05:23 AM
Support casting: buff/debuff spells with sufficient variety to support any possible allies. Also spontaneous casting for prepared casters (like cleric healing and druid summoning).

Blasting. While not optimal, it's still nice for the caster to have ranged, offensive spells as at least an option to using a weapon.

Divination. Don't need a ton of this stuff, but having the right spell has really changed the courses of campaigns, from using Speak With Dead on a slain enemy to investigate their plans to Comprehend Languages to learn that the Goblin Priestess chanting at the center of the demonic portal is actually trying to close the portal as opposed to opening it and our quest giver hoped to dupe us into helping him bring pandemonium to the kingdom.

Cluedrew
2018-08-09, 07:17 AM
What are your "go to" abilities when playing spell casters of any flavor?Any flavour? In my opinion that is kind of what makes them flavourless. So pick a flavour, a motif and a logic and run with it. Sometimes a missing ability can actually make it more interesting, and I would pick interesting over standard.

Of course I made magic users that don't get any spells at all (by default) so I have my own weird ideas.

Anonymouswizard
2018-08-09, 08:12 AM
That depends entirely on the setting. Going in I have no particular expectations, and will happily work with basically any magic system (in terms of concepts and what is included or excluded, there are all sorts of mechanical implementations I'd work with a lot less happily). Once the setting sets expectations though, spells can start being missed. If you repeatedly go on about exorcism being a big deal in setting, then there's no way to actually do an exorcism we have an issue.

This. My favourite 'wizard' character that I ever played had a mixture of random rituals (many of which would be depowered if I played him in the current version of the setting), the ability to cast one time auto-triggering buffs via sympathetic magic, and the ability to remember anything he'd read (50%) chance. He was in a party with somebody who made clockwork creatures and the campaign villains included somebody who could make TV characters and tropes/cliches come to life, and somebody who's magic manipulated the city. The setting was set up for very diverse magic, but nobody got more than a narrowly defined theme.

The character I played after him had access to the 'dabbler' magic of the GM's homebrew setting, so he could set up anti-demon wards, compel demons, and exorcise demons (we also eventually decided my character likely could summon demons from hell, but wouldn't actually do so). If anybody had been an ordained priest they'd also have got access to the special anti-demon prayers, but that came with a whole host of disads including pacifism in a combat-heavy game.


System-wise I do have a soft spot for noun-verb systems, and would consider that structure (with a carefully selected set of nouns and verbs) a good one to look at for the spell categories of interest when picking what spells there are. This can include just not using certain noun-verb combinations.

While I'm personally a bigger supporter of thematic magic over verb-noun magic, I agree that it's a great way to consider types and categories of spells. Although most of my problems with verb-noun systems is not being great at constructing them, it's hard to judge whether Fire and Animal are of roughly equal worth as nouns, or do I need to go for Energy and Animal, or Fire plus Bird?

(This post was generated by a Post Twaddle spell.)

Knaight
2018-08-09, 08:46 AM
While I'm personally a bigger supporter of thematic magic over verb-noun magic, I agree that it's a great way to consider types and categories of spells. Although most of my problems with verb-noun systems is not being great at constructing them, it's hard to judge whether Fire and Animal are of roughly equal worth as nouns, or do I need to go for Energy and Animal, or Fire plus Bird?

I definitely think you can get a very thematic system out of verb-noun by selecting your verbs and nouns carefully. For instance, there's Ars Magica with it's scholarly magic that did scholarly better than anything else I've ever seen, where the really direct way to hurt somebody (direct bodily harm straight from the magic) would be Perdo Corpus. It's a flavorful little name, especially if you actually know any Latin. Meanwhile in the homebrew I ran about seeking out ancient and alien intelligences to be bestowed their magic that same spell would be Cut Meat, which I like to think also gets the flavor across.

Kaptin Keen
2018-08-09, 10:48 AM
I'd go the other way, and remove spells that flatten the game. Prime examples would be fly and teleport - and it may seem that they do the opposite of flatten, but that's part of the problem: If you see the game becoming three dimensional because you can now fly, then most of the dimensions in which you play are invisible to you.

