Refactored 3e Spell Lists [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-10, 07:13 AM

So, as a companion piece to my other quixotic endeavour (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?570982-Skill-based-Spellcasting), I've been thinking about how one might simplify and refactor the general 3E spell listings.

My general procedure is gonna be as follows:

Strip out anything with 'Mass', 'Symbol of', 'Lesser/Greater', 'Monster vs. Person' etc. in the title. This should be handled either with general-purpose metamagic or save modifiers or both, they don't need separate listings.
Spells with similar functions or operating principles should be merged under one heading so far as possible. (The cure X wounds series is the most obvious, but a case could be made for, e.g, feather fall/levitate/flight, among others.)
Spells that don't clearly belong under a given school should probably be either rephrased or relocated. This is gonna be a little subjective, particularly if you're looking at end-result rather than operating principle.

I'm looking primarily at wizard/sorc spells for now, but probably also going to borrow a little from some of the cleric/druid listings, just to get an idea of flavour.

Okay, let's look at Enchantment first. Far as I can tell, these break down into 6 basic sequences:

The 'Holding' sequence, which convinces a person or creature that they either cannot or should not move.
The 'Sleep' sequence, which convinces them they're tired.
The Charm/Suggestion/Dominate/Persuasion/Demand sequence, which makes the victim increasingly susceptible to your orders.
The Daze/Stun/Idiocy/Confusion/Feeblemind/Mind Fog/Insanity/Irresistable Dance sequence, which makes the victim stupid or crazy.
The Bravery/Rage, Fear/Depair/Antipathy, Fascinate/Sympathy, and Calm Emotions spells, which induce a particular emotional state.
Spells like Geas and Modify Memory, which seem to function as a kind of atomic brainwashing?

Power Word Blind and Power Word Kill seem to be outliers, as does Binding, but other than that the school seems straightforward enough.

Transmutation next. This taxonomy here seems to be a lot more scattered, but I *think* the overall pattern is as follows:

The Polymorph sequence, which I will use to include the various Enlarge/Reduce spells as well as Alter Self. Simple enough.
The stat-boosting animal-quality sequence (Bull's Strength, etc.) Maybe Spider Climb and Water Breathing fit here? I guess the idea is that you're... temporarily borrowing genetic traits from other species, or something? A quasi-polymorph?
The Flesh to Stone/Stone to Flesh/Statue/Stoneskin/Iron Body sequence, sitting across from Gaseous Form/Wind Walk/Ethereal Jaunt/Etherealness. Okay, so you're not limited to organic transformations.
An interesting outlier, Disintegrate, maybe grouped with Erase. If you can turn stone to flesh, why not flesh or stone to a puff of dispersed air, right?
Stone Shape/Passwall/Transmute Rock-Mud/Move Earth, and spells like Mending/Fabricate, as well as Control Water or even Control Weather? The last one seems like a stretch, but I guess they all consist of rearranging non-organic materials.
The time or speed-controlling sequence- Expeditious Retreat/Haste/Slow/Temporal Stasis/Time Stop, and the telekinetic/action-at-a-distance/anti-gravity sequence- Animate Rope/Rope Trick/Telekinesis/Feather Fall/Levitate/Fly/Overland Flight/Reverse Gravity. You... change the fundamental fabric of space-time?

This still leaves spells like Mage Hand, Mnemonic Enhancer/Mage's Lucubration and Darkvision, among others, that don't seem to follow any clear pattern or fit with the school at large. I'd be inclined to shuffle those off into other schools and/or make them into metamagic feats, and consider reassigning the time-space/gravity sequence as well.

One more, just to finish for now- Conjuration:

Obscuring Mist/Fog Cloud/Sleet Storm/Stinking Cloud/Solid Fog/Cloudkill/Acid Fog/Incendiary Cloud. This feels like it should be Transmutation or Evocation to me? The argument is probably 'you grab stuff from other planes and annoy your enemies', but given there are elemental planes of fire, ice & air it seems like half of Evocation would fit this definition? Ditto for Acid Splash/Grease/Acid Arrow/Web.
The Summon Monster/Planar Binding/Planar Ally sequence. Mechanics are different, but all to do with fetching extraplanar help. Summon Swarm/Unseen Servant/Mount/Phantom Steed/Faithful Hound/Black Tentacles look like specialised variants.
The Dimension Door/Phase Door/Teleport/Teleport Circle/Plane Shift/Gate sequence. Similar to the above, only you go visit them instead of them visiting you.
Word of Recall/Instant Summons/Secret Chest as variants on useful emergency-evac measures. Fair enough.

Various outliers like Mage Armor, Trap The Soul and so forth don't seem to fit very clearly, and Mage's Mansion and Maze seem like they should be deliberate construction projects, in the same vein as Secure Shelter or Tiny Hunt. I'd also imagine that spells like Sending, Message and Contact Other Plane should be under this school instead.

So... am I making sense so far? Would there be some critical tactical nuances lost if I tried to mung these categories together? Has all this been done better elsewhere already? Other thoughts?

EDIT: Might as well finish the other schools off:

Divination seems to break down as follows:

The various short-range Detect spells, which might also generalise to Find Traps, Deathwatch, stuff like See Invisibility/Arcane Sight/True Seeing/Analyse Dweomer, and even Detect Scrying.
The long-range Clairvoyance/Clairaudience/Scrying spells, including Arcane Eyes/Prying Eyes, which can also serve as a springboard for Detect Spells.
The Locate Object/Locate Creature/Discern Location/Find The Path sequence, which lets you find someone or something specific.
The Legend Lore/Vision sequence, which gives general knowledge of past events particular to a subject.
The Guidance/True Strike/Moment of Prescience/Foresight sequence, which confer some concrete combat benefits to the caster based on anticipation of future events.
The Discern Lies/Detect Thoughts sequence, which I think might be extended to Tongues and Comprehend Languages, at least if you're looking at spoken language (you can't read the mind of a book.)
The Augury/Commune sequence, which answers specific yes/no questions, but might actually be mechanically closer to a Sending spell since you're talking to a patron deity?

The org-chart here seems pretty consistent. Read Magic and Identify/Analyse Dweomer seem a little fuzzy in terms of provenance, but probably squeeze in somewhere?

Here comes Illusion:

Silent Image/Minor Image/Major Image/Hallucinatory Terrain/Mirage Arcana/Illusory Wall/Phantom Trap/Persistent Image/Permanent Image/Programmed Image: all about static installations of pre-set scenery.
Disguise Self/Mirror Image/Seeming/Mislead/Veil/Project Image- variations on creating personal disguises or doubles.
Magic Aura/Misdirection/False Vision/Screen - specific measures for frustrating scrying or divination effects.
Shadow Conjuration/Shadow Evocation/Greater s.C/Greater s.E/Shades: All about convincingly 'faking' other spells, with Simulacrum being the meat shield version.
Color Spray/Hypnotic Pattern/Rainbow Pattern/Phantasmal Killer/Scintillating Pattern/Weird- these look like they might be Enchantment, in the sense that they e.g, fascinate a victim or scare them to the point of a KO or heart attack. Possibly Dream and Nightmare too?
Last but not least, Blur/Displacement/Invisibility/Invisibility Sphere/Greater Invisibility/Mass Invisibility- hiding from physical attacks and senses.

Ghost Sound/Ventriloquism/Illusory Script/Magic Mouth almost seem like they might be Sending variants, so maybe those could be outsourced. It certainly seems like there should be room for substantial synergy effects, where Illusion could be used to make Enchantment-based suggestions more compelling, or where Evocation could produce genuine light/heat/force effects that make an Illusion more substantial.

Evocation, not to be soon forgot-

The Dancing Lights/Flare/Light/Continual Flame/Daylight/Sunburst sequence. Pretty self-explanatory.
The Shatter/Shout/Greater Shout sequence.
The Ray of Frost/Ice Storm/Wall of Ice/Cone of Cold/Freezing Sphere/Polar Ray sequence.
The Shocking Grasp/Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning sequence.
The Burning Hands/Flaming Sphere/Scorching Ray/Fireball/Fire Shield/Wall of Fire/Delayed Fireball/Meteor Swarm sequence.
The Gust of Wind/Wind Wall sequence.
The Interposing Hand/Forceful Hand/Grasping Hand/Clenched Fist/Crushing Hand sequence, possibly in the same vein as Mage's Sword?
Magic Missile, the always-hits oddball, probably also force-based?
Floating Disk/Tiny Hut/Wall of Force/Resilient Sphere/Forcecage/Telekinetic Sphere- these all look like more force-based constructs, but static rather than mobile.

Sending and Contigency don't belong here. Prismatic Spray is everything plus the kitchen sink. 'Force' seems to be very Green-Lantern-esque in it's applications, and a lot of the wall/sphere stuff here is tactically defensive, not offensive. That's neither good nor bad, just something to note.

And finally Abjuration:

The Resistance/Endure Elements/Resist Energy/Protection from Energy sequence- warding off specific elemental damage types.
The Protection from X/Magic Circle vs X/Dismissal/Banishment sequence- dealing with alignment-based or extraplanar threats.
Dispel Magic/Remove Curse/Break Enchantment/Antimagic Field/Spell Turning/Greater Dispel/Protection from Spells/Disjunction/Freedom sequence- seem like fairly universal anti-magic/counterspell measures.
Shield/Protection from Arrows/Globe of Invulnerability: This is one of those tricky sequences where the function is defensive but the *form* is suspiciously similar to either Evocation or Conjuration, since you're sculpting forcefields to do stuff.
Dimensional Anchor/Dimensional Lock/Imprisonment- also a little tricky, though one could argue it's a kind of antimagic aimed specifically at conjuration. Hold Portal/Arcane Lock have similar *functions* but probably work off telekinetic effects?
The Obscure Object/Nondetection/Private Sanctum/Sequester/Mind Blank sequence- this looks very similar to some of the Illusion spells intended to fool Divination effects, but I think the difference is they can't actively *mislead* a diviner, just give them null results. Fair enough.

Repulsion should be enchantment, since it's mind-affecting, or Evocation if it's made physical? Guards and Wards/Prismatic Wall/Prismatic Sphere look very random. Alarm/Explosive Runes/Fire Trap should be Evocation, just with an appropriate trigger. Stoneskin should probably be Transmutation.

I'm going to leave out Necromancy for the time being, since I think it might actually make more sense if this were exclusively a clerical schtick. To be continued.

Nifft

2018-10-10, 07:29 AM

Half of your ideas look like a rehash of the core Psionics lists.

Darkvision is like Spider Climb & Water Breathing, in that it's a new special ability imposed on your body -- it's not like the ability-boost spells.

Are you allowed to look at non-core spells? If not, you'll have a lot of outliers.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-10, 07:36 AM

Half of your ideas look like a rehash of the core Psionics lists.
Yeah, I know very little about Psionics, to be honest. Haven't looked at non-core at all- is there a particular splatbook you'd recommend?

Darkvision is like Spider Climb & Water Breathing, in that it's a new special ability imposed on your body -- it's not like the ability-boost spells.
...Ahhhhh. *comprehension dawns*

Nifft

2018-10-10, 08:27 AM

Yeah, I know very little about Psionics, to be honest. Haven't looked at non-core at all- is there a particular splatbook you'd recommend?

Start with Core: http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/psionicPowerList.htm

Some of the major groupings you discuss are visible in Core.

noob

2018-10-10, 08:49 AM

Okay, let's look at Enchantment first. Far as I can tell, these break down into 6 basic sequences:
The 'Holding' sequence, which convinces a person or creature that they either cannot or should not move.
The 'Sleep' sequence, which convinces them they're tired.
The Charm/Suggestion/Dominate/Persuasion/Demand sequence, which makes the victim increasingly susceptible to your orders.
The Daze/Stun/Idiocy/Confusion/Feeblemind/Mind Fog/Insanity/Irresistable Dance sequence, which makes the victim stupid or crazy.
The Bravery/Rage, Fear/Depair/Antipathy, Fascinate/Sympathy, and Calm Emotions spells, which induce a particular emotional state.
Spells like Geas and Modify Memory, which seem to function as a kind of atomic brainwashing?

Do you consider heroism/greater heroism and antipathy/that thing which attracts to be in the emotion induction group?
I guess lullaby is in the sleep sequence.
would zone of truth fit in the cripple psyche group or in the make susceptible to orders group?

Time Stop is misleading: it does not manipulate time but rather makes you faster just like haste but more intense.

Goaty14

2018-10-10, 08:50 AM

noob

2018-10-10, 08:54 AM

Note that the PHBII introduced the mechanic of spells being in two schools instead of one. If a wizard dumped either, the spell wouldn't be available. So when you're asking yourself if the conjuration BFCs should be transmutation or evocation, you could make them both. IMO, the ones that
-Deal damage (i.e incendiary cloud) should be Evocation. (As that's Evocation's schtick)
-Involve fog (i.e Fog Cloud, Obscuring Mist) should be Transmutation. (I.e "Manipulating the air into water)
-Everything else (i.e Cloudkill) should remain Conjuration. (Uh, conjuring nasty stuff, duh)

cloudkill involve fog and incendiary cloud too so incendiary cloud and cloud kill should also be in transmutation with your rule.
so incendiary cloud should be triple school with the rules you gave.
however no spell at all from transmutation manipulate air to transform it(but it can manipulate other stuff into turning it into air) so it would be some kind of entirely new exception to how transmutation works just for adding fog spells in it.

Unseen Servant/Phantom Steed/Faithful Hound are not summoning something: it is creating them from force or whatever so it should be dual school spells with evocation.

Mage Armor seems to have as a fluff to create something from force so it should either be evocation or be a dual school evocation conjuration or a evocation abjuration spell or a triple school spell.

Conjuration associated itself with creating stuff and so did beat up some other schools to steal some of their spells but it could not steal force wall from evocation.

Nifft

2018-10-10, 09:38 AM

-Everything else (i.e Cloudkill) should remain Conjuration. (Uh, conjuring nasty stuff, duh)

Poison is Necromancy.

"Nasty stuff" clouds are usually poisonous -- Cloudkill, Stinking Cloud, etc. -- so they could be Conjuration / Necromancy, just like Kelgore's Grave Mist.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-10, 10:26 AM

Do you consider heroism/greater heroism and antipathy/that thing which attracts to be in the emotion induction group?
I guess lullaby is in the sleep sequence.
would zone of truth fit in the cripple psyche group or in the make susceptible to orders group?
Yes, yes, and that's an interesting question. Ordinarily I'd file ZoT under divination, but in principle you could just order someone to "be honest" if they were subject to mental compulsion. Hmm.

Time Stop is still time-manipulation though, just limited to the caster.

Note that the PHBII introduced the mechanic of spells being in two schools instead of one. If a wizard dumped either, the spell wouldn't be available. So when you're asking yourself if the conjuration BFCs should be transmutation or evocation, you could make them both. IMO, the ones that
-Deal damage (i.e incendiary cloud) should be Evocation. (As that's Evocation's schtick)
-Involve fog (i.e Fog Cloud, Obscuring Mist) should be Transmutation. (I.e "Manipulating the air into water)
-Everything else (i.e Cloudkill) should remain Conjuration. (Uh, conjuring nasty stuff, duh)

Poison is Necromancy.

"Nasty stuff" clouds are usually poisonous -- Cloudkill, Stinking Cloud, etc. -- so they could be Conjuration / Necromancy, just like Kelgore's Grave Mist.
Eh... it depends. Negative-energy/anti-life, specifically, is supposed to be necromancy's shtick- that could act like a poison, but plenty of living creatures also produce dangerous venom that doesn't involve negative energy.

One could equally argue that Cloudkill is Transmutation, because you're turning the air into cyanide gas, or some such. Same with anything acid-based, Grease spells, et cetera.

Edit:

Conjuration associated itself with creating stuff and so did beat up some other schools to steal some of their spells but it could not steal force wall from evocation.
I tend to think of Conjuration more as the 'transport' school of magic. You're not creating something ex nihilo, you're just opening a door to somewhere else and stepping through or inviting back some friends.

I mean, in principle you could jam open a door to, say the plane of elemental water, then siphon out the contents, sure. But it's not clear why you'd need different spells for every plane you might bridge to, or if that's not what Evocation spells already effectively do.

Nifft

2018-10-10, 12:59 PM

Eh... it depends. Negative-energy/anti-life, specifically, is supposed to be necromancy's shtick- that could act like a poison, but plenty of living creatures also produce dangerous venom that doesn't involve negative energy.

No what I mean is that the spell Poison is Necromancy: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/poison.htm

Also spells like Mind Poison (SpC) and Blackrot (CMage).

Poison effects are about 50% Necromancy, and 50% spread across other schools -- including weird stuff like Abjuration in some cases.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-10, 01:41 PM

No what I mean is that the spell Poison is Necromancy: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/poison.htm

Also spells like Mind Poison (SpC) and Blackrot (CMage).

Poison effects are about 50% Necromancy, and 50% spread across other schools -- including weird stuff like Abjuration in some cases.
Ah, I getcha.

I think part of the puzzle here is trying to reconcile what a particular school is for in tactical terms against what it does in metaphysical terms. In tactical terms, stuff like Fire Shield is clearly an abjuration, but in metaphysical terms something like Explosive Runes is clearly an evocation (just with trigger conditions.) I'm sure there are other examples.

I will check out those Psion rules, but although a cleaner taxonomy and point-based system would certainly be welcome, it looks like there's about as many total psion powers as there are core spells, which is a little bit of overkill for me. What I'm ultimately hoping to do is boil down every school to just 4-8 spells with some suitable metamagic and save/casting modifiers on top, hopefully without excluding too many outliers.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-10, 02:10 PM

Obscuring Mist/Fog Cloud/Sleet Storm/Stinking Cloud/Solid Fog/Cloudkill/Acid Fog/Incendiary Cloud. This feels like it should be Transmutation or Evocation to me? The argument is probably 'you grab stuff from other planes and annoy your enemies', but given there are elemental planes of fire, ice & air it seems like half of Evocation would fit this definition? Ditto for Acid Splash/Grease/Acid Arrow/Web.

Evocation is the "grab raw matter and energy from the Inner Planes" school, yes, so a big gaseous mass of water/ice/acid/fire should definitely be Evocation. As I've found myself ranting in several threads lately, Conjuration (Creation) is defined identically to Evocation the PHB school descriptions and should not exist as a subschool because it's just an excuse for shoving Evocation effects into Conjuration where they don't belong.

Eh... it depends. Negative-energy/anti-life, specifically, is supposed to be necromancy's shtick- that could act like a poison, but plenty of living creatures also produce dangerous venom that doesn't involve negative energy.

Note that Necromancy deals with "life force" in general, not just strictly positive and negative energy and souls. That's why poison, contagion, ray of exhaustion, and the like are all Necromancy: they all sap your vitality in various ways without necessarily being negative energy effects.