Cosi
2018-08-09, 02:16 PM
Looking over the 3e SRD, including both categories of spells and specific ones:

1. fireball
2. Some combination of other Fire spells
3. Summoning magic
4. charm and dominate
5. Illusions, specifically silent image type spells
6. invisibility
7. alter self/disguise self (turn into a humanoid)
8. polymorph/Wild Shape (turn into a monster or animal)
9. dispel magic
10. detect magic, arcane sight, identify
11. fly/levitate/overland flight
12. dimension door/teleport
13. plane shift (assuming you have other planes)
14. scrying
15. animate dead
16. wall of stone
17. major creation
18. fabricate
19. disintegrate
20. forcecage
21. Some way of cheating death
22. Healing magic, probably including raise dead

That's enough for one fairly broad caster, or three or so specialized ones. If you go the specialist route, you'll probably need to add a little filler so you don't end up with something like an Illusionist whose only combat options are various kinds of image spells.

There are some things that are circumstantial. For example, if you're doing something closely tied to D&D, I think magic missile and lightning bolt are must-haves. Curses have a pretty big legacy in fantasy, but the specific spells D&D has aren't a great fit for them. Some of the examples listed may not be appropriate for the power level you're imagining. If you want to have Druid-ish casters, you need an entire suite of nature magic, but I don't consider that stuff iconic in-and-of-itself.

I'd also echo the sentiment that non-combat spells and spells that have a societal, rather than personal, impact are a good idea. I've included a couple, but they tend to be glossed over. Also, they require you to think about your worldbuilding. You can't give people wall of iron at will and expect them to live in wooden huts.


I'm working on putting together a magic system and I think it covers everything that I would like. I'm not sure if I'm missing something obvious though. I thought I'd do a little informal survey to double check. If you were to sit down and make up a new wizard PC for a game, what would you miss that made you say "Wait. Why is there no spell that can do X?" What are your "go to" abilities when playing spell casters of any flavor?

For what exactly?

Is it supposed to supplement the magic systems in an existing game (e.g. Binders in 3.5, SoP in PF)? In that case, you can basically give people whatever abilities you want as long as you end up producing level appropriate characters at each level. If people can still be Druids or Bards, it doesn't really matter if there's an option that doesn't have reincarnation or whatever.

Is it supposed to replace the magic systems in an existing game? In that case, you need to look at what challenges characters in that game are supposed to face, and make sure you provide tools for facing them. If people are expected to fight Basilisks, they need some tool for curing people who get petrified.

Is it supposed to be an entirely new system? In that case, I would recommend not starting with the magic effects. Define the setting first. The magic appropriate in a high fantasy setting is different from what's appropriate for a cosmic horror setting or a magipunk setting or a wuxia setting. In particular, you should figure out what non-magical characters are going to be able to do, because that's generally the power level constraint.


I'd go the other way, and remove spells that flatten the game. Prime examples would be fly and teleport - and it may seem that they do the opposite of flatten, but that's part of the problem: If you see the game becoming three dimensional because you can now fly, then most of the dimensions in which you play are invisible to you.

If you think casting fly is flattening the game, the reason fly exists is invisible to you.

Kaptin Keen
2018-08-09, 03:34 PM
If you think casting fly is flattening the game, the reason fly exists is invisible to you.

No. No, that is just completely wrong. I know exactly why it exists.

Cluedrew
2018-08-09, 04:33 PM
I already gave my answer but I have a few questions about other people's answers.


1. fireball
2. Some combination of other Fire spellsSo I looked over the list and I think I understand why most of those are on the list, having talked with you about such matters before, but these confuse me. Because it is not "direct damage spells" or "immediate combat effects" but very particularly fireball and some other fire spells. Why not thunderbolt and some storm themed spells?

On Fly: Before we start into this, could I take a moment and ask: What are talking about? For example: flatten? I mean it might make the world seem flatter if you fly over it but somehow I don't think that is what we are talking about. Is this some sort of power-curve thing or suddenly everyone has to fly and so there is less variation?

I'm also curious about the reason fly exists, mentioned several times but never stated. As far as I know the reason fly exists it is a cool thing so someone packed it into a spell.

Xuc Xac
2018-08-09, 06:59 PM
That depends entirely on the setting. Going in I have no particular expectations, and will happily work with basically any magic system...

I already have a setting in mind, but I don't want to prejudice the responses by introducing it too soon. There are some things that I don't often use myself when I play a spellcaster, but which should definitely be included. I'm just asking for other suggestions to be sure I'm not leaving out something obvious because it's in one of my personal blind spots. For example, I don't care much for using charm/dominate effects, but they are something that should be possible.



System-wise I do have a soft spot for noun-verb systems, and would consider that structure (with a carefully selected set of nouns and verbs) a good one to look at for the spell categories of interest when picking what spells there are. This can include just not using certain noun-verb combinations.