Plus, in D&D it's arguable that inflicting a disease on someone is actually closer to laying a curse, metaphysically speaking, than it is to summoning up a bunch of tiny creatures to invade their body, in the same way that D&D has 6 basic building blocks (4 elements and 2 energies), or 18 if you include the 4 paraelements and 8 quasielements, rather than 118+ atomic elements. (Though I like to picture diseases as very very very tiny undead creatures taking very very very tiny negative energy-filled bites out of people's life force, and cure disease is basically a positive energy maximized empowered meteor swarm at their scale. :smallwink:)

I will check out those Psion rules, but although a cleaner taxonomy and point-based system would certainly be welcome, it looks like there's about as many total psion powers as there are core spells, which is a little bit of overkill for me. What I'm ultimately hoping to do is boil down every school to just 4-8 spells with some suitable metamagic and save/casting modifiers on top, hopefully without excluding too many outliers.

You don't really need to look at all the psionic powers or figure out how to fold them into your system, it's just a good example of what you're trying to do here. For example, psionic charm (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/charmPsionic.htm) folds charm person and charm monster together by adding monster types with extra power point expenditures, all the Psychockinesis energy powers (e.g. energy ball (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/energyBall.htm)) let you choose between four types so you can have a acid/fire/ice/lightning ray/burst/line/cone as desired rather than acid arrow, fireball, lightning bolt, and cone of cold tying specific energies to specific shapes, and so forth. So if you're looking to combine and modularize spells, the powers might provide some good guidance.

Goaty14

2018-10-10, 05:36 PM

One could equally argue that Cloudkill is Transmutation, because you're turning the air into cyanide gas, or some such. Same with anything acid-based, Grease spells, et cetera.

One could also argue that Cure Light Wounds is a Divination. No, I'm not joking, there was a "positive energy should be necromancy" rant thread where people argued CLW could be any school.

The magic system is ambiguous like that, probably on purpose.

Nifft

2018-10-10, 06:25 PM

One could also argue that Cure Light Wounds is a Divination. No, I'm not joking, there was a "positive energy should be necromancy" rant thread where people argued CLW could be any school.

The magic system is ambiguous like that, probably on purpose.

The schools of magic seem somewhat useful as thematic clusters.

They're just plain stupid as rigid categories -- they don't withstand even the slightest application of logical scrutiny.

Therefore, the wise game writer does not attempt to apply logical scrutiny to the schools of magic, and instead treats them as thematic labels with very few concrete points of mechanical import.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-10, 10:38 PM

The schools of magic seem somewhat useful as thematic clusters.

They're just plain stupid as rigid categories -- they don't withstand even the slightest application of logical scrutiny.

Well, they don't at the moment, and that's mostly the fault of Conjuration and Transmutation being "default" schools that gobble up other schools' conceptual space and Abjuration not being consistently given certain effects, such as mage armor being Conjuration but shield being Abjuration despite them both creating [Force] effects (which is normally Evocation), whereas in previous editions shield was indeed Evocation and mage armor was Conjuration because it conjured up physical armor.

Pretty much every thread on "How do I change the spell schools so they make sense and/or are more balanced?" thread gravitates to the same set of suggestions--restrict what Conjuration and Transmutation mean, come up with a guiding principle as to what counts as an Abjuration, make spells on the boundaries dual-school spells, etc.--so there's at least a common understanding of what schools-as-rigid-categories would look like and it's not too much work to come to concrete boundaries for each school for a given group.

Therefore, the wise game writer does not attempt to apply logical scrutiny to the schools of magic, and instead treats them as thematic labels with very few concrete points of mechanical import.

Actually, I'd say that schools, subschools, and descriptors having more mechanical definition, not less, would be better. Some of them have mechanics attached, but most of them are merely hooks for other mechanics, and that's a wasted opportunity.

There are plenty of similar sets of spells that get repeated over and over in 3e with bunches of minor and usually pointless differences that could be made more standardized:
The "detect in a cone while concentration for more information" Divinations
The "create a magical sensor that lets you " Divinations
The "turn into a monster, but gain X/Y/Z and keep A/B/C" Transmutations
The "cloud of that gets moved or dispersed by wind" Conjurations (that should be Evocations, dammit)
The "here's how the Ethereal Plane works" Conjurations
The "create a minion under your verbal and/or mental control" spells of various schools
All sorts of "This spell functions as [blah], except..." spells

If the rules for all the various "magical sensor" divinations were folded into the (Scrying) subschool, if there were a coherent (Polymorph) subschool--as in one that replaced the alter self/polymorph/Alternate Form inheritance mess, not the one in PHB2 that just applied to those spells without changing any existing spells--so that all of those spells functioned the same way, if the rules for planar travel were explained in an (Extraplanar) subschool and/or an [Ethereal]/[Astral]/[Shadow] descriptor for Conjuration, and if instead of this copy paste job:

[B]Divination
Level: Brd 0, Clr 0, Drd 0, Sor/Wiz 0
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: 60 ft.
Area: Cone-shaped emanation
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 min./level (D)
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No

You detect magical auras. The amount of information revealed depends on how long you study a particular area or subject.

1st Round
Presence or absence of magical auras.

2nd Round
Number of different magical auras and the power of the most potent aura.

3rd Round
The strength and location of each aura. If the items or creatures bearing the auras are in line of sight, you can make Spellcraft skill checks to determine the school of magic involved in each. (Make one check per aura; DC 15 + spell level, or 15 + half caster level for a nonspell effect.)

Magical areas, multiple types of magic, or strong local magical emanations may distort or conceal weaker auras.

Aura Strength
An aura’s power depends on a spell’s functioning spell level or an item’s caster level. If an aura falls into more than one category, detect magic indicates the stronger of the two.

Spell or ObjectFaintModerateStrongOverwhelming
Functioning spell (spell level)3rd or lower4th-6th7th-9th10th+ (deity-level)
Magic item (caster level)5th or lower6th-11th12th-20th21st+ (artifact)

Lingering Aura
A magical aura lingers after its original source dissipates (in the case of a spell) or is destroyed (in the case of a magic item). If detect magic is cast and directed at such a location, the spell indicates an aura strength of dim (even weaker than a faint aura). How long the aura lingers at this dim level depends on its original power:

Original StrengthDuration of Lingering Aura
Faint1d6 rounds
Moderate1d6 minutes
Strong1d6×10 minutes
Overwhelming1d6 days

Outsiders and elementals are not magical in themselves, but if they are summoned, the conjuration spell registers.

Each round, you can turn to detect magic in a new area. The spell can penetrate barriers, but 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt blocks it.

Detect magic can be made permanent with a permanency spell.

[B]Divination
Level: Clr 1
Components: V, S, DF
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: 60 ft.
Area: Cone-shaped emanation
Duration: Concentration, up to 10 min./level (D)
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No

You can sense the presence of evil. The amount of information revealed depends on how long you study a particular area or subject.

1st Round
Presence or absence of evil.

2nd Round
Number of evil auras (creatures, objects, or spells) in the area and the power of the most potent evil aura present.

If you are of good alignment, and the strongest evil aura’s power is overwhelming (see below), and the HD or level of the aura’s source is at least twice your character level, you are stunned for 1 round and the spell ends.

3rd Round
The power and location of each aura. If an aura is outside your line of sight, then you discern its direction but not its exact location.

Aura Strength
An evil aura’s power depends on the type of evil creature or object that you’re detecting and its HD, caster level, or (in the case of a cleric) class level; see the accompanying table. If an aura falls into more than one strength category, the spell indicates the stronger of the two.

Creature/ObjectFaintModerateStrongOverwhelming
Evil creature (HD)10 or lower11-2526-5051 or higher
Undead (HD)2 or lower3-89-2021 or higher
Evil outsider (HD)1 or lower2-45-1011 or higher
Cleric of an evil deity (class levels)12-45-1011 or higher
Evil magic item or spell (caster level)2nd or lower3rd-8th9th-20th21st or higher

Lingering Aura
An evil aura lingers after its original source dissipates (in the case of a spell) or is destroyed (in the case of a creature or magic item). If detect evil is cast and directed at such a location, the spell indicates an aura strength of dim (even weaker than a faint aura). How long the aura lingers at this dim level depends on its original power:

Original StrengthDuration of Lingering Aura
Faint1d6 rounds
Moderate1d6 minutes
Strong1d6×10 minutes
Overwhelming1d6 days

Animals, traps, poisons, and other potential perils are not evil, and as such this spell does not detect them.

Each round, you can turn to detect evil in a new area. The spell can penetrate barriers, but 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt blocks it.
...it was something like this:

Divination spells of the Detection subschool enable you to identify qualities of creatures or objects or to find unknown or hidden things.

Detection spells have the following basic template unless otherwise noted in a spell's statistics block:

Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: 60 ft.
Area: Cone-shaped emanation
Duration: Concentration (D), up to a maximum duration noted in the spell's entry
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No

The cone generated by a Divination (Detection) spell moves with you and extends in the direction you look, and its cone defines the area that you can sweep each round.

Studying an area for one round reveals the presence or absence of whatever the spell detects, and if you study the same area for multiple rounds, you gain additional information, as noted in the descriptive text for the spell.

A Detection spell can penetrate barriers, but 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt blocks it.

Some Detection spells detect magical or supernatural auras in multiple categories of strength: Faint, Moderate, Strong, or Overwhelming. Thresholds for each category will be noted in the description, along with any special effects related to detecting an aura of a given strength.

Auras linger even after their source is gone; such auras register as Dim and are detectable for a certain duration after they are created, depending on the original aura strength:

[B]Faint: 1d6 rounds
Moderate: 1d6 minutes
Strong: 1d6×10 minutes
Overwhelming: 1d6 days

Divination (Detection)
Level: Brd 0, Clr 0, Drd 0, Sor/Wiz 0
Duration: Maximum 1 min./level

This spell detects magical auras. Outsiders and elementals are not magical in themselves, but if they are summoned, this spell can detect the Conjuration (Summoning) aura of the effect that summoned them.

Concentration: You detect the number of different magical auras and the power of the most potent aura with a second round of concentration, and the strength and location of each aura with a third round of concentration. You can identify the school of each aura in line of sight with a Spellcraft check (see Spellcraft description).

Auras: An aura’s power depends on a spell’s functioning spell level or an item’s caster level, whichever is stronger:

Spell or ObjectFaintModerateStrongOverwhelming
Functioning spell (spell level)3rd or lower4th-6th7th-9th10th+ (deity-level)
Magic item (caster level)5th or lower6th-11th12th-20th21st+ (artifact)

Divination (Detection)
Level: Clr 1
Components: V, S, DF
Duration: Maximum 10 min./level

This spell detects the presence of evil. Animals, traps, poisons, and other potential perils are not evil, and as such this spell does not detect them.

Concentration: You detect the number of evil auras (creatures, objects, or spells) in the area and the power of the most potent evil aura present with a second round of concentration, and the power and location (if within line of sight) or direction (if out of line of sight) of each aura with a third round of concentration.

If you are of good alignment, and the strongest evil aura’s power is overwhelming (see below), and the HD or level of the aura’s source is at least twice your character level, you are stunned for 1 round and the spell ends.

Auras: An evil aura’s power depends on the type of evil creature or object that you’re detecting and its HD, caster level, or (in the case of a cleric) class level:

Creature/ObjectFaintModerateStrongOverwhelming
Evil creature (HD)10 or lower11-2526-5051 or higher
Undead (HD)2 or lower3-89-2021 or higher
Evil outsider (HD)1 or lower2-45-1011 or higher
Cleric of an evil deity (class levels)12-45-1011 or higher
Evil magic item or spell (caster level)2nd or lower3rd-8th9th-20th21st or higher

...that would make spell descriptions clearer and more concise and spell effects more uniform and consistent, and would hopefully tighten up various inconsistencies or holes in the spell rules in the process.

RedWarlock

2018-10-11, 02:45 AM

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-11, 05:15 AM

...that would make spell descriptions clearer and more concise and spell effects more uniform and consistent, and would hopefully tighten up various inconsistencies or holes in the spell rules in the process.
That sort of thing, yes. Or even just have a 'Detect [X]' spell with listings for possible targets.

PoDL, I do have one objection to your assertion about Evocation. In-canon, are there any Evocation spells that actually create *matter*? My take was that they only ever created energy effects (fire, cold, force, electricity, but not acid). Note that Cold is not the same as Ice. I've never seen a canon explanation that actually connects Evo with the inner planes, just your own assertions.
I was thinking the distinction might be that Evocation manipulates energy whereas Conjuration is required to summon matter, but Ice Storm/Wall of Ice are Evocation spells (unless they condense water vapour out of air, or something?), and Meteor Swarm seems to throw some rocks in the mix?

On a totally random note: One idea I like is that Wish is essentially a form of time travel, where you use a combination of divination to identify key tipping points in the timeline, conjuration to pull some relativistic hijinks, abj/trans/evo to make subtle alterations, and ench/illusion to implant repressed memories in your younger self so you still remember to make the requisite changes. Like TV-flash! The most terrible Barry Allen ever.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-11, 11:01 AM

I've posted my breakdown of the remaining schools in the OP for the curious.

Evocation is the "grab raw matter and energy from the Inner Planes" school, yes, so a big gaseous mass of water/ice/acid/fire should definitely be Evocation. As I've found myself ranting in several threads lately, Conjuration (Creation) is defined identically to Evocation the PHB school descriptions and should not exist as a subschool because it's just an excuse for shoving Evocation effects into Conjuration where they don't belong.
Fully agreed.

Rather than having spells assigned to multiple schools, I've been wondering if there should be some effort put into synergy effects between different spell categories. e.g, where Conjuration or Transmutation could reinforce an Evocation spell by boosting the supply of reagents for a fire/ice/lightning spell? Or where casting Raise Dead requires a trans-planar Sending variant to contact the deceased? I'm not sure how it would work, exactly, but it seems like there's some room for that interpretation.

You don't really need to look at all the psionic powers or figure out how to fold them into your system, it's just a good example of what you're trying to do here.... ...So if you're looking to combine and modularize spells, the powers might provide some good guidance.
Sure. I'll look into it.

Nifft

2018-10-11, 11:25 AM

Actually, I'd say that schools, subschools, and descriptors having more mechanical definition, not less, would be better.

What you're talking about is re-writing the schools, and that's cool, but it's a different topic from what I'd been discussing.

You're talking about what should be; I've been discussing what currently is.

Rather than having spells assigned to multiple schools, I've been wondering if there should be some effort put into synergy effects between different spell categories.

If you want to put in that much effort, I think you should seriously consider just re-writing the magic system entirely.

D&D magic is a grab-bag of effects from a wide variety of myth & fiction. There's no good way to unify those disparate sources into a coherent whole, so D&D magic didn't even try to make the whole coherent. If you're rebuilding it, you could make a coherent whole, but you probably don't want to start with the big ball of mud that is D&D magic.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-11, 02:21 PM

PoDL, I do have one objection to your assertion about Evocation. In-canon, are there any Evocation spells that actually create *matter*? My take was that they only ever created energy effects (fire, cold, force, electricity, but not acid). Note that Cold is not the same as Ice.

I was thinking the distinction might be that Evocation manipulates energy whereas Conjuration is required to summon matter, but Ice Storm/Wall of Ice are Evocation spells (unless they condense water vapour out of air, or something?), and Meteor Swarm seems to throw some rocks in the mix?

In AD&D, before Conjuration (Creation) was a thing, wall of iron, wall of stone, and the like were all Evocation, and the school descriptions in Tome of Magic, Player Options, etc..all included matter in the Evocation school description. And by the way, so were cloudkill, stinking cloud, web...sensing a theme here? :smallwink:

I honestly have no idea why Conjuration (Creation) was introduced and so many spells moved into it; there was never a comment on that decision by any of the earlier designers. At least with the whole "healing going to Conjuration from Necromancy" thing, there was a history of people freaking out about D&D being Satanic and a concerted effort to e.g. make mindless undead explicitly Evil instead of Neutral, change descriptions of Necromancy from "deals with dead things or the restoration of life, limbs, or vitality to living creatures" to "manipulate[s] the power of death, unlife, and the life force," and so forth to show a general trend of making it "the creepy and evil school" and divorce common PC spells from that. For Evocation -> Conjuration, I got nothin'.

I've never seen a canon explanation that actually connects Evo with the inner planes, just your own assertions.

Granted, I don't think there's a specific quote where it explicitly says "Evocations pull energy and matter from the Inner Planes." But it's pretty clear from the snippets in AD&D where magical theory is addressed that that's what it does:
The 1e DMG specifies that all schools draw on the energy of specific other planes for their effects, and that casting spells with "generic ambient magical energy" is impossible and would wipe out the caster from the strain.
The 1e Manual of the Planes allows casters to freely change up Evocation spells on the Inner Planes to any other element/paraelement/quasielement (wall of radiance, airball, etc.) and enhances or impedes Evocations based on which Inner Plane the caster is on.
The 2e Guide to the Outer Planes states that on the Outer Planes (which in pre-3e cosmology do not connect to the Inner Planes via the Astral because only the Ethereal plane connects to the Inner Planes) explicitly elemental-related spells--both elemental creature conjurations and elemental energy evocations--pull their substance from the surrounding environment and are thereby changed; for instance, conjuring a fire elemental in the Abyss creates a "fire pseudo-elemental" with an Evil alignment and casting wall of ice in a fiery portion of Baator is diminished or impossible because there's little to no source material to draw upon.
The 2e Player Option: Spells & Magic introduces "schools of effect," new wizard subclasses that specialize in different ways than the traditional eight or nine "schools of philosophy." One of them, the "dimensionalist" specialty (which specializes in explicitly plane-related spells), is said to overlap with Alteration, Conjuration, and Invocation/Evocation because they draw on or manipulate other planes, and is described thus: "The dimensionalist is familiar with all kinds of extradimensional pockets, planes, and sources of power. While other wizards make use of these dimensions, the dimensionalist has a much clearer understanding of what he is doing and why when he casts spells of this school." Also, dimensionalists have to have Enchantment/Charm and Necromancy as their prohibited schools because "these philosophies have nothing to do with extraplanar studies or spells."

And there are quite a few more; those are just the references I remember off the top of my head so I can look up the quotes.

Rather than having spells assigned to multiple schools, I've been wondering if there should be some effort put into synergy effects between different spell categories. e.g, where Conjuration or Transmutation could reinforce an Evocation spell by boosting the supply of reagents for a fire/ice/lightning spell? Or where casting Raise Dead requires a trans-planar Sending variant to contact the deceased? I'm not sure how it would work, exactly, but it seems like there's some room for that interpretation.

That could work for some spells, mostly those expected to be cast during downtime. But for a lot of spells it wouldn't, for either mechanical reasons (you don't have all that many actions in combat, so setting up a one-two punch is rarely useful unless you can do it before surprising an enemy) or flavor reasons (you can't sending a departed soul, generally, because souls are objects only able to be manipulated with Necromancy, and they may have been turned into petitioners in the meantime, who would essentially be different beings for sending purposes due to the memory loss and body change).

What I would do is go ahead and assign things dual-school status whenever you think it might fit, and then once you're done go back through them and see whether any of them make sense to split out, rather than trying to come up with synergy effects as you go for every potential dual-school effect.

What you're talking about is re-writing the schools, and that's cool, but it's a different topic from what I'd been discussing.

You're talking about what should be; I've been discussing what currently is.

Ah, your mention of "game writers" made me think you were talking about a rewrite. In the current setup, I completely agree with you.

D&D magic is a grab-bag of effects from a wide variety of myth & fiction. There's no good way to unify those disparate sources into a coherent whole, so D&D magic didn't even try to make the whole coherent. If you're rebuilding it, you could make a coherent whole, but you probably don't want to start with the big ball of mud that is D&D magic.

I mean, the D&D school setup isn't fundamentally different than other games' magic systems. Ars Magica has its verb/noun system, and its Creo/Intellego/Muto/Perdo/Rego verbs map more or less to D&D's Conjuration (creatures)/Evocation (objects), Divination, Transmutation, Evocation (blasting)/Necromancy (SoDs), and Abjuration (wards)/Enchantment (creatures), respectively, while its Imaginem/Mentem/Vim nouns map very closely to Illusion/Enchantment/Abjuration and the elemental nouns map to Conjuration and Evocation.

Shadowrun has spell categories of Healing, Detection, and Illusion which map to D&D Necromancy, Divination, and Illusion, and Combat and Manipulation which not only map to Conjuration/Evocation and Transmutation but also suffer the "designers put everything in Combat and Manipulation" problem that Conjuration and Transmutation do. It also has Conjuration (maps to Conjuration), Adept powers (maps to personal Abjuration and Transmutation), and even Metamagic.

Both of those games are lauded for their magic systems, the former for weaving the lore so well throughout the game and having...serviceable spell construction mechanics and the latter for having very strong and well-thought-out metaphysics, and both have the same "categories magic into groups of 'how they do stuff' and 'what they effect' and divide spell effects up appropriately." The general approach is sound, the problem with D&D's take is simply that the 3e devs changed some school definitions and spell categorizations and threw too many things into the default schools, which can be addressed without starting from scratch.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-11, 03:45 PM

D&D magic is a grab-bag of effects from a wide variety of myth & fiction. There's no good way to unify those disparate sources into a coherent whole, so D&D magic didn't even try to make the whole coherent. If you're rebuilding it, you could make a coherent whole, but you probably don't want to start with the big ball of mud that is D&D magic.

In AD&D, before Conjuration (Creation) was a thing, wall of iron, wall of stone, and the like were all Evocation, and the school descriptions in Tome of Magic, Player Options, etc..all included matter in the Evocation school description. And by the way, so were cloudkill, stinking cloud, web...sensing a theme here? :smallwink:
Yeah, I see what you mean...

I probably will wind up writing a different system, but I guess what I'm aiming for is something that still feels sufficiently D&D-ish that it doesn't frighten off the local gaming group. Just... uh... an adaptation that doesn't make me wince internally and can be summarised in, oh, less than 20 pages or so.

That could work for some spells, mostly those expected to be cast during downtime. But for a lot of spells it wouldn't, for either mechanical reasons (you don't have all that many actions in combat, so setting up a one-two punch is rarely useful unless you can do it before surprising an enemy) or flavor reasons (you can't sending a departed soul, generally, because souls are objects only able to be manipulated with Necromancy, and they may have been turned into petitioners in the meantime, who would essentially be different beings for sending purposes due to the memory loss and body change).
Technically speaking Raise Dead is also a conjuration spell at the moment, though I was thinking of inventing an entirely new 'school' that would sit across from necromancy for this purpose. (I get the point about necromancy being a general 'life force' school, so maybe one could squeeze it between the 'holy' and 'unholy' domains.)

Your point about petitioners is interesting, because spells like Resurrection/True Res specify time-of-death limits measured in decades or centuries, at which point one might expect most souls to have been promoted to archon/lemure/whatever status. And Sending does technically allow for contacting 'someone familiar' on another plane...

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-11, 04:50 PM

Yeah, I see what you mean...

I probably will wind up writing a different system, but I guess what I'm aiming for is something that still feels sufficiently D&D-ish that it doesn't frighten off the local gaming group. Just... uh... an adaptation that doesn't make me wince internally and can be summarised in, oh, less than 20 pages or so.

One of my goals when doing my own re-schooling homebrew was also to avoid scaring off the experienced D&D players in my group. In my experience, people won't object to a major change to a given aspect of the system as much as they otherwise would if you can point to precedent within D&D. "I'm changing X because it's dumb" may be true but won't help it feel like D&D, but "I'm changing X because back in 1e..." will usually silence any objections. :smallwink:

More seriously, aim for broad sweeping changes and rules of thumb more than spell-by-spell things. If you can put down a rule like "all cloud spells are Evocation," that's simpler, easier to remember, and easier to use when categorizing non-core spells you might have missed than a rule like "acid fog and cloudkill are Conjuration, fog cloud and obscuring mist are Conjuration/Evocation, incendiary cloud is Evocation...." because that requires a lot more verbiage, is still very special-case-y, is harder to remember, and cannot be generalized to new spells without your input. Elegance and concision are your friends here.

Technically speaking Raise Dead is also a conjuration spell at the moment

I don't have as much of an undying (heh) hatred for the Conjuration (Healing) subschool stealing stuff from Necromancy as I do for Conjuration (Creation) and Evocation...but it's definitely still there. :smallamused:

Your point about petitioners is interesting, because spells like Resurrection/True Res specify time-of-death limits measured in decades or centuries, at which point one might expect most souls to have been promoted to archon/lemure/whatever status. And Sending does technically allow for contacting 'someone familiar' on another plane...

Regarding promotion, the vast majority of souls become lantern archons, lemures, manes, etc. and stay in that form for a very long time. Promotions are rare and based more on need than merit, according to the Monstrous Manual; there are bazillions of exemplars of higher-than-petitioner status because there are many bazillions of Primes from which souls flow into the plane, not because most or even many get promoted in a relatively short timescale of decades or centuries.

And the lore does take this into account:

Of course, if a mortal is resurrected in some manner, this also disperses the petitioner form in a sense, pulling it back through the Astral alongside its memory core, losing any memories of its time in the planes in the process. But the planes and the powers don't like losing their petitioners, especially given that once alive, they may choose a different path. Thus, resurrection of any sort tends to be a difficult task, requiring great power (and, of course, consent of the raised). And those that have moved on from being a petitioner, either through merging or through ascension, can no longer be brought back by any means.

Regarding petitioners being "someone familiar," petitioners lose almost all of their memories upon death, as their memories go to the Astral (as mentioned in the above quote) while their souls go to the corresponding Outer Plane. Petitioners can retain their memories through deific intervention, infernal pacts, strength of will, and various other means, of course, and in that case you could sending your dear friend Bob the Paladin even once he's become Bob the Lantern Archon, but if Joe the LG Fighter becomes Joe the LG Lantern Archon with little to no memory of his past life, well...

Once formed, most petitioners have the same personalities they had in life, though nearly all memories of that life are lost. Some may have flashes of names or common mannerisms carried over, but for the most part a petitioner is entirely devoid of their living nature. As a petitioner continues along their path, however, the innate wisdom of the plane or realm's nature, or that bestowed by their power, tends to change them, bringing them more in line with the nature of their home. They become more and more focused on that nature, leading to the common stereotype of petitioners as single-minded and boring. However, as petitioners come from mortals, there is as much variation in their nature as there is amongst the living.

...Joe the Lantern Archon will quickly diverge from Joe the LG Fighter to the point that sending probably wouldn't work.

Now, this isn't to say that you can't rejigger the petitioner fluff so that more memories are retained, personalities don't tend to drift until after the resurrection window, and so forth. My point was just that there are a bunch of places where an obvious split of a school-blurring spell might have flavor ramifications and you need to either work those out or work around them.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-11, 05:49 PM

One of my goals when doing my own re-schooling homebrew was also to avoid scaring off the experienced D&D players in my group. In my experience, people won't object to a major change to a given aspect of the system as much as they otherwise would if you can point to precedent within D&D.. ...Elegance and concision are your friends here.
I'm definitely hoping for concision- again, 4-8 spells per school- but if I'm combining this with the skill-based casting ideas from the other thread you could have actual straightforward synergy bonuses from other schools, at least for certain casting purposes. Have to see, I guess.

My bugaboo about Necromancy is mainly that it creates an asymmetry in domain/school-access- Clerics are generally the ones getting the nifty faith-healing abilities, whereas wizards can channel negative energy to their heart's content but can't channel the positive variety at all, for some reason. (And then Bards get it, with no clear metaphysical justification.) It seems very arbitrary.

I'd like there to be at least some things clerics can do that wizards can't and vice versa, so rather than give healing to wizards I'd incline to make necromancy cleric-only. That, or make healing a 'good/holy' school, the nastier death-based-magic an 'evil/unholy' school, and necromancy a 'grey area' that can do a little of both, but either not as effectively or in more cautious and specialised ways.

Regarding promotion, the vast majority of souls become lantern archons, lemures, manes, etc. and stay in that form for a very long time. Promotions are rare and based more on need than merit, according to the Monstrous Manual; there are bazillions of exemplars of higher-than-petitioner status because there are many bazillions of Primes from which souls flow into the plane, not because most or even many get promoted in a relatively short timescale of decades or centuries.

Regarding petitioners being "someone familiar," petitioners lose almost all of their memories upon death, as their memories go to the Astral (as mentioned in the above quote) while their souls go to the corresponding Outer Plane. Petitioners can retain their memories through deific intervention, infernal pacts, strength of will, and various other means, of course, and in that case you could sending your dear friend Bob the Paladin even once he's become Bob the Lantern Archon, but if Joe the LG Fighter becomes Joe the LG Lantern Archon with little to no memory of his past life, well...
So... hang on a second. When the Raise Dead spell stipulates the soul must be 'free and willing to return', does that mean it's asking the blank-slate petitioner with no memory of it's former life, or the astral memory core that can't make decisions?

Are worshippers generally informed that this is what they can realistically expect on death? Because it reminds me more of the cosmic fluff from Kult than "blessed are the saints and martyrs", so to speak...

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-11, 10:44 PM

So... hang on a second. When the Raise Dead spell stipulates the soul must be 'free and willing to return', does that mean it's asking the blank-slate petitioner with no memory of it's former life, or the astral memory core that can't make decisions?

It's undefined, technically. Spells like raise dead, reincarnate, and the like didn't have the "souls must be willing to return" verbiage in AD&D, and after that was added in 3e they didn't cover what exactly happens when you die in MotP or the like, implicitly leaving the Planescape flavor in place but not explaining how those two things interact.

The 3e MotP implies that memory cores don't immediately dissociate from the souls anymore, saying that souls "eventually forget their past lives (this is why spells that restore life may fail if a long time has elapsed)" and "if the surviving characters visit the Outer Planes and encounter the dead spirit of a former comrade, their old ally may or may not remember them." So rather than having some souls retain some or all of their memories due to willpower/faith/etc. and keep them, while others lose them all immediately, all souls kind of gradually lose their memories at various rates depending on their willpower/faith/etc.

Were I to use the Planescape flavor for the afterlife with the 3e willing-to-return clause, for whatever reason, I would probably rule that since those spells can reconnect the memory core and the soul when it brings the target back, the spell would reach "through" the memory core to connect it with the soul, reuniting the full being for long enough for it to make a decision as to whether it wants to come back.

Are worshippers generally informed that this is what they can realistically expect on death? Because it reminds me more of the cosmic fluff from Kult than "blessed are the saints and martyrs", so to speak...

Indeed they are. Keep in mind, though, that "lose your memory, go to Outer Plane, become petitioner, merge with plane" is the baseline state of things--it's what you get if you do the bare minimum to exemplify your alignment and have no patron deity, the equivalent of going to church on Christmas and Easter and ignoring religion otherwise.

People who strongly exemplify their alignments can end up as petitioners who retain more of their memory, if not all of it, and even continue to grow and gain experience after death. Those who worship their patron deities sufficiently fervently go to their god's afterlife instead, becoming divine servants, petitioners who retain all their memories, or more powerful outsiders, however that particular god's divine realm works. People who make pacts with celestials and fiends can "jump the line" to become "real" outsiders instead of petitioners as well, though the wording on those fiendish contracts is tricky and such a favorable deal is rarely offered.

(Forgotten Realms has an entirely different cosmological setup, though, with an incredibly terrible afterlife. Screw the Wall of the Faithless. :smallannoyed:)

So while in real-life religions the teachings are generally something like "Be good and get rewarded in the nice afterlife, be bad and get punished in the bad afterlife!", in D&D it's "Be Good or Evil, it doesn't matter, Good gods judge Good people and Evil gods judge Evil people so do whatever feels right to you. But if you're wishy-washy or don't worship well enough, 'you' won't get a reward because 'you' won't really exist anymore; if you want to keep being 'you' after you die, you need to be strong in your convictions and stay on good terms with your patron!"

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-12, 09:47 AM

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-12, 02:35 PM

On Raise Dead, etc.: My inclination would be to suggest that the various alignment-based afterlives would treat departed souls rather differently. The chaos-aligned planes would probably have a lot more infighting and disagreement but also allow you to retain individuality for much longer- perhaps indefinitely- whereas the mechanus-equivalents would specialise in, well, "the nail that sticks up must be hammered down".

Perhaps. On the other hand, Pandemonium is all about going insane and losing yourself in the howling winds, whereas Bytopia and Arcadia residents are basically the same as mortals as far as personality, individuality, etc. but simply choose harmony and cooperation because that's what they truly believe is best.

Sticking with the default version in 3e lets you cover both bases with its vagueness on the duration of memory loss: some souls retain their sense of self for a long time and "gradually" means "over many millennia," some throw themselves headfirst into being One With Everything and merge with the plane in mere months. That gives you both versions as needed, and on Bytopia you can have communities of remember-everything-with-full-continuity-of-consciousness souls, where certain pastoral Prime towns basically have their populations migrate en masse to Dothion as they die, exist right next to communities of totally-memory-wiped souls where new ones show up and integrate harmoniously with welcoming total strangers because that's The Right Thing To Do.

I can't see 'mortals exist solely as long-term sustenance for hungry gods' as anything but morally noxious or something that good-aligned deities would be happy about, though.

Yeah. That's why the FR version sucks. :smallannoyed:

Note that the whole Gods Need Prayer Badly (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodsNeedPrayerBadly) thing (warning, TVTropes link!) is not the AD&D or 3e default nor a feature of most settings. In Planescape, gods are shaped by belief (like everything else in the Great Wheel), but predate mortalkind and don't subsist on their worship and wither away without it in the same way (or at least to the same scale) that FR gods do, and in many other settings gods are totally independent of worship and worshiping a god is much more of a bargain or tit-for-tat agreement than a necessity for the gods.

What about reincarnation mechanics? Is that something covered in the canon at any length?

Yep. In several Prime worlds, elves have their own special afterlife (because of course there's a special elven afterlife :smallwink:) to which they can go instead of the normal ones, and they can reincarnate from there. Because gods can muck around with petitioners, souls, and memory cores, the Hindu version of reincarnation is practiced by several faiths (including the actual Hindu pantheon). One of the Sigil factions, the Believers of the Source or Godsmen (who believe that people exist to improve themselves over multiple lifetimes and eventually maybe ascend to godhood) are hard to resurrect but very easy to reincarnate and can even access past lives on occasion.

Going further on the topic of necromancy: I think part of the problem here is that there isn't a lot of consistency (https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Tome_of_Necromancy_(3.5e_Sourcebook)/Morality#Moral_Option_2:_Playing_with_Fire) on what 'negative energy' is or to what extent actual souls are involved. I mean, if we look at the original greek-inspired medieval-alchemy metaphysics that D&D seems to be borrowing from, you have the 4 standard elements, and a 5th element to represent life-force- aether, quintessence, chi, or prana. In that framework, you can channel 'aether' to heal wounds, but you can also try stuffing it into a corpse to give it some semblance of life again, or possibly follow the 'aether trail' to sniff out someone's soul and yank it back into their body.
[...]
But the aether in itself is neither inherently good nor bad.

Positive energy and negative energy and their relation to the undead are actually fairly consistent in their portrayal overall; most 3e sources still follow the existing canon where those things are concerned. While the Tome of Necromancy says that "Some monsters have been written up with the (incorrect) assumption that either 'The Crawling Darkness' or 'Playing With Fire' was the general rule," a more accurate statement would be "The 'Playing With Fire' interpretation is the default one for D&D, but some 3e monsters have been written up with the (incorrect) assumption that 'The Crawling Darkness' is in play due to a handful of ham-fisted changes to Necromancy early in the edition."

Positive energy is a creative force, negative energy is a destructive force, and neither has any relationship to Good or Evil. Though some later 3e devs did take the whole cleric spontaneous-casting-by-alignment thing (where flavor-wise Good clerics spontaneously heal because Good gods want their followers to help people and Evil clerics spontaneously inflict because Evil gods want their followers to hurt people and sometimes heal undead, and mechanically it's easier for most PC clerics to heal and most villain clerics to harm) and misinterpreted that as "positive energy Good, negative energy Evil," since 3e already screwed around with Necromancy's alignment implications.

Problem is that, by default, a corpse can't actually support that life any more, so it's either an automaton running on a withered brain-stem's basal instincts or a severely uncomfortable vessel for the victim's soul, which is where the ickyness comes in.

Undead come in both varieties: Mindless undead are automata powered by negative energy, in the same way that golems and other constructs are powered by elemental or shadow energy, while sapient undead are vessels for the now-negative-energy-powered soul. It's not really all that icky; undead are basically just running all the normal living processes "backwards" using negative energy. Mortals only find them icky because of the whole "death by energy drain and/or blood sucking" thing so many undead tend to engage in. :smallwink:

(One could even argue that Monks are practicing a benign sort of 'internal necromancy', with the ultimate aim of liberating themselves from the cycle of life & death or a particular afterlife destination through control over their own aether/chi. You know, like actual Buddhism.)

A monk's internal ki powers, the supernatural stuff in Tome of Battle, incarnum, and the like are arguably (and in the latter case explicitly) manipulations of a person's internal soul energy, which is largely positive energy with some secret sauce mixed in. Note that the true nature of souls in D&D has never been detailed, out-of-game because falling afoul of real-world religious authorities who already thought it was Satanic and blasphemous wasn't fun and in-game because if the gods and outsiders who care a lot about souls could just make them that would destabilize things pretty badly in favor of whoever figured it out first.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-12, 03:46 PM

Perhaps. On the other hand, Pandemonium is all about going insane and losing yourself in the howling winds, whereas Bytopia and Arcadia residents are basically the same as mortals as far as personality, individuality, etc. but simply choose harmony and cooperation because that's what they truly believe is best.
Yeah, I've never been very fond of Pandemonium/Limbo's descriptions, to be honest- it just doesn't seem like 'Giant Frog' should be the baseline embodiment (https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Tome_of_Fiends_(3.5e_Sourcebook)/Morality_and_Fiends#Ethics_Option_2:_A_Question_of _Sanity) of all things chaotic. (I don't have enormous fondness for WH40K, but the setting seems to grok 'chaos should be variagated and diverse' a good deal better.)