The rough draft so far is loosely based on "verb noun", but the nouns are broad and more abstract than Ars Magica's.


Any flavour? In my opinion that is kind of what makes them flavourless. So pick a flavour, a motif and a logic and run with it.

That's why I said "any flavor" and not "every flavor". One of the things I don't like about D&D magic is that generalists can do just as much as specialists, who aren't really that specialized. I would prefer something like "the highest level spell you can cast is 10 minus the number of schools you can access: specialists in one school get 9th level spells in their school, generalists who dabble in eight schools can only cast 1st and 2nd level spells". I don't mind if magic can do everything, but I hate it when one wizard can do everything.


Looking over the 3e SRD, including both categories of spells and specific ones:

1. fireball: check
2. other Fire spells: check
3. Summoning magic: you could teleport things to you, but there's no bottomless pit of celestial badgers to draw on. You have to arrange things to summon in advance.
4. charm and dominate: check
5. Illusions, specifically silent image type spells: check
6. invisibility: check
7. alter self/disguise self (turn into a humanoid): check
8. polymorph/Wild Shape (turn into a monster or animal): check
9. dispel magic: check
10. detect magic, arcane sight, identify: check
11. fly/levitate/overland flight: check
12. dimension door/teleport: check
13. plane shift (assuming you have other planes): no other planes
14. scrying: check
15. animate dead: no corporeal undead
16. wall of stone: possibly, but I don't think anyone would do it. It's easier to just reshape the ground and raise it into a barrier. Producing something from nothing is hard.
17. major creation: see #16
18. fabricate: more likely than making things from nothing
19. disintegrate: check
20. forcecage: "force" isn't really a thing
21. Some way of cheating death: if you mean "by a remarkable coincidence, the bullet ricocheted off my pocket watch and I'm unharmed" then yes. If you mean, turning into a lich or something, then no.
22. Healing magic, probably including raise dead: check, but restoring life is one of those "theoretically possible but really hard" things.

magic missile and lightning bolt: check

Curses: check

If you want to have Druid-ish casters, you need an entire suite of nature magic: nothing specifically for druid types, but there are plenty of things that druids could use to achieve their nature worshiping goals.



For what exactly?


A new system for some settings I'm developing. I want something with a little more consistency than the random grab bag of powers that you get in a lot of systems. For example, why are flaming sphere, fireball, delayed blast fireball, and meteor swarm all separate spells instead of one ability that can be scaled up and down? Flexible, generic systems have the opposite problem of having too many options to build specific spells or a narrow list of powers (e.g. Savage Worlds is good but the spells are very combat focused).

Quertus
2018-08-09, 07:16 PM
I'm working on putting together a magic system and I think it covers everything that I would like. I'm not sure if I'm missing something obvious though. I thought I'd do a little informal survey to double check. If you were to sit down and make up a new wizard PC for a game, what would you miss that made you say "Wait. Why is there no spell that can do X?" What are your "go to" abilities when playing spell casters of any flavor?

The ability to research new spells.

Spells (?) that let me create and/or recharge items.

Spells that analyze magic.

Because, otherwise, mages seem like idiots.

Otherwise, it depends on the character. A few things I commonly aim for:

Polymorph abilities, body swapping, minion creation (animate dead, animate object, summon monster, dominate monster, mindrape, simulacrum), illusions, direct damage, mending, healing (yes, even on a wizard), life drain, teleport, invisibility. The ability to swap places with someone, or make 2 people swap places, is really cool. Buffs, debuffs, curses. The ability to manipulate magic itself (dispel magic is a very crude example). Contingency. Other defensive spells (I like 5d chess, OK?). Permanent spell effects - that's a big meta-requirement.

Spells that I've found really cool:

Spells that have really crazy results (Nahal's Reckless Dwoemers, Wheel of Fortune).

The ability to swap places with someone, or make 2 people swap places, is really cool.

Spells that change or create things. Pretty much all of D&D Transmutation.

2e D&D had lots of cool necromancy spells that allowed for the mutation of creatures, to attempt to create custom monsters. That was really cool.

2e D&D Mirage Arcana allowed for the creation of semi-real locations - kinda the precursor to Planar Shepherd?

Mage the Ascension has the ability to inhabit multiple bodies simultaneously.

Mage has Semi-Auto CAD-Cam / Jury Rig, which allow you to merge two objects and pick and choose to add properties of one to the other.

A Life- or Magic-based version of the above would be really cool, too.