A possible solution here would be to rig up some Possession rules for summoning Outsiders into a mortal body. Even if Jim the LG Fighter has transitioned to a more advanced spiritual form, regenerating their original body as a vessel to inhabit could act as a hefty casting-bonus for summoning Jim the Astral Deva to the material plane. (With the benefit that if they die again, they aren't permanently destroyed.)

I'm not sure how much of a problem this'd be in practical terms during play- it seems like this would be more an issue for raising long-dead NPCs than a recently-expired party member- but if the player doesn't roll up a new PC immediately there is the outside possibility of battle casualties getting their own afterlife-based solo adventure. Or, you know, scrawling messages (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PtMT0PNOyg) on the walls in blood.

Because gods can muck around with petitioners, souls, and memory cores, the Hindu version of reincarnation is practiced by several faiths (including the actual Hindu pantheon). One of the Sigil factions, the Believers of the Source or Godsmen (who believe that people exist to improve themselves over multiple lifetimes and eventually maybe ascend to godhood) are hard to resurrect but very easy to reincarnate and can even access past lives on occasion.
...Eeexcellent. *steeples fingers*

I will just say that in hindsight the Satanic Panic strikes me as rather ironic- Gygax himself was a fundamentalist christian, and it shows (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7577381). You could easily create a version of D&D that's 100% christianity-compatible and surprisingly little would change.

Undead come in both varieties... ...mortals only find them icky because of the whole "death by energy drain and/or blood sucking" thing so many undead tend to engage in. :smallwink:
No, I get the whole "filling up the tank with a different kind of gas" analogy- but the basic problem is that the engine itself is broken. The whole reason why someone's life-force leaked out in the first place is because their body was beaten, hacked, zapped or metabolically compromised to the point where they can't stands no more. I can't imagine that being comfortable to 'live' with.

The other problem I see with having these two kinds of undead at once is that they imply metaphysical frameworks that don't sit well with eachother. The 'mindless undead' model is like using electricity to make a frog's leg twitch, or Frankenstein animating his creature with a lightning bolt (leaving aside that D&D has actual lightning-powered golems for now)- the specific reason why this story is frightening is because it suggests there is no animating principle independent of the body. It's the horror of materialism- that we're nothing more than atoms arranged in the right ways and spun into motion.

Whereas if you have a universe where the soul explicitly is an animating principle independent of the body, then this approach either cannot or should not work. (You can counter that mindless undead aren't really person-like, but if they can move around and follow verbal orders it feels pretty close, and there are numerous undead species that are not damned souls trapped in a lifeless husk, yet still highly intelligent.)

Nifft

2018-10-12, 03:56 PM

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-12, 04:07 PM

What's with the dandwiki link?

Anyway, for one game what I did was replace Limbo with Faerie as the planar embodiment of CN.
Yeah, I was thinking something like that would be more flavoursome (especially given that most of the tolkien-derived fantasy races in D&D and fair range of the fiendish outsiders are clearly derived from medieval Fae or greco-roman nature spirits.*)

The link I gave is going on about the Slaads and law/chaos in general:

In this model we get a coherent explanation for why, when all the forces of Evil are composed of a multitude of strange nightmarish creatures, and the forces of Good have everything from a glowing patch of light to a winged snake tailed woman, every single soldier in the army of Chaos is a giant frog. This is because in this model Limbo is a place that is totally insane. It's a place where the answer to every question really is "Giant Frog". Creatures of Chaos then proceed to go to non Chaotically-aligned planes and are disappointed and confused when doors have to be pushed and pulled to open and entrance cannot be achieved by "Giant Frog".

EDIT: *Or norse mythology, of course. All a big pointy-eared melting pot, anyways.

Nifft

2018-10-12, 04:22 PM

That wiki seems a bit wrong, though -- the plane for insanity in 3.x would usually be the Far Realms, not Limbo.

Limbo isn't insane, it's just highly morphic.

Githzerai wouldn't be able to meditate on Monkish topics if they were stuck in a plane of insanity. What they do is use the morphic trait of the plane to test their own mental self-control, imposing their will upon the flexible inconstant material of Limbo.

So the wiki is leading you through bad assumptions, into invalid conclusions.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-12, 04:34 PM

So the wiki is leading you through bad assumptions, into invalid conclusions.
I think the broader point the ToF is making is that one would expect a plane of concentrated chaos and/or it's denizens to not show particular uniformity on this or any other point. And it's not equating chaos with insanity, it's pointing out the problems with trying to do so, or with any other straightforward rubric for law/chaos.

The Githzerai, now that you mention them, do seem odd- I mean, is there a correspondingly amorphous CN race that hangs around Mechanus and creates islands of creative autonomy that make humanoid life possible?

Nifft

2018-10-12, 04:55 PM

I think the broader point the ToF is making is that one would expect a plane of concentrated chaos and/or it's denizens to not show particular uniformity on this or any other point. And it's not equating chaos with insanity, it's pointing out the problems with trying to do so, or with any other straightforward rubric for law/chaos.

There were tables for variant Slaad traits in at least one edition... the 3.5e Slaad is probably lacking due to being Product Identity (i.e. not in the SRD) and thus getting less attention than other monster types.

But the Slaadi are not the only Limbo [Chaos] monsters -- look at the Chaos Beast (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/chaosBeast.htm), for example.

It's possible that all highly morphic monsters came from Limbo: that would be stuff like the Phasm, the Doppelganger, and the Mimic. I mean, if you want Limbo as a thing in your cosmology.

The Githzerai, now that you mention them, do seem odd- I mean, is there a correspondingly amorphous CN race that hangs around Mechanus and creates islands of creative autonomy that make humanoid life possible?

PCs who go there specifically to troll Modrons, maybe?

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-13, 01:01 PM

Yeah, I've never been very fond of Pandemonium/Limbo's descriptions, to be honest- it just doesn't seem like 'Giant Frog' should be the baseline embodiment (https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Tome_of_Fiends_(3.5e_Sourcebook)/Morality_and_Fiends#Ethics_Option_2:_A_Question_of _Sanity) of all things chaotic. (I don't have enormous fondness for WH40K, but the setting seems to grok 'chaos should be variagated and diverse' a good deal better.)

I think the broader point the ToF is making is that one would expect a plane of concentrated chaos and/or it's denizens to not show particular uniformity on this or any other point. And it's not equating chaos with insanity, it's pointing out the problems with trying to do so, or with any other straightforward rubric for law/chaos.

In-game, the reason that all the slaad come in rainbow uniformity is not because chaos = insanity (though slaad are fairly "differently sane" and the ToF provides a reasonable summary of their particular outlook), but because the original or "true" slaad (the surviving members of whom would later become known as the slaad lords) were each unique in form and very powerful, and several of them were worried about other more powerful slaad arising and displacing them, so they created the Spawning Stone to force slaads into certain forms with only minor variations.

Out-of-game, the reason that Charles Stross (the creator of the slaad) went with a frog theme is that "totally amorphous shapechanger" is a cliché for chaos and he wanted to have some sort of unexpected and unsettling theme to them, similar to how Lovecraft's "formless creatures from out of time and space" tend to end up with lots of eyes and tentacles.

Additionally, early D&D had a bit of a running theme with lots of frog/snake/rat/spider monsters, since it was very focused on the dungeon and the ruined aesthetic of fallen civilizations, and those animals tend to be found in crumbling towers, sunken temples, and such, so he was making a bit of an association with decay, mutation, and so forth by going with a frog theme. The various OSR games amusingly have to eschew slaad (because they're product identity) and then go whole hog on the frogmen and toadmen and snakemen and so on.

I will just say that in hindsight the Satanic Panic strikes me as rather ironic- Gygax himself was a fundamentalist christian, and it shows (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7577381). You could easily create a version of D&D that's 100% christianity-compatible and surprisingly little would change.

Oh, it was definitely ridiculous, and you can indeed run a totally Christianity-rethemed version; I've done it before for some of my very Christian friends who were uncomfortable with the baseline D&D cosmology. But that doesn't stop crazy people who are looking to be offended from latching onto a dumb idea and running with it.

A possible solution here would be to rig up some Possession rules for summoning Outsiders into a mortal body. Even if Jim the LG Fighter has transitioned to a more advanced spiritual form, regenerating their original body as a vessel to inhabit could act as a hefty casting-bonus for summoning Jim the Astral Deva to the material plane. (With the benefit that if they die again, they aren't permanently destroyed.)

There are actually rules for that already in BoED/BoVD/Eberron, both channeling celestials and fiends possessing unwilling hosts, that you could crib from.

No, I get the whole "filling up the tank with a different kind of gas" analogy- but the basic problem is that the engine itself is broken. The whole reason why someone's life-force leaked out in the first place is because their body was beaten, hacked, zapped or metabolically compromised to the point where they can't stands no more. I can't imagine that being comfortable to 'live' with.

The other problem I see with having these two kinds of undead at once is that they imply metaphysical frameworks that don't sit well with eachother. The 'mindless undead' model is like using electricity to make a frog's leg twitch, or Frankenstein animating his creature with a lightning bolt (leaving aside that D&D has actual lightning-powered golems for now)- the specific reason why this story is frightening is because it suggests there is no animating principle independent of the body. It's the horror of materialism- that we're nothing more than atoms arranged in the right ways and spun into motion.

Whereas if you have a universe where the soul explicitly is an animating principle independent of the body, then this approach either cannot or should not work. (You can counter that mindless undead aren't really person-like, but if they can move around and follow verbal orders it feels pretty close, and there are numerous undead species that are not damned souls trapped in a lifeless husk, yet still highly intelligent.)

Well, keep in mind that the soul isn't an animating force at all. At a fundamental level a living creature (or deathless), an undead, and a construct all work the same way, they're just powered respectively by positive, negative, and elemental or shadow energy, and none of them need a soul to walk and talk and stab people in the face.

Having a soul is what separates a human from a tree, a vampire from a skeleton, and a warforged from a golem, and is what lets them have individual identities and believe in things and grow and change and so forth, as opposed to merely being meat/bone/rock puppets with mobility and simplistic (if complex) programming but no actual sapience. Skeletons are no more person-like because they can walk and follow orders than a human with its brain taken out and replaced by an Amazon Echo and some Arduinos to let it listen to orders and carry them out is still a "person."

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-16, 03:39 PM

Out-of-game, the reason that Charles Stross (the creator of the slaad) went with a frog theme is that "totally amorphous shapechanger" is a cliché for chaos and he wanted to have some sort of unexpected and unsettling theme to them, similar to how Lovecraft's "formless creatures from out of time and space" tend to end up with lots of eyes and tentacles.

Additionally, early D&D had a bit of a running theme with lots of frog/snake/rat/spider monsters, since it was very focused on the dungeon and the ruined aesthetic of fallen civilizations, and those animals tend to be found in crumbling towers, sunken temples, and such, so he was making a bit of an association with decay, mutation, and so forth by going with a frog theme. The various OSR games amusingly have to eschew slaad (because they're product identity) and then go whole hog on the frogmen and toadmen and snakemen and so on.
Bit of a digression, but can I just say that I really dig Wayne Barlowe's approach to these things? He does 'weird but structured' probably better than any other artist I know of.

What I might try doing is creating a 'classless bestiary' in the same sense that I'm trying to aim for 'classless PCs'. Divide monsters into 4 basic groups per the alignment segments (probably Fae, Inevitables, Undead and Celestials), and let the GM mix & match traits to create custom monster-races for the setting. (Or just maverick individuals.)

There are actually rules for that already in BoED/BoVD/Eberron, both channeling celestials and fiends possessing unwilling hosts, that you could crib from.
Thanks for the tip.

Having a soul is what separates a human from a tree, a vampire from a skeleton, and a warforged from a golem, and is what lets them have individual identities and believe in things and grow and change and so forth, as opposed to merely being meat/bone/rock puppets with mobility and simplistic (if complex) programming but no actual sapience. Skeletons are no more person-like because they can walk and follow orders than a human with its brain taken out and replaced by an Amazon Echo and some Arduinos to let it listen to orders and carry them out is still a "person."
Hmm. I wonder about that.

I guess my adjudication would be that "False Undead" are essentially a category of golem produced by wizard-necromancers, with the only advantage being that the raw materials of a fresh human corpse are nominally more disposed to getting up and walking around than a lump of clay would be? "True Undead" could be the recalled souls of the fallen, substantially more dangerous, and mostly or exclusively the plaything of powerful clerics.

So something like the following:

Necromancy:
* All spells cause injury/fatigue in addition to SP cost.
Speak with Dead -augment divinations connected to fresh corpse
Ghost Touch -extend range of touch effects, fatigue the living
Drain Essence -siphon health & spell-points from subject to caster
Decomposition -poison the living, dissolve undead
Vital Stasis -preserve corpse or hamper/paralyse living
False Life -mild heal, temporarily boost max. health of subject
Tissue Construct -grow replacement parts, combine surgically
False Animation -create 'false undead' from fresh corpse

Holy Spells:
Radiance -lights way or blinds foes, repels/burns undead
Close Wounds -convert minor injury to fatigue
Purge Affliction -remove disease, paralysis, poison, etc.
Libation -purify food/water, create potions/holy water
Word of Peace -boost to diplomacy, put compelled undead to rest
Exorcism -use dialog to expel outsiders or malign undead
Heal -remove major injury, regenerate limbs or ability loss
Resurrection -combines contact/summoning/regeneration of the dead

Unholy Spells:
Miasma -obscures vision, fortifies undead
Death Knell -slays anyone nearby near death
Word of Doom -boost to intimidate, can use dialog to curse target
Seal Affliction -render harmful condition permanent
Contagion -deal mild damage & inflict disease, befoul food/water
Summon Undead -combines contact/summoning/binding of souls as undead
Destruction -deal heavy damage, can consume corpse
Soul Drain -steadily drain life & levels from subject

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-17, 12:43 AM

What I might try doing is creating a 'classless bestiary' in the same sense that I'm trying to aim for 'classless PCs'. Divide monsters into 4 basic groups per the alignment segments (probably Fae, Inevitables, Undead and Celestials), and let the GM mix & match traits to create custom monster-races for the setting. (Or just maverick individuals.)
[...]
I guess my adjudication would be that "False Undead" are essentially a category of golem produced by wizard-necromancers, with the only advantage being that the raw materials of a fresh human corpse are nominally more disposed to getting up and walking around than a lump of clay would be? "True Undead" could be the recalled souls of the fallen, substantially more dangerous, and mostly or exclusively the plaything of powerful clerics.

I generally favor a nice type/subtype setup for a build-your-own-monster or monster-classes setup, where types are based on physical compositions and give you body plan and gross physical characteristics while subtypes are based on plane/composition/environment/etc. and give access to thematic groupings of abilities.

I also usually go with four types, but mine are Folk (generally human-like creatures with language and society and so forth), Beasts (monstrous but still vaguely biological creatures), Elementals (things made of a single substance, so classical elementals but also oozes as "ooze elementals" and plants as "wood elementals" and the like), and Spirits (things with immaterial, not-at-all-biological, or otherwise unusual forms). Then you subtype those by alignment, life force, and so forth.

As an example:

SubtypeFolkBeastElementalSpirit
no subtypeHalfling, ElfDog, Owlbear——
(Fire)Fire Genasi, AzerPhoenix, SalamanderMagma Paraelemental, BelkerEfreeti, Rast
(Demon)Tiefling, SuccubusVrock, BabauBalor, YochlolDybbuk, Sibriex
(Construct)Nimblewright, Shield GuardianClockwork Horror, AutomatonClay Golem, Juggernaut—
(Undead)Zombie, VampireOwlbear Skeleton, Bone Rat SwarmLavawight, DesiccatorShadow, Banshee
(Fey)Verdant Lord, PixieBlink Dog, UnicornTreant, Frostwind ViragoSpirit of the Land, Dryad
(Aberration)Elan, IllithidAboleth, Beholder—Rukarazyll, Gibbering Mouther

And of course monsters can have multiple subtypes: White Dragons are Beast (Cold, Dragon), Retrievers are Beast (Construct, Demon), etc. This works nicely for a mix-and-match monster system because you can have a general list of monster abilities (Attribute Boost, Extra Natural Attack, Speed Increase, etc.) and lists for each subtype (Demon Summoning and Telepathy for demons, Breath Weapon and Scaling Energy Resistance for dragons, etc.) and then a given monster is just X selections from the general list and Y from subtype lists, where X and Y vary by HD or CR or whatever other metric you want to use.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-18, 10:56 AM

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-19, 12:36 AM

Just as an aside, for necromancy I'm working off the assumption that the outer planes and their divine/demonic patrons have an effective lockdown on positive/negative energy, so a wizard can't draw power from the inner planes to do this kind of work, and it's correspondingly more exhausting.

That doesn't work out by the standard fluff, since there's plenty of arcane magic that uses positive or negative energy (SoD spells like enervation and finger of death, reanimators like animate dead, environmental infusions like blood snow and blackwater taint, debuffs like wave of exhaustion and disrupt undead, and so forth, plus any spells that manipulate quasielements like lightning are at least positive-/negative-adjacent).

A better way to frame it would probably be that gods have claimed dominion over souls and anything that would bring them back or slow their departure from their mortal coil, due to the respective roles of deities and souls in the D&D multiverse, so arcane healing is certainly possible--though more limited and less efficient, with bards only getting it due to their jack-of-all-trades nature and the existence of divine bards--but the gods tend to frown on anyone who tries to research any spells that would undermine their oligopoly on healing and resurrection. That not only explains the bard and the handful of arcane healing spells that do exist, but gives you free rein to reserve whatever spells you want for divine casters, since gods are entitled to be petty and inconsistent with what they deign to allow arcanists to research without getting smitten.

On a similar note, I'd imagine that clerics should have an easier time summoning souls and outsiders that are actually in their patron's keeping, than they would with the dead in general and especially those that head to a hostile afterlife.

If by that you mean clerics shouldn't all get a generic Turn/Rebuke Undead ability but should get more thematic versions or different abilities entirely, I agree. The cleric originally got it because of Sir Fang the Vampire and kept it because undead are disproportionately scary at low levels, but if you're revamping spells you can give them alternative tools for dealing with undead.

I like that outline quite a bit, but I think one could go further. Things like the Balor and Succubi, for example- with the wings and hooves and horns and so forth- are clearly modelled off medieval depictions of the devil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_in_Christianity#History) in turn based on various nature-oriented pagan deities (and/or Tolkien, which tries to bridge the two.) In other words, you've got a bunch of Dionysian chaos/nature/sexuality spirits effectively shovelled into the 'blech, evil' corner because of historical accident/bad PR.

Even Apollonian creatures like Angels and Sphinxes/Lammasu could be construed as animal hybrids of some kind, at least until you get into wierder iterations like the Thrones/Ophanim and Eye of Providence, which give off a pretty 'modron' vibe. On that note, modron/undead gives you the hellraiser/cenobite aesthetic, or certain aspects (https://www.reddit.com/r/ImaginaryMonsters/comments/8sslfg/sarganatas_brigadier_general_of_hell_wayne/) of barlowe's inferno.

You could still have a lot of individual/racial outliers, of course- lawful earth-attuned fae (dwarves), corrupted miltonian celestials, etc- plus it would be nice to figure how you might represent 'a wizard did it' mechanically.

Oh, you definitely could fold everything into Mortal and Spirit types, with everything demonic/fey/celestial/etc. falling into the latter category. The main reason I split Folk and Beast and split Elemental and Spirit is for easily splitting up type-based ability lists.

Humanoid creatures are traditionally light on fancy features (just stat boosts and some flavor abilities for PC races, one or two signature tricks for monstrous races) and tend to take class levels, fight with weapons, and so forth like a human--a succubus can easily be made as a Folk/[something seductive like a Bard or Beguiler] with stat boosts from her Folk HD and some fancy magic weapons, for instance, with the demon-specific stuff like SLAs and at-will teleport coming from the (Demon) list. Beasts, meanwhile, are usually big bundles of physical and/or defensive stuff like massive stats, thick armor, tons of natural weapons, high SR, etc.--possibly also one powerful magical offense/mobility thing for what would have formerly been Magical Beasts, Dragons, and similar. Elementals tend to have a couple elemental-thematic abilities (energy damage, special movement speeds) and are amorphous/insubstantial/no-discernible-anatomy/etc. with corresponding defensive benefits, while Spirits get the truly weird abilities and would tend toward getting more unique and subtype-specific benefits than type-based benefits.

So if you look at a list of (Constructs) and see that a Nimblewright is a Folk, a Clockwork Horror is a Beast, and a Clay Golem is an Elemental (Earth), you could reasonably expect the Nimblewright to fight with rapiers, wear armor, and have one or two magic tricks, the Clockwork Horror to have a couple natural attacks, good natural armor, and good SR, and the Clay Golem to be immune to a ton of stuff and have some sort of magical effect on an attack. Folding all of those under "Modron" in your proposed system doesn't convey that and makes it a bit harder to differentiate creatures of the same subtype(s), and you get back to the same problem where every Outsider has similar stats regardless of theme or role.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-19, 07:40 PM

That doesn't work out by the standard fluff, since there's plenty of arcane magic that uses positive or negative energy (SoD spells like enervation and finger of death, reanimators like animate dead...
I... get where you're coming from, but this gets back to what I was saying earlier (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?571150-Refactored-3e-Spell-Lists&p=23431596&viewfull=1#post23431596) about wizards not getting healing spells and me wanting to preserve proper symmetry, so rather than give heavy healing to wizards I'd prefer to take away the negative energy spells, or at least limit access to both in a consistent manner. I might have given a different impression with the persephone analogy, but I'm probably not thinking of the Gods as an omnipresent cosmic government with various ad-hoc rulings for the general population, except insofar as it pertains to their own worshippers. But I'm agreed that accessing the soul should be much trickier from an arcane perspective.

If by that you mean clerics shouldn't all get a generic Turn/Rebuke Undead ability but should get more thematic versions or different abilities entirely, I agree. The cleric originally got it because of Sir Fang the Vampire and kept it because undead are disproportionately scary at low levels, but if you're revamping spells you can give them alternative tools for dealing with undead.
No, I mean more in the sense that a Lawful Good cleric should have an easier time resurrecting LG worshippers of his own God than the members of some demonic cult or his apatheistic CN team-mate, assuming both are equally willing to return. Presumably convincing his own God to return a soul to life should be easier than convincing an alien or hostile power to release one of theirs.

Oh, you definitely could fold everything into Mortal and Spirit types, with everything demonic/fey/celestial/etc. falling into the latter category. The main reason I split Folk and Beast and split Elemental and Spirit is for easily splitting up type-based ability lists...

...Folding all of those under "Modron" in your proposed system doesn't convey that and makes it a bit harder to differentiate creatures of the same subtype(s), and you get back to the same problem where every Outsider has similar stats regardless of theme or role.
I suppose when I think of these categories I'm mostly coming at the angle of psychology, aesthetics and metaphysical origins, which would probably be incidental to a lot of players. I can totally understand the argument for a different breakdown from a tactical perspective and I agree your framework looks pretty robust as a method of capturing the existing bestiary. I'll probably return to it later.

I'm just sort of shaking my cane at the fae/demon conflation rampant in derivative fantasy- particularly if it files something with horns and hooves under lawful evil- and saying "this is all wrong!"

noob

2018-10-20, 03:45 AM

Would the adamentine clockwork horror be a beast spirit?

Spirits get the truly weird abilities
Like at will - disintegrate, implosion, Mordenkainen's disjunction is definitively weird on a cr 9 creature.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-20, 01:17 PM

Anyway, getting back a little closer to the original topic, I've been doing some thought experiments to see how you might generalise/scale the basic spell effects from a given school.

Let's start with something relatively simple- Evocation, more specifically Fire.

Call Fire (level 1)
2d6 damage to single point or 5-ft square. (1d4 as cantrip.)
Maintain +1
Lasts for concentration duration, may shift/sculpt area with extra check.
Spread +1
Expand by 10 ft radius for burst
Expand by 15 ft for cone
Expand by 4 5-ft-squares if maintained.
Intensity +1
Add 2d6 damage. Can stack.
Quickfire +1
Adheres to subject, dealing 1d4 damage/round until extinguished, can spread.
Explosive +1
Deal 2d4 force damage, knockback, burst/cone only.

So, a Maintained, Quickfire, +2 Spread, Call Fire spell would count as a level 5 spell, cover 9 5-ft squares and deal 2d6 damage + 1d4 DoT, which seems comparable-ish to Wall of Fire (level 4.) But replicating the old wizardly standby, Fireball (level 3), requires +2 Spread and +2 Intensity, also making it a 5th-level spell. Not sure if that's a bug or a feature.

Part of the problem is that these effects scale in a linear rather than exponential fashion, and I'm not super clear on how to replicate certain spell effects (like multiple Scorching Rays or meteors in Meteor Swarm, or whether Fire Shield slots in neatly anywhere, or how knockback would work exactly.)

If high-level casters are intended to be engines of apocalyptic destruction that overshadow all other contenders, they probably need a lot more 'oomph' at the high end, and the spellcasting system I've outlined elsewhere already cuts down casters quite a bit. Probly need to crunch some numbers and see how a hypothetical fight would go.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-20, 02:04 PM

I... get where you're coming from, but this gets back to what I was saying earlier (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?571150-Refactored-3e-Spell-Lists&p=23431596&viewfull=1#post23431596) about wizards not getting healing spells and me wanting to preserve proper symmetry, so rather than give heavy healing to wizards I'd prefer to take away the negative energy spells, or at least limit access to both in a consistent manner. I might have given a different impression with the persephone analogy, but I'm probably not thinking of the Gods as an omnipresent cosmic government with various ad-hoc rulings for the general population, except insofar as it pertains to their own worshippers. But I'm agreed that accessing the soul should be much trickier from an arcane perspective.

Ah, I didn't realize you were going ahead with the cleric-only-Necromancy idea. In post #34 you mentioned "false undead" being the province of wizard-necromancers and then had a list of Holy, Unholy, and Necromancy spells with False Animation (and False Life, a wizard staple) under Necromancy, so I figured you'd decided against that and were giving wizards Necromancy and clerics Holy and Unholy.

If you are giving Necromancy just to divine casters...hmm. It's hard to come up with a good flavor explanation for restricting positive and negative energy themselves, since all spellcasting is just channeling energy from the planes, and if wizards can handle the elemental planes just fine, why not the energy planes?

How about this: the main benefit of divine casting is that the gods do the heavy lifting for their priests in terms of learning and controlling their spells. Clerics know more spells by default, they can just ask for outsider help instead of having to bind it, they can chat with extraplanar intelligences with zero risk of brain damage, and so on. So perhaps both arcane and divine magic can evoke positive and negative energy just fine, just like they can evoke fire or lightning, but Necromancy effects require evoking positive/negative energy inside another creature (as opposed to fireballs and lightning bolts, which you can call up wherever and chuck at your targets), which is really freakin' hard and situational, so a wizard would need an infeasibly high-level spell, lots of anatomical knowledge, etc. to do that while a cleric just goes "Yo Pelor, heal this guy, okay?" and Pelor handles all the fine details.

So clerics get Necromancy not because positive and negative energy are "special" or reserved for the gods despite the Inner/Outer Plane divide, but because doing anything useful with it is just too
dang hard for mortal arcanists, at least historically and for the foreseeable future.

No, I mean more in the sense that a Lawful Good cleric should have an easier time resurrecting LG worshippers of his own God than the members of some demonic cult or his apatheistic CN team-mate, assuming both are equally willing to return. Presumably convincing his own God to return a soul to life should be easier than convincing an alien or hostile power to release one of theirs.

That works. It's a reasonable extrapolation from the rule that a departed soul knows the alignment and patron deity of anyone trying to raise it, and the convention that priests of a given deity will require quests or extra payment to bring someone of a different faith back.

I suppose when I think of these categories I'm mostly coming at the angle of psychology, aesthetics and metaphysical origins, which would probably be incidental to a lot of players. I can totally understand the argument for a different breakdown from a tactical perspective and I agree your framework looks pretty robust as a method of capturing the existing bestiary. I'll probably return to it later.

I'm just sort of shaking my cane at the fae/demon conflation rampant in derivative fantasy- particularly if it files something with horns and hooves under lawful evil- and saying "this is all wrong!"

To be fair, the association of Chaos and Evil isn't just a Christian-derived thing. Lots of mythologies have a primordial dragon and primordial waters as a representation of chaos that the good god du jour has to slay and set apart from civilization because "civilization good, nature bad." Norse mythology is more nuanced, having an innangard/utangard division but valuing the utangard as much as the innangard in different contexts, but it still puts all the alfar, trolls, etc. in the "bad scary monsters outside of civilization" bucket.

People may decry D&D's two-axis alignment system, but it's pretty novel (mythologically speaking) for saying that you can be civilized and also evil, and uncivilized/naturalistic and also good.

Would the adamentine clockwork horror be a beast spirit?

Like at will - disintegrate, implosion, Mordenkainen's disjunction is definitively weird on a cr 9 creature.

Nah, a bunch of at-will SLAs isn't "weird," it's just under-CRed. (And really, my guess is that they assigned CR for the clockwork horrors by spell level by accident; CR 9 for 9th-level spells, when it should have been at least CR 16 for 16 HD.)

By "weird" I mean things like the Gibbering Mouther's amorphous-mass-of-eyes-and-teeth appearance, madness-inducing voice and ability to turn everything into quicksand nearby, or the Rukarazyll's fungus-with-horns-and-ichor appearance, fungus-transforming touch, and ability to spit oozes, a Fiendwurm's fanged-earthworm appearance, ability to spit demons, and imploding portal in its gut, and so forth. It isn't always a high bar--"living shadow that makes more of itself by touching you" qualifies--but it's more than just "critter with powerful spells."

Though in my system I do allow for "multiclassing" two monster classes, or a monster class and a PC class, so you could hypothetically have a Beast/Spirit. It's mostly used for those monsters with spellcasting or other PC class abilities, though; Rakshasa are Folk (Outsider, Lawful, Evil, Shapechanger)/Sorcerers, Solars are Folk (Outsider, Angel)/Clerics, and so forth.

So, a Maintained, Quickfire, +2 Spread, Call Fire spell would count as a level 5 spell, cover 9 5-ft squares and deal 2d6 damage + 1d4 DoT, which seems comparable-ish to Wall of Fire (level 4.) But replicating the old wizardly standby, Fireball (level 3), requires +2 Spread and +2 Intensity, also making it a 5th-level spell. Not sure if that's a bug or a feature.

Definitely a bug. Plain ol' blaster casters are one of the weakest archetypes, it's often suggested that direct-damage spells should be lower level than they are or deal more damage at a given level (looks like you realize that yourself, as call fire deals 2d6 as a 1st-level spell), direct-damage [Reserve] feats are rarely useful if you can't get them at very low levels, and so on, so any system in which fireball is higher-level is not a good thing.

For direct damage, the standard is 1d6/level damage, possibly but not necessarily capped by spell level. So using the sample effects, call fire should be 1d6/level fire damage and fireball should be just +2 Spread. But keeping in mind that direct damage is fairly weak, making it 2d6/level with a level cap wouldn't be unreasonable, and either hitting the 10d6 damage cap when you get fireball at 5th instead of at 10th or capping 3rd-level spells at 15d6 or 20d6 damage is fine.

Maintain, then, shouldn't just deal the base damage each round, but should take the base damage and spread it out over the duration, so instead of 2d6/level it's 2d6/round for 1 round/level. Intensity should add another 1d6/level or 2d6/level or thereabouts and be +3 or +4, then; it's closer to Twin, Repeat, Energy Admixture, and the like.

Part of the problem is that these effects scale in a linear rather than exponential fashion, and I'm not super clear on how to replicate certain spell effects (like multiple Scorching Rays or meteors in Meteor Swarm, or whether Fire Shield slots in neatly anywhere, or how knockback would work exactly.)

Yeah, spell levels should definitely be exponential. So if the bar for "do the same thing twice" is usually +3 or +4 levels (Twin, Repeat, Quicken, etc.), then "Duplicate" (add a second target/area with full effect) should be +3 or +4 as well and "Split" (divide the effect over multiple targets/areas) should be +1 or +2.

Scorching ray is thus a Split of either 6d6 to 1 target or 3d6/3d6 to 2 targets at 3rd level (instead of 4d6 to 1 target), 14d6 to 1 target or 5d6/5d6/4d6 to 3 targets at 7th level (instead of 4d6 to 2 targets), and so on. Meteor swarm could then be, say, Spread +4 Duplicate +3 Split +1: 2d6/level over a 40-foot-radius sphere, duplicated to 2d6/level over 2 40-foot-radius sphere, split to 2d6/level over 4 40-foot-radius spheres, or 34d6 over four areas, which comes out to 8d6 per sphere. Not exactly the same as the standard spell, which does 2d6 bludgeoning to one creature and 6d6 fire in an area, but pretty close.

Fire shield could be a mix of call fire and a "ward self" seed, perhaps. 1d6+level/round is close enough to 2d6/round, so call fire 1 + ward self 1 gives you two levels to play with to duplicate the pseudo-Evasion effect.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-20, 02:43 PM

Ah, I didn't realize you were going ahead with the cleric-only-Necromancy idea. In post #34 you mentioned "false undead" being the province of wizard-necromancers and then had a list of Holy, Unholy, and Necromancy spells with False Animation (and False Life, a wizard staple) under Necromancy, so I figured you'd decided against that and were giving wizards Necromancy and clerics Holy and Unholy.
Yes, that's exactly it. Wizards get limited access to positive/negative energy within the necromancy school, but only clerics get access to holy/unholy. The reason why the wizards only get limited access is because the Gods have the soul/aether/pos-neg monopoly I mentioned (they basically have to steal it from other life forms or their own life-force reserves.)

So the wizard-necromancers get a bunch of two-edged spells with quasi-scientific names based on material processes, and the clerics get a bunch of 'thematic' spells which reserve the more spectacular effects at either end of the spectrum.

...Now that I think of it, you might be able to adapt Tissue Construct to teratogenesis- just grow body-parts from different species, and graft them onto a host with some immune-suppression: boom, instant chimera. Or do 'partial polymorphs' cover this territory already?

How about this: the main benefit of divine casting is that the gods do the heavy lifting for their priests in terms of learning and controlling their spells... ...so a wizard would need an infeasibly high-level spell, lots of anatomical knowledge, etc. to do that while a cleric just goes "Yo Pelor, heal this guy, okay?" and Pelor handles all the fine details.
That was another explanation I considered, yeah- basically the thermodynamic gradient applies in some loose sense to wizards more than it does to clerics, so it's easier for them to rip things apart than it is to consciously stitch things together. Ditto for the communing with planar allies, and so on.

I'm quite partial to that model, but... under this framework Bards should not be getting healing spells either unless they put skill ranks in Faith (which should be handled accordingly), and it's not obvious to me that, say, create greater undead involves less delegation of fiddly details than regenerate.

I like all your suggestions for balancing evocation, and I'll definitely come back to those, but probably not this weekend. Cheers.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-20, 03:10 PM

So the wizard-necromancers get a bunch of two-edged spells with quasi-scientific names based on material processes, and the clerics get a bunch of 'thematic' spells which reserve the more spectacular effects at either end of the spectrum.

...Now that I think of it, you might be able to adapt Tissue Construct to teratogenesis- just grow body-parts from different species, and graft them onto a host with some immune-suppression: boom, instant chimera. Or do 'partial polymorphs' cover this territory already?

No reason you couldn't have temporary partial-polymorph spells under Transmutation (or whatever you end up calling that school), and then instantaneous partial-polymorph and/or grafting spells as dual-school Necromancy/Transmutation.

I'm quite partial to that model, but... under this framework Bards should not be getting healing spells either unless they put skill ranks in Faith (which should be handled accordingly), and it's not obvious to me that, say, create greater undead involves less delegation of fiddly details than regenerate.

The reason bards get healing spells at all is that they were originally fighter/thief/druids with arcane-like class powers, giving them a reputation for being able to a little bit of everything; in 2e, though, they became a rogue subclass and could only learn wizard spells. There's no reason that in this system you couldn't drop the bard's access to healing spells--or, to preserve the do-anything flavor, allow bards to either be "bards" who cast arcane spells or "cantors" who cast divine spells.

As for create greater undead, you could split up the types of undead available to arcane and divine casters. Shadows, ghouls, and spectres might be "easier" to make than mummies and devourers, for instance, so arcanists can make the former and priests the latter.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-27, 05:17 PM

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

To be fair, the association of Chaos and Evil isn't just a Christian-derived thing. Lots of mythologies have a primordial dragon and primordial waters as a representation of chaos that the good god du jour has to slay and set apart from civilization because "civilization good, nature bad." Norse mythology is more nuanced, having an innangard/utangard division but valuing the utangard as much as the innangard in different contexts, but it still puts all the alfar, trolls, etc. in the "bad scary monsters outside of civilization" bucket.
Can't argue with that. (Tezcatlipoca/Quetzalcoatl vs. Cipactli is my favourite example, which is notable given that Quetzalcoatl is something of a dragon himself.)

I'm not taking a particular dig at christianity per se so much as D&D's defacto regurgitation of the same imagery despite actually incorporating the law/chaos axis as something distinct from good/evil, and being quite happy to borrow wholesale from greco-roman mythology. There are satyrs in the monster manual, for heaven's sake.

Maintain, then, shouldn't just deal the base damage each round, but should take the base damage and spread it out over the duration, so instead of 2d6/level it's 2d6/round for 1 round/level. Intensity should add another 1d6/level or 2d6/level or thereabouts and be +3 or +4, then; it's closer to Twin, Repeat, Energy Admixture, and the like...

Yeah, spell levels should definitely be exponential. So if the bar for "do the same thing twice" is usually +3 or +4 levels (Twin, Repeat, Quicken, etc.), then "Duplicate" (add a second target/area with full effect) should be +3 or +4 as well and "Split" (divide the effect over multiple targets/areas) should be +1 or +2...