2e Psionic items were really cool.

NichG
2018-08-09, 09:24 PM
I think the main thing I would miss would be conceptual flexibility. That is to say, for magic to feel like an integrated part of the world to me, it has to be something that isn't there to be used by people, but rather was just there and people learned to make use of it. So e.g. a fixed spell list set by nature is weird to me, but a fixed list of underlying concepts or fundamental forces or whatever is fine. Similarly, it isn't really necessary for me that 'for everything a person would want, there is a spell for that' - just because someone would want to use magic to eavesdrop on someone else's thoughts, grow a beard, build a castle, or change the flavor of food doesn't mean that those things must be possible. But where those things are impossible, it should be because the underlying concepts that magic is built off of don't make contact with something, not just that 'oh, that spell doesn't exist'.

In terms of metaphors for magic, my go-to is that magic is essentially conceptual alchemy. To me, in settings with magic, there is some kind of high-level sentient nature to the universe itself or at least to some primordial avatars of the universe which continue to hold some power. The universe-as-found is then constructed out of a compromise between the underlying way things work and the imposition of those entities/sentiences/etc, for whom something that 'makes sense' becomes so. That is to say, if blood is held to be associated with life in general, then by invoking those sentiences, a user of magic can convince reality to e.g. convert a blood sacrifice into an extension of a person's youth. High magic is the wholesale influence and rewriting of those conceptual maps while low magic is making use of associations that are already there to obtain some temporary leverage.

The reason for that is that one of the main aspects shared across magic systems is that magic is almost always a personal ability - that is to say, most fictional wizards have at best something like a staff or wand or drawn out magic circle to perform their workings, rather than e.g. a room-sized machine which does the heavy lifting of spellcasting. A mage doesn't generally have to compute the trajectories of atoms to turn water into wine or create a fireball, or fully understand neuroscience in order to read or manipulate someone's thoughts - something in 'what magic is' makes those very complicated phenomena conceptually simple enough that a person, often in a faux-medieval backdrop, can still work with them without being forced to understand reality at that level. So for that to be the case, it suggests there has to be something fundamental to reality that understands how to interpret high-level concepts and map them into the low-level physical details - that is to say, some kind of mind.

Magic in such a metaphor should generally have the ability to exploit some kind of fantasy-logic. You are bound to this item and can be influenced through it because you carried it around with you for years; you violated an oath, and so you can be subject to reprecussion; you are on someone else's land, so they have power over you; etc. It shouldn't generally just do things without having some kind of explanation behind it - a fireball just because it's iconic isn't so good, but a fireball because the caster has ritually summoned and bound an eternal flame in their left hand is better.

Of course, another metaphor is that magic is just another collection of fundamental forces unique to that setting's universe - much like there is charge and mass and so on, there's also chi and mana and vim and such. In such a setting, I think magic should tend to be much more limited in what it can do directly. If 'life force' is a fundamental thing, a mage working with nothing other than themselves might be able to 'give their life force to someone else', 'stoke the renewal of someone's life force', 'disperse the life force of a target', etc. But with access to sophisticated setups, extending that into things like 'permanently modifying someone's form by locally directing life force to fuse it with external dead tissue' could be possible. The idea then is that off-the-cuff magic isn't going to be very versatile, but given time and artifice, it can be greatly extended - much like someone armed with a charged up capacitor isn't going to do much more than shock someone to death, but someone with a soldering iron, circuit components, and time can build a computer. For someone to be a versatile and mobile caster in such a system, they would basically be using some method to carve such circuits into their own body/mind/soul over a long period of training and self-modification - e.g. why not just anyone who reads a primer on the Theory of Vim can start throwing around flesheating curses and the like straight off the bat.

So, what spells would I miss?

Basically, for magic to be interesting to me, it should transform the possible. If adding magic to a setting doesn't mean that the world will be totally different from a world without it, it comes off as kind of pointless window-dressing. Magic Missile is basically just a flashy way of being an archer, etc. So the really key spells/effects are the ones that allow you to make contact with things that, without magic, could not have been interacted with at all. Planar travel, interacting with the spirits of the dead, permanently altering someone's biology, transmuting substances, making it possible to exchange aspects of onesself, entering bodily into dreams, traveling through time, obtaining alternate forms of existence, etc are all examples of this kind of thing. I don't need magic to be able to do all of them, but it shouldn't do none of them either (and whichever ones it does, should be pretty thoroughly explored, not just exist as some one-off spell).