Fire shield could be a mix of call fire and a "ward self" seed, perhaps. 1d6+level/round is close enough to 2d6/round, so call fire 1 + ward self 1 gives you two levels to play with to duplicate the pseudo-Evasion effect.
(Snipped for brevity, but I like your replication of Meteor Swarm in particular.) Alright, let's see if I'm getting this straight:

Call Fire (level 1)
2d6 damage/level to single point or 5-ft square. (1d6 as cantrip.)
Maintain +1
Spread damage over 1 round/cast level, may shift/sculpt area with extra check.
Ward +1
As maintain, but limited to melee opponents, moves with self.
Remaining damage automatically negates equivalent cold/ice damage.
Spread +1
Expand by 10 ft radius for burst
Expand by 15 ft for cone
Expand by 4 5-ft-squares if maintained.
Split +1
Divide damage between multiple targets or burst points.
Quickfire +1
Adheres to subject, dealing 1d4 damage/round until extinguished, can spread.
Explosive +1
Deal 2d4 force damage, knockback, burst/cone only.
Duplicate +3
Cast the spell twice in a single action.
Intensity +3
Add 2d6 damage/level. Can stack.

I'm a little curious about the DoT for Maintain effects? I'd expect that most enemies will just move out of the area and focus on breaking the caster's concentration, and 2d6 damage is something higher-level critters will probably just shrug off unless the damage scales? Or am I missing the picture here?

One complication with respect to the alternate spellcasting system I was thinking about- since there are no 'caster levels' per se in that framework- there's just character level and skill ranks in Arcana- if a wizard starts out the gate (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?570982-Skill-based-Spellcasting&p=23441196&viewfull=1#post23441196) with 6 ranks in Arcana, that's... 12d6 points of damage with a level-1 Call Fire spell, which seems excessive. Thoughts?

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-27, 05:48 PM

The reason bards get healing spells at all is that they were originally fighter/thief/druids with arcane-like class powers, giving them a reputation for being able to a little bit of everything; in 2e, though, they became a rogue subclass and could only learn wizard spells.
...Ah. *dawning comprehension*

As for create greater undead, you could split up the types of undead available to arcane and divine casters. Shadows, ghouls, and spectres might be "easier" to make than mummies and devourers, for instance, so arcanists can make the former and priests the latter.
I definitely intend to split up the various undead species, but probably the other way around (shadows/spectres are clearly soul-like-entities of some kind, whereas mummies could be construed as fancified zombies, so I'd likely allow clerics access to the former and wizards the latter. Or at least clarify that the mummies created by clerics have actual souls and memories and stuff.)

Oh- for lolz, I have an outline sketch for what the schools as a whole might look like-

Divination:
True Seeing
Discern Thoughts
Scrying
Location
Lore
Foresight

Enchantment:
Holding
Slumber
Confusion
Alter Mood
Compulsion
Inception

Illusion:
Image
Seeming
Invisibility
Dream
Simulacrum
Shadow Spell

Abjuration:
Resist Energy
Dispel Magic
Protection from [X]
Reflection
Sculpt Force
Darkness / Silence

Transmutation:
Polymorph
Trait Morph
Balance of Humour
Airs & Vapours
Transubstantiate
Disintegrate

Evocation:
Light
Sound
Fire
Ice
Wind
Lightning

Conjuration:
Summoning
Planar Ally
Teleport
Sending

Universal:
Telekinesis
Anti Gravity
Time Dilation
Contingency
Lucubration
Instillment
Luck
Wish
Circle of [X]
Symbol of [X]
Word of [X]
Mass [X]
Extended [X]
Distant [X]
Perpetual [X]
Empowered [X]

You can most likely guess most of the spell-effects from the naming scheme, but a couple of notes:

'Inception' covers/extends from Modify Memory, with the general intention of overwriting the subject's memories & beliefs, but I gather that mind-control effects can be problematic when and if applied to player-characters, so I think enchantment in general need to be revisited.

'Transubstantiate' is intended to cover stone-to-flesh/petrify, gaseous form, and possibly defensive effects like stoneskin/iron body, depending on how cooperative/in-control the subject is. I'm not sure converting an unwilling subject into a puff of air isn't functionally equivalent to Disintegrate, though?

There's no obvious good reason for Silence to be limited to clerics, but I'm also leaning toward Darkness/Silence being under Abjuration, since they involve 'warding off' particular forms of energy and have plausibly 'defensive' applications. Technically ice/cold could be considered 'negation of fire/heat' as well, but that feels like a bridge too far, maybe.

Nifft

2018-10-28, 01:51 PM

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-28, 05:48 PM

Divinations: Location and Lore seem to both be post-cognition. Merge those perhaps?

Enchantments: The movie Inception was about modifying memory through dreams, so you could merge Sleep (and related) into that otherwise-sparse category. The spell Confusion is a (Compulsion) effect, so those could also be merged.
I love the idea of beliefs being more malleable during dreams. Great call, I should really work that in.

I would say Compulsion is supposed to cover Suggestion/Domination effects, where you want the victim to do something specific that they might not be usually inclined to, whereas Confusion makes them behave in a dazed, stupid or random manner, but doesn't give the victim specific orders. (Alter Mood could be used for the milder Charm effects, as well as rage/fear/etc.)

Location/Lore/Foresight are intended to cover the present/past/future respectively. The various [X] universal spells would basically be types of learned metamagic, but maybe those make more sense as feats or just freebie spell options? Nothing set it stone yet.

Nifft

2018-10-28, 06:52 PM

I love the idea of beliefs being more malleable during dreams. Great call, I should really work that in. Cool.

I would say Compulsion is supposed to cover Suggestion/Domination effects, where you want the victim to do something specific that they might not be usually inclined to, whereas Confusion makes them behave in a dazed, stupid or random manner, but doesn't give the victim specific orders. (Alter Mood could be used for the milder Charm effects, as well as rage/fear/etc.) In that case, maybe merge Confusion into Dreams? The idea being that you're forcing nightmare-like hallucinations and that's what is making the victim behave in an apparently random fashion.

There are some additional dream-effect spells in Secrets of Sarlona (an Eberron book), and also some in Heroes of Horror (which has the Oneiromancy feat for casting specific dream-oriented spells).

Location/Lore/Foresight are intended to cover the present/past/future respectively. The various [X] universal spells would basically be types of learned metamagic, but maybe those make more sense as feats or just freebie spell options? Nothing set it stone yet. Clairvoyance works as present, so location kinda makes sense. But also stuff like Status which watch a person not a location, and the default use of Scry is to target a person not a location, and in addition spells like Detect Magic and See Invisibility could be about the present as well.

Identify (and similar) feels like past.

Hmm, though maybe See Invisibility and True Seeing should be in Abjuration, since really they're about negating a type of magical effect. Hmm.

RedWarlock

2018-10-28, 09:57 PM

Hmm, though maybe See Invisibility and True Seeing should be in Abjuration, since really they're about negating a type of magical effect. Hmm.

They also work against other effects that aren't strictly spell effects, like a Displacer Beast's displacement, or an invisible stalker's natural invis. I'm sure there are others, as well. Don't conflate negating a condition which is commonly (but not exclusively) generated by spells, and actual negations of spells.

Nifft

2018-10-28, 10:22 PM

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-28, 10:59 PM

(Snipped for brevity, but I like your replication of Meteor Swarm in particular.) Alright, let's see if I'm getting this straight:

Call Fire (level 1)
2d6 damage/level to single point or 5-ft square. (1d6 as cantrip.)
Maintain +1
Spread damage over 1 round/cast level, may shift/sculpt area with extra check.
Ward +1
As maintain, but limited to melee opponents, moves with self.
Remaining damage automatically negates equivalent cold/ice damage.
Spread +1
Expand by 10 ft radius for burst
Expand by 15 ft for cone
Expand by 4 5-ft-squares if maintained.
Split +1
Divide damage between multiple targets or burst points.
Quickfire +1
Adheres to subject, dealing 1d4 damage/round until extinguished, can spread.
Explosive +1
Deal 2d4 force damage, knockback, burst/cone only.
Duplicate +3
Cast the spell twice in a single action.
Intensity +3
Add 2d6 damage/level. Can stack.

I don't know if you need Intensity if you have Duplicate; at that point you're dealing 6d6/level as a 7th-level spell, which is either pointless if you keep the existing caps of ~20d6 or far too good if you uncap it and they're dealing 78d6. If you aim is to allow multiple rays, very wide AoEs, etc., you could specify that Duplicate doesn't let you overlap the spell effects (same target or area), in which case Duplicate is for bigger spells and Intensity is for more damage and they make sense to coexist.

I also don't think Explosive should necessarily deal force damage--that has knock-on effects like fully affecting incorporeal things, ignoring DR, etc., and as a precedent most [Force] spells have lower damage dice to compensate--so it might make more sense for that to deal bludgeoning damage instead.

Otherwise those things look good.

I'm a little curious about the DoT for Maintain effects? I'd expect that most enemies will just move out of the area and focus on breaking the caster's concentration, and 2d6 damage is something higher-level critters will probably just shrug off unless the damage scales? Or am I missing the picture here?

A bit, yes. There are three main uses for DoT effects:

1) Clearing out the chaff. You don't cast wall of fire to do anything against the Lich King, you do that to take out his legions of skeletal mooks who would otherwise be dangerous by weight of numbers.

2) Action and/or resource advantage. You don't cast flaming sphere because it's a lethal ball of fiery doom, you cast it because it turns your move actions into minor damage and blockage that you'd otherwise have to spend other spell slots and/or standard actions to inflict. And it can also cause enemies to spend actions dispelling or otherwise dealing with your DoT effects, giving you a further advantage.

3) Area denial. You don't cast incendiary cloud because 4d6/round is super dangerous, you do it because you're trying to punish creatures for being in the area: either they avoid it to avoid taking damage (in which case they stay out of the area and you get what you want) or they go in the area anyway (in which case you get free damage on them and you get what you want).

Low to moderate damage is sufficient to achieve those purposes, and if you increase the damage of DoT effects then one-and-done effects become less attractive because they don't provide any of those side benefits yet your DoT effects are dealing more comparable damage.

One complication with respect to the alternate spellcasting system I was thinking about- since there are no 'caster levels' per se in that framework- there's just character level and skill ranks in Arcana- if a wizard starts out the gate (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?570982-Skill-based-Spellcasting&p=23441196&viewfull=1#post23441196) with 6 ranks in Arcana, that's... 12d6 points of damage with a level-1 Call Fire spell, which seems excessive. Thoughts?

Don't use ranks as CL, use character level. Things in 3e are balanced assuming single-class casters, so ECL X assumes arcane CL X or divine CL X or BAB +X or X+3 skill ranks or whatever, and separate progressions are only necessary when you're trying to impose some role protection among different classes. If you want everyone to be able to do a bit of everything, then saying that everyone from a level 6 dabbler with +1 Arcana to a level 6 uber-magic-specced wizard with +45 Arcana has CL 6, then not only is that much simpler to deal with on the player side but you don't have to figure out how to map ranks to character level at all.

Oh- for lolz, I have an outline sketch for what the schools as a whole might look like-

Thoughts, in order of presentation:

1) For Divination, instead of past/present/future, I'd say a more comprehensive division would be sensors (for things like clairaudience/clairvoyance, prying eyes, and the like that create sensors you can sense through, and scrying actually fits in with those well)/information (for things that just tell you stuff automatically, from identify to status and more)/revelation (for things like divination and legend lore that give vague and/or incomplete information).

The problem with splitting things up by when it tells you about is that spells for the past, present, and future vary wildly in effect so building those spells up from seeds is very tricky, but if your groupings are more mechanical in nature then it's easier to build up; for instance, Revelation might give you a percentage chance of knowing something about something very close in time and space, then you could add +X for knowledge further in the future to get divination, +Y for more reliable knowledge to get contact other plane, +Z for knowledge farther away in space to get legend lore, and so on.

2) Darkness/Silence probably shouldn't be Abjuration. They would generally fall under either Evocation (for actually manipulating light/sound energy) or Illusion (for messing with sight and hearing), and in fact darkness and silence have bounced between those schools over the years; besides, you already have Invisibility (which should probably be "Obcsurement" or something for defeating more than just visual senses) and Seeming under Illusion and Light and Sound under Evocation, and the other Abjuration effects are much broader anyway.

As a replacement, you might want Runes, for glyphs of warding, sepia snake sigil, sign of sealing, and all of the other "draw a symbol that does something bad to intruders when triggered" spells, as that's much more solidly Abjuration.

3) Balance of Humors in Transmutation is much more vague than the other categories, and if you mean that to be the transmutative healing subschool those would probably fall under Transubstantiation flavor-wise (knitting flesh together and such).

4) Why Wind and Fire for Evocation, but not Water and Earth? Those might make more sense as two general Elements (air/earth/fire/water) and Energy (light/sound/cold/lightning) schools, or four Air (wind/sound/lightning), Fire (fire/light), Water (water/cold/acid), and Earth (earth/stone/metal) schools, otherwise you leave out a lot of common effects. To fill the resulting gaps, Telekinesis, Gravity, and Force would work very well in Evocation (though the latter overlaps slightly with Abjuration), as the three of those are also manipulations of energy (kinetic, gravitational, and pure magical, respectively).

RedWarlock

2018-10-28, 11:57 PM

Did you think that I'd said "spells" in the text you quoted?

No, my error there. (My brain's been fuzzy lately, there's been no sun out for like 2 weeks where I live and I've got BAD seasonal affective disorder.)

I still feel like there's wiggle room between usages of see invis/true sight and the definition of abjuration, but maybe that's just me.

Nifft

2018-10-29, 12:31 AM

I also don't think Explosive should necessarily deal force damage--that has knock-on effects like fully affecting incorporeal things, ignoring DR, etc., and as a precedent most [Force] spells have lower damage dice to compensate--so it might make more sense for that to deal bludgeoning damage instead. Yeah, Force should be its own thing.

No, my error there. (My brain's been fuzzy lately, there's been no sun out for like 2 weeks where I live and I've got BAD seasonal affective disorder.) Seems like a bad time for you to try talk down to strangers on the internet. Maybe you could just not do that? And then when you feel better, you could continue to not do that. Then we could have a fun thread about the thread's topic instead.

I still feel like there's wiggle room between usages of see invis/true sight and the definition of abjuration, but maybe that's just me. You really need to read all the words, because I'm not implying any kind of certainty about this particular thought:

Hmm, though maybe See Invisibility and True Seeing should be in Abjuration, since really they're about negating a type of magical effect. Hmm.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-29, 05:29 AM

I don't know if you need Intensity if you have Duplicate; at that point you're dealing 6d6/level as a 7th-level spell, which is either pointless if you keep the existing caps of ~20d6 or far too good if you uncap it and they're dealing 78d6. If you aim is to allow multiple rays, very wide AoEs, etc., you could specify that Duplicate doesn't let you overlap the spell effects (same target or area), in which case Duplicate is for bigger spells and Intensity is for more damage and they make sense to coexist.
Okay hang on, you're gonna have to walk me through the math here. I wasn't planning to have any caps on damage, so if a 7th-level spell needs a 13-14th-level caster under standard rules, that's a baseline 26d6 points of damage, assuming damage scales with caster level. A level 1 Call Fire spell with the +3 Intensity and +3 Duplicate needed to actually be a 7th-level spell deals 4x that to a single target, which is 104d6 damage. I'll agree that's a boatload of hurt, but the victim does get the usual reflex save/SR effects, so... compared to spells like Destruction or Finger of Death, is it that unreasonable? Or at least more unreasonable than primary casters's exponential power curves are in general?

'Explosive' can deal bludgeoning damage, sure.

A bit, yes. There are three main uses for DoT effects... ...Low to moderate damage is sufficient to achieve those purposes, and if you increase the damage of DoT effects then one-and-done effects become less attractive because they don't provide any of those side benefits yet your DoT effects are dealing more comparable damage.
Hmm. I suppose DoT can still be boosted with Intensity. I might come back to this later.

Don't use ranks as CL, use character level. Things in 3e are balanced assuming single-class casters, so ECL X assumes arcane CL X or divine CL X or BAB +X or X+3 skill ranks or whatever, and separate progressions are only necessary when you're trying to impose some role protection among different classes. If you want everyone to be able to do a bit of everything, then saying that everyone from a level 6 dabbler with +1 Arcana to a level 6 uber-magic-specced wizard with +45 Arcana has CL 6, then not only is that much simpler to deal with on the player side but you don't have to figure out how to map ranks to character level at all.
Yeah, but on the other hand a level-10 character who takes a few ranks in Arcana is instantly dealing as much baseline damage as the dedicated 10th-level wizard, which I'm not particularly trying to encourage. We'll see, I guess.

1) For Divination, instead of past/present/future, I'd say a more comprehensive division would be sensors...
I probably gave the wrong impression here- True Seeing is intended to map to the various Detect spells as well as Find Traps, et cetera, not just countering invisibility. Discern Thoughts is for mind-probing, natch. Scrying would cover the various sensor spells, yup, it's just that Location tells you where to look and Scrying lets you actually look there. So those are all present-tense operations. Lore covers the past of an object, place, or person (which might include Identify effects), and Foresight principally gives you combat/evasion/test bonuses based on vague foreknowledge of future events. (I don't want to lean too heavily into actual prophetic visions, because those should quickly become self-negating if the PCs have free will.)

2) Darkness/Silence probably shouldn't be Abjuration. They would generally fall under either Evocation (for actually manipulating light/sound energy) or Illusion (for messing with sight and hearing), and in fact darkness and silence have bounced between those schools over the years...

...4) Why Wind and Fire for Evocation, but not Water and Earth? Those might make more sense as two general Elements (air/earth/fire/water) and Energy (light/sound/cold/lightning) schools, or four Air (wind/sound/lightning), Fire (fire/light), Water (water/cold/acid), and Earth (earth/stone/metal) schools, otherwise you leave out a lot of common effects. To fill the resulting gaps, Telekinesis, Gravity, and Force would work very well in Evocation (though the latter overlaps slightly with Abjuration), as the three of those are also manipulations of energy (kinetic, gravitational, and pure magical, respectively).
I can see the logic to your scheme, and I do feel a little hypocritical for trying to shuffle off effects into other schools, but partly my concern is that this lumps an awful lot of spells and spell-options into the Evocation school- you can see how many fiddly bits we've attached to just Fire so far, and while some of that might be abstracted across other Evocation spells or even spellcasting in general, multiplying that x10 feels a bit lopsided.

I was thinking I'd probably allow Force spells to throw around rocks and water, since in principle it's just using kinetic energy, and maybe encourages use of the battlefield? Runes will probably go under Universal (Symbol of [X], though it's possible the various meta-spells need their own 'school'). Balance of Humors is actually intended to cover the various attribute-bonus spells, like Bull's Strength and so forth (either that or I'll shuffle those off into Druidic/Fae magic, given the wildlife theme).

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-29, 05:44 AM

In that case, maybe merge Confusion into Dreams? The idea being that you're forcing nightmare-like hallucinations and that's what is making the victim behave in an apparently random fashion.

There are some additional dream-effect spells in Secrets of Sarlona (an Eberron book), and also some in Heroes of Horror (which has the Oneiromancy feat for casting specific dream-oriented spells).
Yeah, Dreams might more logically be an enchantment effect. I'm hoping to retain effects like Feeblemind and Daze as well, so I'm not 100% sure where those could be slotted in. But yeah, a lot of this is pretty fungible.

Hmm, though maybe See Invisibility and True Seeing should be in Abjuration, since really they're about negating a type of magical effect. Hmm.

I still feel like there's wiggle room between usages of see invis/true sight and the definition of abjuration, but maybe that's just me.
It depends. You could certainly use Dispel/antimagic effects to get rid of invisibility, but you'd have to know where to target them first, so one can argue Divination gives you that necessary intel (it doesn't reveal the subject to non-casters, for example).

There are lots intentions that can arguably be fulfilled by different methods. Zone of Truth could be phrased as Divination, since you're seeking information, but could also be phrased as Enchantment, if you're compelling someone to be honest. Hold Person and Ghoul Touch both paralyse using different methods (mind tricks and physiology.)

I think it comes down to how there's something of an open question about how Abjuration 'works', really. My inclination is to lump Abjuration/Transmutation/Evocation into a continuum that deals with the material world, and Illusion/Enchantment/Divination into a continuum that deals with the mind and information. Under that framework, Abjuration is explicitly anti-Evocation, so if the latter is about creating matter & energy, the former should be about negating or banishing matter and energy- but this has clearly destructive/offensive applications, rather than just protective. (Negate force == paralysis, negate heat/fire == cold/ice, negate light == darkness, banish air == suffocation, banish water == horrid wilting, etc- it almost starts to feel more like necromancy (http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/File:Draining_the_fire_lilies.png).)

Whereas if Abjuration is defined as 'spells with a protective intent', then you're really grabbing bits and pieces from all the other schools and tweaking them into defensive configurations, and you can't preserve any neat symmetries. It's a bit of a pickle.

.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-10-29, 03:08 PM

Okay hang on, you're gonna have to walk me through the math here. I wasn't planning to have any caps on damage, so if a 7th-level spell needs a 13-14th-level caster under standard rules, that's a baseline 26d6 points of damage, assuming damage scales with caster level. A level 1 Call Fire spell with the +3 Intensity and +3 Duplicate needed to actually be a 7th-level spell deals 4x that to a single target, which is 104d6 damage.

It would indeed be 104d6. I was applying Duplicate and Intensity separately to the base damage; I'd skimmed over Duplicate and misremembered it as doubling the base effect rather than casting the whole spell twice.

I'll agree that's a boatload of hurt, but the victim does get the usual reflex save/SR effects, so... compared to spells like Destruction or Finger of Death, is it that unreasonable? Or at least more unreasonable than primary casters's exponential power curves are in general?

The difference here is that SoDs have no effect or drastically reduced effect (5d6 instead of 40d6 for disintegrate, 10d6 instead of death for destruction, etc.) and are either single-target or greatly restricted (e.g. holy word only killing things 10 levels below you) before 9th level spells, while call fire is a flat Ref half in a wide AoE. 52d6 damage (average 182) on a successful save at 14th level, when even a fighter is going to max out at around 165 HP (10 + 13d10 with 6ish Con), isn't a save-or-die, it's a save-and-still-die.

Keep in mind, too, that all of these spells can be cast on the fly, so you can choose damage type, area, etc. as needed and a caster can always target weak saves and energy vulnerabilities, so going much beyond 2d6/level isn't really necessary for DoTs and is definitely excessive for one-off blasts. It would probably be best to remove that option, so casters aren't just sinking everything into damage all the time and actually make use of the other options presented.

Yeah, but on the other hand a level-10 character who takes a few ranks in Arcana is instantly dealing as much baseline damage as the dedicated 10th-level wizard, which I'm not particularly trying to encourage. We'll see, I guess.

It's a tradeoff, certainly. But contrast caster multiclassing (a Fighter 16/Wizard 1 has a dinky CL 1 magic missile and that's it) with ToB multiclassing (a Fighter 16/Warblade 1 has IL 9 and can pick up 5th-level maneuvers right away, and those 5th-level maneuvers have the same effect whether initiated by that Fighter/Warblade or by a Warblade 20). In the former case, there's very little reason to dabble outside of your main schtick unless you're going for a dual-progression PrC because the spells you get are nowhere near level-appropriate; in the latter case, the maneuvers you get are reasonably level-appropriate, and it's the number and level of maneuvers that differential martial adepts from dabblers rather than IL.

I probably gave the wrong impression here- True Seeing is intended to map to the various Detect spells as well as Find Traps, et cetera, not just countering invisibility. Discern Thoughts is for mind-probing, natch. Scrying would cover the various sensor spells, yup, it's just that Location tells you where to look and Scrying lets you actually look there. So those are all present-tense operations. Lore covers the past of an object, place, or person (which might include Identify effects), and Foresight principally gives you combat/evasion/test bonuses based on vague foreknowledge of future events. (I don't want to lean too heavily into actual prophetic visions, because those should quickly become self-negating if the PCs have free will.)

So you're not planning to include most future divinations like augury or ask-a-higher-being divinations like commune? Those are a pretty big portion of Divination's utility (and, from a metagame perspective, are a handy way for players who are stuck to get a plot handout from the DM), so leaving them out would have a pretty big impact.

I can see the logic to your scheme, and I do feel a little hypocritical for trying to shuffle off effects into other schools, but partly my concern is that this lumps an awful lot of spells and spell-options into the Evocation school- you can see how many fiddly bits we've attached to just Fire so far, and while some of that might be abstracted across other Evocation spells or even spellcasting in general, multiplying that x10 feels a bit lopsided.

Someone worried about Evocation being too broad and powerful? Well that's a first. :smallwink:

If Evocation is being defined broadly enough to include Light and Sound then it makes sense for Darkness and Silence to go there as well, and if it has Fire and Wind then Water and Earth probably belong in the same place. You could make Light, Darkness, Sound, and Silence the domain of Illusion, if you like, but having "raw" light/sound manipulation in Evocation and the more "refined" stuff in Illusion works nicely in the same way that raw Force use/refined Force use is split Evocation/Abjuration and raw Earth use/refined Earth use is split Evocation/Transmutation.

And like you said, a lot of the Evocation fiddly bits will be shared by a lot of spells. Flaming sphere and cone of cold and control winds are a lot more similar than any two Transmutation or Conjuration spells, so even if Evocation has a lot of different elements and energies to work with the basic effects are more or less uniform.

I was thinking I'd probably allow Force spells to throw around rocks and water, since in principle it's just using kinetic energy, and maybe encourages use of the battlefield?

Things like earthquake and its derivatives don't readily fit as [Force] effects, and remember that with Conjuration (Creation) gone all the spells like wall of stone, mudslide, and sudden stalagmite fall under Evocation as well; similar concerns hold for [Water] spells.

Runes will probably go under Universal (Symbol of [X], though it's possible the various meta-spells need their own 'school').

I don't think there's much of a benefit to lumping in things like Symbol of X and Circle of X into Universal when those are pretty clearly Abjuration effects in a way that Mass X and the various metamagic effects aren't.

As for a magic-about-magic school, I use Thaumaturgy for that, encompassing metamagic-type effects as well as dispelling/antimagic and what you've termed Lucubration (and, I assume, Instillment, if that means things like imbue with spell ability). I replace Abjuration with Thaumaturgy in my own setup to keep the 8 schools and because I personally feel that Abjuration makes more sense as a subschool (e.g. mind blank as Enchantment (Abjuration), banishment as Conjuration (Abjuration), nondetection as Illusion (Abjuration), and so forth), but since you aren't enforcing any numerical pattern for your schools you can easily have them both.

Balance of Humors is actually intended to cover the various attribute-bonus spells, like Bull's Strength and so forth (either that or I'll shuffle those off into Druidic/Fae magic, given the wildlife theme).
[...]
I'm hoping to retain effects like Feeblemind and Daze as well, so I'm not 100% sure where those could be slotted in.

You could have a separate subschool for that, thought it would be a very small and narrow one. But here's a radical suggestion: put the physical stat boosts in Transubstantiate, since "turn your muscles into stone" and "turn your muscles into more muscles" are fairly similar, and then make an "Intellect" subschool for Enchantment governing mental buffs like fox's cunning, mental stat debuffs like feeblemind, dazing/stunning, and similar effects. That helps make Enchantment more than just the mind-control-and-debuffs school, and gets away from the all-good-buffs-are-Transmutation tendency.

I think it comes down to how there's something of an open question about how Abjuration 'works', really. My inclination is to lump Abjuration/Transmutation/Evocation into a continuum that deals with the material world, and Illusion/Enchantment/Divination into a continuum that deals with the mind and information. Under that framework, Abjuration is explicitly anti-Evocation, so if the latter is about creating matter & energy, the former should be about negating or banishing matter and energy- but this has clearly destructive/offensive applications, rather than just protective. (Negate force == paralysis, negate heat/fire == cold/ice, negate light == darkness, banish air == suffocation, banish water == horrid wilting, etc- it almost starts to feel more like necromancy (http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/File:Draining_the_fire_lilies.png).)

Whereas if Abjuration is defined as 'spells with a protective intent', then you're really grabbing bits and pieces from all the other schools and tweaking them into defensive configurations, and you can't preserve any neat symmetries. It's a bit of a pickle.

In standard D&D it's definitely the latter one, which is why I view it as less of a "real" school than the others, as mentioned above. But it's hard to go with the former option and still keep things like magic circle against X, antilfe shell, etc. since that starts getting into the territory of alignment, souls, minds, and similar non-material things.

If it helps, the 2e Netherese boxed set in FR used a system called "Fields of Mythal" instead of spell schools, where Fields largely overlapped with certain schools but schools could be split over multiple Fields. The Fields were Invention (creation and destruction spells, comprising Evocation, the summoning/calling parts of Conjuration, and the "death spells" portion of Necromancy), Mentalism (mental and knowledge spells, comprising Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, and the anti-outsider portions of Abjuration), and Variation (change and control spells, comprising Transmutation, the animation portion of Necromancy, the teleportation portion of Conjuration, and the remainder of Abjuration). So there's precedent for grouping spell schools thematically like that, and even back then the designers realized that the "protect from demons" and "protect from swords" aspects of Abjuration were somewhat at odds.

You might consider another school split, into Warding (purely defensive anti-Evocation stuff) and Abjuration (mostly defensive but possible offensive anti-outsider/Divination/Enchantment stuff). The names are more clear (Wards are by definition defensive only, and to "abjure" is to renounce or reject something which covers non-material things nicely), you can get the anti-Evocation smmetry with Warding without worrying it will devolve into the "negating things" do-everything school in the way Transmutation is the "changing things" do-everything school, and Abjuration (with its souls-and-alignment theme) goes with Conjuration and Necromancy to give you a nice trio of physical (Evocation/Transmutation/Warding), mental (Divination/Enchantment/Illusion), and spiritual (Abjuration/Conjuration/Necromancy) groupings.

Lacuna Caster

2018-10-30, 05:52 PM

That's a bit to digest, so I'll probably revisit this over the weekend, but I agree on a lot of those points.

I think my inclination for the moment is to focus on getting a couple of the core schools worked out. I have Enchantment sorta-done, Divination should be relatively straightforward, and the bulk of Evocation should be extensible from what we talked about here. Most of the schools can probably handle their own specific counter-spells if need be, though Illusion v Divination does seem natural.

I might just leave out Necromancy and Transmutation entirely until I can get a little playtesting done and have a better idea of where the gaps are. I reckon once the specific spell-descriptions are fleshed out, one could revisit the classification scheme again.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-07, 12:12 PM

Okay, I think I have a rough outline for evocation now, plus or minus some of the fiddly details:

Call Fire:
2d6 damage/level to single point or 5-ft square.

Quickfire +1
Adheres to subject, dealing 1d4 damage/round until extinguished, can spread.
Explosive +1
Deal 2d4 extra damage, convert half damage to bludgeoning/knockback, burst/cone only.
Cleansing +1
Deals 50% bonus damage to corporeal undead.

Call Wind:
Deals no direct damage, but applies knockback to subjects in area.

Coil & Snatch +1
May pick up and retrieve items using knockback rules.
Downburst +1
Grant +10 to Athletics checks or prevent falling damage.
Skyward +2
Grants flight with normal move speed for one round.

Call Ice:
Deal (1d6 + 2) damage per level to a single point or 5-ft square.
All subjects must pass a DC 10 + level Str check or be chilled.

Hail & Sleet +1
Add 1d6 bludgeoning damage, subjects must test to avoid slipping.
Numbing +1
Add 1d4 damage, convert 50% damage to fatigue/nonlethal.
Freezing +2
The DC for chill effects increases by 5.
If already chilled, they are glued in place. If glued, they freeze solid.

Call Light:
Deals no damage, but blinds subjects for 1d4 rounds +1/level.

Call Sonic:
Deals 1d8 damage/level and deafens subjects for 1 round.

Call Lightning:
Deal 1d12 damage/level to a single point or 5-ft area up to 15 ft away.
Ignore armour for purposes of defence or damage reduction.
Cannot use Spread unless Maintained, but see options below.

Forking +1
Expand to affect targets within 5 ft.
Extend area by 4 5-ft squares if maintaining.
Arcing +1
Jump to an additional 2 targets with 15 ft of a prior target.
Extend initial range by 15 ft. Cannot maintain.

Shocking +1
Targets must pass a Str test, DC = 1/2 current injury.
If failed, targets are reduced to zero health + bleeding.
Splitting +1
Have 50% chance to apply one level of Light and Sonic effects.

General Evocation:
Maintain +1
Lasts for concentration duration, deals half damage.
May shift/sculpt area with extra check.
Ward +1
As maintain, but limited to melee opponents, moves with self.
Remaining damage automatically negates opposite damage/effect types.
Spread +1
Expand by 10 ft radius for burst
Expand by 15 ft for cone
Expand by 4 5-ft-squares if maintained.
Split +1
Divide damage between multiple targets or burst points.
Intensity +1
Increase spell level by 1 and save DC by 2.
Duplicate +3
Cast the spell twice in a single action.
Effects cannot stack on a single target.

Call Darkness:
Suppresses light effects, applying total concealment, chance of confusion.
Must be Maintained, normal area is doubled.

Call Silence:
Suppresses sonic effects, making communication & spellcasting difficult.
Must be Maintained, normal area is doubled.

Call Void:
Counters everything, including other schools' magic and ongoing enchantments.
Counts as 1 level higher for these purposes.

Counterspelling:
Ready another spell to counter with.
You roll 1d20 + (spell level x 4)
Opponent rolls 1d20 + (spell level x 2.)
If you roll higher, the spell is countered.

Fire counters Ice and vice versa, Wind counters both plus itself.
Light counters Darkness, Sonic counters Silence, and vice versa.
Light counters Ice, Darkness counters Fire, and vice versa.
Lightning counters itself. Void counters everything.

All 'per level' effects here refer to the total spell level, rather than caster level, character level or skill ranks. For example:

A level 3 Call Fire spell (base level 1, spread +2) deals 6d6 damage in a 20-foot radius, replicating Fireball fairly neatly.

A level 7 Call Fire spell (base level 1, Duplicate +3, Intensity +1 x3) deals 14d6 damage to two targets with a +6 bonus to the save DC. Punishing, but survivable.

A level 9 Call Fire spell (base level 1, Duplicate +3, Split +1, Spread +3, Explosive +1) deals 18d6+2d4 fire/bludgeoning damage in a 30-foot radius, split between 2 targets, twice, for 9d6+1d fire/bludgeoning damage in a 30-foot radius to 4 targets. So not too distant from Meteor Swarm.

The Maintain spells last for concentration duration, I just halved their damage per round, and added some Counterspelling rules that generally give the advantage to the defender. And then you just flavour the various damage types/effects.

I've left out Force and all matter-summoning effects for now, but I'll probly revisit those later.

So you're not planning to include most future divinations like augury or ask-a-higher-being divinations like commune? Those are a pretty big portion of Divination's utility (and, from a metagame perspective, are a handy way for players who are stuck to get a plot handout from the DM), so leaving them out would have a pretty big impact.
I think I covered this briefly in the other thread, but I'm planning to handle spells like Commune/Augury as Sending extensions where you talk directly to your patron deity. To the extent that your patron thinks they know the future, they can tell you as much, but that's no guarantee of actual prophecy-fulfillment.

I don't think there's much of a benefit to lumping in things like Symbol of X and Circle of X into Universal when those are pretty clearly Abjuration effects in a way that Mass X and the various metamagic effects aren't.
I don't particularly see Symbol/Circle as Abjurations so much as ways to add permanency, in the same way that I don't see Explosive Runes as an Abjuration so much as an Evocation with trigger conditions, and the various Symbol spells behave similarly. But I haven't really dug into those yet.

Things like earthquake and its derivatives don't readily fit as [Force] effects, and remember that with Conjuration (Creation) gone all the spells like wall of stone, mudslide, and sudden stalagmite fall under Evocation as well; similar concerns hold for [Water] spells.
I forgot about earthquake, now that you mention it... though I wonder if that wouldn't qualify as an uber-charged sonic/kinetic effect?

But here's a radical suggestion: put the physical stat boosts in Transubstantiate, since "turn your muscles into stone" and "turn your muscles into more muscles" are fairly similar, and then make an "Intellect" subschool for Enchantment governing mental buffs like fox's cunning, mental stat debuffs like feeblemind, dazing/stunning, and similar effects. That helps make Enchantment more than just the mind-control-and-debuffs school, and gets away from the all-good-buffs-are-Transmutation tendency.
I like that quite a bit.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-11-07, 04:52 PM

The individual element effects look pretty good. They could probably use some expansion, but what you have is fine.

Ready another spell to counter with.
You roll 1d20 + (spell level x 4)
Opponent rolls 1d20 + (spell level x 2.)
If you roll higher, the spell is countered.

Why use spell level rather than caster level or the equivalent, and why the level * 2 bonus for the counterspeller over the counterspellee? It leads to wonky effects like a 5th-level spell having an even chance to counter a 9th-level spell, and multiple low-level casters having a better chance to counter a high-level caster's low-level spell than a single equvlly-high-level caster.

If it's just more reliability you're looking for, there are other ways to do it. For instance, do a standard caster level check, but let the counterspeller "take 15" instead of having the defender use a base of 11 on the DC, or the like. Or if you want to stick with spell levels, have a non-opposed check with a DC based on the difference in spell levels, so equal spell levels are very likely be countered and higher- or lower-level spells vary appropriately. It's not that the way you have it is bad, at all, just a little strange.

I don't particularly see Symbol/Circle as Abjurations so much as ways to add permanency, in the same way that I don't see Explosive Runes as an Abjuration so much as an Evocation with trigger conditions, and the various Symbol spells behave similarly. But I haven't really dug into those yet.