Anonymouswizard
2018-08-10, 07:44 AM
No spell should be there by default. I've been in games which used worlds that only had one very limited sort of magic. I've also played in worlds were wizards can theoretically do anything (although I like them less).

If we're going for magical abilities I think should be available, is really a small list.
-Mind reading
-Clairvoyance
-Induce Emotion
-Summon Spirit/Demon

And that's pretty much all I consider absolute. It doesn't even need to be easy or cheap to acquire, and they're can be a large number of limitations and drawbacks (which there probably should be, all of those are incredibly powerful tools)

Now if there's no magic you don't need anything. But that's about the minimum I'd want from a magic system.

Eldan
2018-08-10, 09:38 AM
I'd go the other way, and remove spells that flatten the game. Prime examples would be fly and teleport - and it may seem that they do the opposite of flatten, but that's part of the problem: If you see the game becoming three dimensional because you can now fly, then most of the dimensions in which you play are invisible to you.

I don't necessarily agree. But the world has to support it. If there's places for example that you can only reach flying, then learning to fly opens up new dimensions.

Grim Portent
2018-08-10, 02:23 PM
The main ones I'd miss are shapeshifting, divinations of various kinds but mostly fortunetelling and prophecy, curses and summoning. Those are more or less my main interests for when I want to play an old fashioned mythical magic man.

Cosi
2018-08-10, 02:29 PM
No. No, that is just completely wrong. I know exactly why it exists.

If you did, then you wouldn't say it was flattening the game.


So I looked over the list and I think I understand why most of those are on the list, having talked with you about such matters before, but these confuse me. Because it is not "direct damage spells" or "immediate combat effects" but very particularly fireball and some other fire spells. Why not thunderbolt and some storm themed spells?

I just think fire magic is more iconic. Not necessarily the specific spells, but doing stuff with fire is much more common than doing stuff with acid or cold. Electricity is certainly a close second, and I would definitely support having some spells that hit people with lightning (probably something like call lightning and something like chain lightning). But I don't think it's necessary.


The rough draft so far is loosely based on "verb noun", but the nouns are broad and more abstract than Ars Magica's.

I would be cautious about that. Systems that encourage people to dynamically create spells tend to be very difficult to use and result in interminable arguments if they are anything less than perfectly specified. They're also very difficult to balance, because two effects that are superficially similar can have wildly different power levels. As an example, creating a block of stone is strictly more work than creating a block of stone with an opponent-sized hole in the middle, but one is a BFC effect and the other is a death spell.


I don't mind if magic can do everything, but I hate it when one wizard can do everything.

One thing to bear in mind is that the more restrictions you place on the difficulty of magic, the less challenges you can have that require any particular piece of magic. If there's a serious chance that the party won't have remove disease, encounters with disease become vastly more deadly.


disintegrate: check

Keep in mind that for the world to be stable, this probably needs to be at least as difficult as adding mass.


For example, why are flaming sphere, fireball, delayed blast fireball, and meteor swarm all separate spells instead of one ability that can be scaled up and down?

I get what you're going for, but those spells are pretty separate. flaming sphere is a DoT where fireball is one-and-done, meteor swarm has multiple AoEs where fireball has one, and delayed blast fireball is a spell that encourages preparation more than the others. I could certainly see having a single fire blast effect that scaled with level, but I don't think "it follows your target around and lasts for a minute", "it deals some physical damage", "it goes off late", and "you get multiple blasts" work best as scaling options on a single spell. In general, I think Spheres (in either the AD&D or "of Power" sense) or Domains are a better model for how related spells should work. Possibly also Reserve Feats.


And that's pretty much all I consider absolute. It doesn't even need to be easy or cheap to acquire, and they're can be a large number of limitations and drawbacks (which there probably should be, all of those are incredibly powerful tools)

I think you need more combat magic than that for something that is supposed to be like D&D (which is how I'm understanding what OP is doing). D&D assumes that a party can be roughly half magic users, and that there could be a combat a session or more. In that context, I think it's necessary that you have some combat magic, and preferably some variety in it. If you go lower than that point, "Magic User" stops really being a class and starts being a profession or background.

Anonymouswizard
2018-08-10, 05:32 PM
I think you need more combat magic than that for something that is supposed to be like D&D (which is how I'm understanding what OP is doing). D&D assumes that a party can be roughly half magic users, and that there could be a combat a session or more. In that context, I think it's necessary that you have some combat magic, and preferably some variety in it. If you go lower than that point, "Magic User" stops really being a class and starts being a profession or background.

I wasn't assuming a D&D-like, which means I was looking at the absolute minimum. And that actually means that combat spells don't make the list, my experience of fantasy has wizards fight with sword, staff, and dagger as much as they fight with magic.

That doesn't mean that combat spells aren't a good addition, but that such things aren't required. If given free choice from a D&D style list to pick my starting spells (not an uncommon situation in fantasy games IME) I'd go with the following choices:
-The basic healing spell
-Some way to make a light
-Some way to clean clothes/people
-A remote viewing or similar spell
-A mind reading or charm spell

Following picks are normally illusion and divination magic, combat spells hover down at a 'maybe pick one up as my tenth pick' level. I just don't consider combat magic relevantg because I mainly play more investigative games where the person who took Cure Wounds is more useful than the party member with Fireball.

Knaight
2018-08-11, 12:57 AM
I already have a setting in mind, but I don't want to prejudice the responses by introducing it too soon. There are some things that I don't often use myself when I play a spellcaster, but which should definitely be included. I'm just asking for other suggestions to be sure I'm not leaving out something obvious because it's in one of my personal blind spots. For example, I don't care much for using charm/dominate effects, but they are something that should be possible.

Should they be? There are serious cases to not have that sort of effect - for instance, in REIGN it's one of very few limits on what magic can conceptually do. There's powerful magic in that game, but its focuses are such that mind control is disruptive, and this is spelled out. The closest you get to mind affecting magic is being able to threaten and bribe people with magic you can do, which is explicitly no different than threatening people with a weapon or bribing them with money or services.

More than that, there are serious cases for basically every class of "common magic", where the particular feel of a heavily magical setting is improved by not having that type in particular.

Kaptin Keen
2018-08-11, 01:01 AM
I don't necessarily agree. But the world has to support it. If there's places for example that you can only reach flying, then learning to fly opens up new dimensions.

Yes and no. Say, a flying city. If you have no way of reaching it, does that make it less exciting or mysterious? That's the problem with trivializing the miraculous - you end up with nothing being particularly unusual or mysterious. In essense, enough magic eliminates magic. I've read thousands of books, and never, ever, even in a single one, seen a writer build drama or story or suspence with the sentence 'and then we teleported there'.

Narrative all but requires you to travel on foot, and struggle by hand. Everything else eventually devolves into 'my make believe magic wang is bigger than your make believe magic wang'.

Quertus
2018-08-13, 09:56 AM
I think NichG said what I probably really wanted to say better than I did. So let me try again more from that PoV.

The magic system needs some reason for me to want to play with it.

The system - the mechanics - themselves need to be engaging, not off-putting.

The spells need to be interesting, not just "+X to Y".

The spells need to do things that can't be done otherwise.

Ideally, it hits all of those.

RIFTS, for example, fails at making magic interesting, at letting magic do much of anything that can't be done mundanely.

Most point-buy systems let everything do everything, making magic less interesting (almost Captain-Hobo-style).

I want magic to do enough different things to let different characters approach it differently. I want replay value. I want to be able to play the guy who gets by on just Forces Prime, and the guy who gets by on just Spirit Correspondence. I want to be able to play the guy who focuses on creating new life and new civilizations (2e D&D Necromancy), and the guy who boldly goes where no man has gone before (Teleport, Plane Shift, or just dungeon-delving 2e D&D Evocation / 3e D&D SoD/SoS/BFC).

I want there to be enough stuff that is completely not necessary to play the game effectively, but completely sufficient to play the game competently. I want 1000 options, of which any 10 will do me, and I get to pick 50 at character creation, and more as I gain experience. I want my choices of spells to say something about the character of the character, not the viability of the character.

That's what I'll miss, more than any one specific spell.

D&D 2e and WoD Mage give me a good magic system. I'm not sure how many other games I'd say that about.

Eldan
2018-08-14, 08:57 AM
Yes and no. Say, a flying city. If you have no way of reaching it, does that make it less exciting or mysterious? That's the problem with trivializing the miraculous - you end up with nothing being particularly unusual or mysterious. In essense, enough magic eliminates magic. I've read thousands of books, and never, ever, even in a single one, seen a writer build drama or story or suspence with the sentence 'and then we teleported there'.

Narrative all but requires you to travel on foot, and struggle by hand. Everything else eventually devolves into 'my make believe magic wang is bigger than your make believe magic wang'.

I have, however, read some absolutely thrilling battle scenes where people used teleportation in clever ways.