All of the glyph/symbol/sigil spells are along the lines of "If [thing I want to protect against] enters [warded thing or area], go off," which is fairly solidly Abjuration, I think. Most of the "intelligent" spells (those that can distinguish targets by appearance, alignment, etc.) tend to be in Abjuration, and those that aren't are usually Divination (since they can detect and distinguish things by nature) and Illusion (since they use the target's perceptions against them). I wouldn't say their effects are generic and cross-school enough to fit as a Universal school.

I could, however, see magic item creation turned into a set of spells, in the same way that in 1e you used the enchant an item spell to create whatever items the DM allowed you to and 2e expanded on that with lots of spells for making whatever items you wanted, and would include things like permanency, imbue with spell ability, and other "permanent until discharged or dispelled" effects. That would fit the "make arbitrary magical effects permanent" category much better, and would make a better candidate for a Universal school.

I forgot about earthquake, now that you mention it... though I wonder if that wouldn't qualify as an uber-charged sonic/kinetic effect?

In theory, yes, but that would require you to make enough addons to your sonic and kinetic base spells to make that possible (which could possibly have abusable combinations with other such effects), where a base [Earth] spell could just have a "make a mini earthquake" addon effect and go from there.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-08, 12:39 PM

Odd. I could have sworn there was another post a few hours ago...

The individual element effects look pretty good. They could probably use some expansion, but what you have is fine.
Cool.

An unopposed check with a DC modifier based on relative spell level does sound better for counterspelling, now that you mention it- I'll patch that in.

Most of the "intelligent" spells (those that can distinguish targets by appearance, alignment, etc.) tend to be in Abjuration, and those that aren't are usually Divination (since they can detect and distinguish things by nature) and Illusion (since they use the target's perceptions against them)...
My take is that these generally seem like lower-level logical extensions of the contingency (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/contingency.htm) spell (although being able to plug in arbitrary divination effects sounds perfectly fair), with Symbol of X just applying the contingency to an item or surface and/or adding permanency.

If merging that with a general item-enchantment/item-crafting school makes sense, I'd be quite happy to do that. Is there a particular 2e resource you'd recommend looking at?

In theory, yes, but that would require you to make enough addons to your sonic and kinetic base spells to make that possible (which could possibly have abusable combinations with other such effects), where a base [Earth] spell could just have a "make a mini earthquake" addon effect and go from there.
Fair enough. I still need to work out general rules for earth/water/acid/force anyway. My to-do list at the moment to finish up is roughly as follows:

* Flesh out rules for stealth, tracking, athletics & environment, etc.
* Flesh out rules for knowledge and crafting skills.
* Possibly flesh out rules for leadership, followers & mass battles.

* Supplemental abjurations, like Protection from X or Magic Circle vs. X, plus final evocations.
* Spells to boost weapons & armour. (General crafting school with associated metamagic.)
* Spells to augment physique (transmutation) & intellect (enchantment/divination).

* Conjuration needs fleshing out, and Enchantment needs tweaks for dialog/effect size.
* Holy/Profane/Natural/Lawful domains need fleshing out, particularly in respect to healing & necromancy.
* Illusion and divination more-or-less worked out, so I'll post those shortly.

My thinking at the moment is that I'll need to work out the bestiary system before I properly work out polymorph and other transmutation spells, and design it with an aim toward being more "magical genetic engineering" than something you can easily whip out in mid-battle. Necromancy might be similar. So something like this:

Illusion | Enchantment | Divination (counter eachother)
Evocation, Conjuration, Thaumaturgy (act as own counters)
Necromancy and Transmutation as semi-illegal 'laboratory schools', sometimes for infringing religious edicts.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-11-08, 03:23 PM

My take is that these generally seem like lower-level logical extensions of the contingency (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/contingency.htm) spell (although being able to plug in arbitrary divination effects sounds perfectly fair), with Symbol of X just applying the contingency to an item or surface and/or adding permanency.

Contingency being a beneficial triggered effect is quite the outlier, with almost everything else being triggered traps or wards or explosions, but I can see where you're coming from. Perhaps instead of having a separate school for symbol-related contingent magic, you could just make that a modifier in your metamagic or crafting school, à la Earthbound Spell or Craft Contingent Spell, and leave the appearance to flavor.

Then you can apply triggered spell or whatever to a [Force] spell to get explosive runes, a stasis-related spell to get sepia snake sigil, hold person or the like to get ghoul glyph, any spell to get glyph of warding, and so forth, and it can be flavored as a rune/sigil/glyph if desired or something like a huge holy symbol, pulsing orb of light or similar if the caster so desires.

If merging that with a general item-enchantment/item-crafting school makes sense, I'd be quite happy to do that. Is there a particular 2e resource you'd recommend looking at?

Hmm, it's been a while, but I believe Volo's Guide to All Things Magical, Tome of Magic, and Player Option: Spells & Magic have all the relevant item enchantment rules. I can pull out my books and look around if not.

* Possibly flesh out rules for leadership, followers & mass battles.

* Conjuration needs fleshing out, and Enchantment needs tweaks for dialog/effect size.

I'd say these two go together, since if you're going to summon or compel a bunch of followers you might as well have them use similar systems, and if multiple PCs start doing that then you start reaching group sizes where mass combat rules are necessary.

My thinking at the moment is that I'll need to work out the bestiary system before I properly work out polymorph and other transmutation spells, and design it with an aim toward being more "magical genetic engineering" than something you can easily whip out in mid-battle. Necromancy might be similar.

Summon demon in 1e with its random demon generation tables in the DMG and astral construct in 3e with its build-your-own-minion menus would be good resources for something like this.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-09, 04:24 PM

So, on the topic of Enchantment spells...

What I have gathered from other games is that mind-control effects can be problematic on a 'meta' level, since in principle they allow one PC (or the GM) to seize either indefinite control of another PC and/or rewrite their beliefs and motivations, and a goodly number of players just don't like that regardless of how much genre precedent or fictional justification there might be. This came up briefly in playtesting for Cosmic Zap and RE delves into the topic a bit here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRDduTeoPyc) while discussing Champions Now. (The rules for Burning Empires also have some special restrictions on Psychology to avoid what the authors refer to as a 'social contract time bomb'- in essence, all the heavyweight mind-warping actions require an invitation from the subject.)

I'm... not entirely clear on how to solve or allow for that in a D&D-esque context. It looks as though in most games a general 'gentleman's agreement' to not shiv other PCs in the back and by extension to limit Dominate spells to the monsters tends to rule the day, but I don't want to limit the PCs to necessarily all being on the same team, or having 100% congruent motivations 100% of the time even if they nominally are. What I've jury-rigged for the moment are some 'feedback' effects, whereby an Enchantment spell that the victim resists allows them to access the caster's mind, and the more power the caster exerts the worse the feedback (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bas_NxngYe4&t=2m50s) can be. But this might not be the right solution and I'm happy to take suggestions. (No pun intended.)

GENERAL ENCHANTMENT OPTIONS:

All Enchantment spells last 1 minute/level by default and allow will saves.

You may optionally make a brief but cogent dialog check to back up your intent.
Success: Save DC increased by 4
Failure: Save DC decreased by 2, +5 to Feedback chance

Potency +1:
+1 spell level, +2 to social skill tests, -5 to resistance.

Subtlety +1:
+1 spell level, re-roll save at +5 DC to prevent victim noticing.
-20 to Feedback chance from victim.

Type of Victim:
Humanoid +0
Beast +1
Monster +2

Duration:
1 minute/level: +0
1 hour/level: +1
1 day/level: +2
indefinite: +3

ENCHANTMENT SPELLS

Sleep (level 1):
Deals 4d6 'virtual' fatigue damage to the subject.
If sufficient to KO, victim falls asleep for duration.
Otherwise no actual fatigue damage is dealt.
Go Deeper: Effects can stack by increasing spell level.

Inception (level 1):
Allows you to communicate with subject in a dream.
Sleeping victims suffer a -10 resistance penalty to other enchantments.
The caster's vulnerability to feedback increases by 10.
Dialogs that occur during a dream take place in a surreal landscape-
arguments and counterarguments shape the perceived dreamscape.
Go Deeper: Effects can stack to multiply penalties.

Compulsion (level 1):
Use a dialog check/scene to convince the victim to do or believe something.
Gain a +5 bonus to social skill tests for this purpose.
Usual dialog modifiers for relationships and terms apply.
In the case of attempting to modify a belief:
Slight modification: +0 resistance & feedback
Moderate modification: +5 resistance & feedback
Drastic modification: +10 resistance & feedback
Flat-out impossibility: +15 resistance & feedback
If you win the dialog, no compromise is required.
If the dialog is failed, the spell counts as resisted for Feedback.

Idiocy (level 2):
Apply -2 penalty to Int/Wis/Cha, or -4 to single attribute.
Reduces chance of Feedback from victim by 50.

Clarity (level 2):
Apply +2 bonus to Int/Wis/Cha, or +4 to single attribute.
Counters other enchantments (see below.)

Fascination (level 1):
Daze for 1 round, draws attention to chosen point until it wears off.
If victim is drawn to a person, improves disposition by 1 step.

Fear (level 3):
Victim rolls to save twice-
one fails: -2 to saves, attacks & skills, -1 to damage (shaken.)
both fail: as above, also flees in panic, 50% chance to drop items.

Courage (level 3):
+2 to saves, attacks & skills, +1 to damage.
+5 to morale checks vs. fear or stress.

Holding (level 3):
Subject takes no actions and make no attempt to defend themselves.
Can be treated as paralysed for most purposes.
May attempt fresh save each turn.

Confusion (level 3):
Oscillates between emotional states and half-real perceptions.
Produces random effects each round:
30% chance to attack nearest target
30% chance to babble incoherently
30% chance to flee from danger
10% chance to behave normally
May attempt fresh save each turn.

On Counterspells and Feedback:

Victims who succumb to an enchantment spell do not immediately realise they are being manipulated, but may well do so after the spell wears off, depending on how uncharacteristic their behaviour in the interlude was.

Any contradictory enchantments in place grant the victim a +2 save bonus per spell level. At the caster's discretion, contradictory enchantments may be dispelled when a new enchantment is applied. Idiocy counters Clarity and vice versa, Courage counters Fear and vice versa, and Clarity, Holding or Sleep generally counter everything, as does Compulsion if phrased correctly.

If a victim resists an enchantment spell, they automatically notice they were being manipulated, and may have a chance to reflect Feedback on the caster. Roll 1d100, add 10 per spell level and any bonus for casting Enchantment spells the victim may have.
Feedback Results:

<=25 no other effects.
26-75 the victim recognises the caster if either currently visible or known to them firsthand.
76-125 the victim also gains the full benefit of a Discern Mind spell upon the caster. (This counts as 'firsthand knowledge' for future purposes.)
>=126 the victim may freely cast any known Enchantment spell, or a Compulsion, of equal spell level, directed at the caster- and they automatically fail any save.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-09, 04:53 PM

Contingency being a beneficial triggered effect is quite the outlier, with almost everything else being triggered traps or wards or explosions, but I can see where you're coming from. Perhaps instead of having a separate school for symbol-related contingent magic, you could just make that a modifier in your metamagic or crafting school, à la Earthbound Spell or Craft Contingent Spell, and leave the appearance to flavor.

Then you can apply triggered spell or whatever to a [Force] spell to get explosive runes, a stasis-related spell to get sepia snake sigil, hold person or the like to get ghoul glyph, any spell to get glyph of warding, and so forth, and it can be flavored as a rune/sigil/glyph if desired or something like a huge holy symbol, pulsing orb of light or similar if the caster so desires.
That would be the idea, yes.

I'd say these two go together, since if you're going to summon or compel a bunch of followers you might as well have them use similar systems, and if multiple PCs start doing that then you start reaching group sizes where mass combat rules are necessary.
I'm not sure. The stereotypical undead army would seem to require that kind of handling, sure, but what I have sketched out so far implies a more one-on-one relationship with typical summonlings whom you bargain with for services. Mass battle rules would be more intended for the small army of low-level followers a high-level knight or noble might be able to field, which I gather I has some precedent in older editions.

Rough outlines for Divination and Illusion:

True Seeing (L0)
60 ft range, concentration, up to 1 min/level.
Blocked by 3 feet wood/dirt, 1 ft stone, 1 inch metal or lead sheet.
Increases in strength each round.
Round 1: Grants +5 to saves vs. illusion, ignores darkness/blinding effects.
Round 2: Grants +10 to identify (but not bypass) illusions in area.
Round 3: Grants +15 to illusion saves if concentrated at single point.
If failed, cannot attempt again for 24 hours.
Previously identified illusions grant +5 to the save, however.

Discern Matter (L1)
Extends True Seeing, penetrates through 2x normal barriers.
Provides +10 bonus to perception & disarm attempts for traps & secret doors.

Discern Life (L1)
Extends True Seeing, reveals if subjects are healthy, sickly, undead, or inanimate.
Provides +10 bonus to Craft[Healing] tests to diagnose poison/disease.

Discern Aura (L1)
Extends True Seeing, reveals magic auras and alignment of creatures and objects.
Provides +10 bonus to skill checks to discern specific abilities or subject-type.

Discern Mind (L2)
Extends True Seeing.
Round 1: Reveals presence of intelligence.
Round 2: Reveals mood, intention and lies, and most intelligent person present.
Round 3: Reveals intelligence, and detailed thoughts of single target.
Note: Stage 3 allows for target's language to be understood.
Note: A failed save at stage 3 allows for Feedback as for an Enchantment spell.

Location (L2)
400 ft +40/level, 1 min/level, 1-round casting.
Gives direction of a particular creature, object or place.
Will save bonuses-
+10 if only vaguely known
+5 if secondhand
+0 if acquainted
-5 if familiar
-2 if you have likeness
-4 if you have possession
-10 if you have body part
(Use metamagic to extend/reduce range/power.)
(Use metamagic to discern location and/or best route.)
If failed, cannot attempt again for 24 hours.

Scrying (L3)
Extends Location.
Creates hearing + seeing sensor at point if successful.

Legend (L3)
Extends Location.
Grants information on subject's past, not position.
(Varying degrees of detail, depending on degree of success.)

Foresight (L0)
+2 bonus to single test. 1 minute or until discharged.
+1: +10 bonus to single attack before next round.
+1: +2 bonus to single test or AC, cumulative.
+?: instant warning of impending dangers, never surprised, +2 AC/reflexes?
It would be nice to have some way to work in actual predictions?

IMAGE (level 1)
Create a visual figment within 4 10-ft cubes, +1 10-ft cube per level.
Lasts for concentration duration.
Will save allows disbelief, fresh test if interacted with.

Blended -1:
Illusion must blend with natural context of area or terrain.

Item Only (level 0):
Illusion limited to single object of less than 5-ft dimensions.

Sound +1:
Introduce noise. (As level-0 cantrip, allows voice-projection.)

Tactile +1:
Add touch, heat and smell. No fresh save for interaction.

Dweomer +1:
Confers magical aura, chance to fool scrying/detection magic.
Increases scrying/true-seeing DC by 5- failure gives false result. Can stack.

Expanded +1:
Expand area by 20-ft cube per level. Can stack.

Persistent +2:
Lasts 1 minute/level, no concentration required, allows trigger/scripting.

Permanent +3:
Lasts indefinitely.

SEEMING (level 0):
Create mirror-image of self. Stays within 5 feet.
If attacked, aggressor has 50% chance to pick the image.
Image’s AC is 10 + size modifier + dex bonus.
Will save allows disbelief if interacted with, disappears if attacked.
Lasts 1 minute/level + concentration.

Disguise +1:
Modify image to resemble another humanoid. (Adds +10 to disguise checks.)
Extra uses allow imitation of non-humanoids, then aberrations, etc.

Multiple +1:
Create an additional image. Aggressors must select target at random.

Persistent +2:
Image no longer disappears on interaction.
Lasts 1 hour/level, can apply to other subject.

OBSCURE (level 1)
Blurs and attenuates the subject's or item's visible outline.
Grants 20% miss chance, +2 touch AC.
Permits subject fresh save if an attack, spell or physical interaction is made.
Lasts 1 minute/level.

Invisible +1:
Grants total concealment, including vs. darkvision.
50% miss chance for attacks, cannot be pinpointed.

Inaudible +1:
Suppresses sound as well as visibility (including tremorsense.)

Sphere +1:
Affects all creatures in expanded 10-ft-radius.

Persistent +2:
No longer expires on attacks, spells, or physical interactions.

SHADOW SPELL (level 0)
Replicate a Summoning or Evocation spell of up to 1 level higher.
The spell replicated must be chosen at the time of preparation unless cast spontaneously.
If effects are sufficient to 'kill' a creature and a belief save is failed, the creature is stunned/falls prone for 1d4 rounds.
Effects are only 10% real (10% real, 10% chance of effect, 10% HP, etc.)

Potency +1:
Increase maximum spell level imitated by 1.
All effects are 10% more real, stun duration increases 1 round. Can stack.
Effects sufficient to stun have cumulative 5% chance to drop subject to 0 HP.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-12, 06:16 AM

What I have gathered from other games is that mind-control effects can be problematic on a 'meta' level, since in principle they allow one PC (or the GM) to seize either indefinite control of another PC and/or rewrite their beliefs and motivations...
...Ah, wait wait wait. You can just use metagame resources to solve the metagame problem. Let the PCs accumulate Inspiration from vows and beliefs and so on, and allow them to spend it on dice rolls etc. in such a way that you can always shut down mind control by spending a point or two. The NPCs and random critters don't generally get Inspiration, so enchantment works normally on them, but only works on the PCs if the players are, uh, 'into it', so to speak.

Of course, if your Inspiration hits zero, you're vulnerable to mind-control, bleeding out, unpleasant crits, et cetera, but in that case... the onus is on the player to not hit zero.

Conjuration rules are sorta done, profane and holy domains sorta done, very very loose bestiary rules-sketch for animals and undead plus order/nature domains in place- I'll probably leave out celestials and inevitables, etc. for the moment. That mostly leaves thaumaturgy and some fleshing out of feat-chains and skill options after that.

Indigo Knight

2018-11-12, 12:58 PM

They're just plain stupid as rigid categories -- they don't withstand even the slightest application of logical scrutiny.

Therefore, the wise game writer does not attempt to apply logical scrutiny to the schools of magic, and instead treats them as thematic labels with very few concrete points of mechanical import.

So, maybe, the solution is to grid chart a mechanic table that group spells by effects - school one is debuffing, school two is buff humanoids, school three is controlling ground stats, school four is radiant keyword, etc. Also, opposing and overlapping schools.

Also, there are 7 or 8 lines of conditions that I usually refer to:

Wounds or bleeding.
Exhaustion.
Compulsion.
Fear.
Mobility.
Vitality (like poison and diseases).
Stun.

You mentioned those in your first post, and I think that these have a correlation to how (or at least should) spells are grouped.

Technically speaking Raise Dead is also a conjuration spell at the moment,
not if it requires the presence of corpses

Personally, I think that the dispel magic spell needs to be broken down to components, as it has way too many applications.

For things like domination magic or summoning magic there was a suggestion by someone to use 'maintain concentration' as a resource. So the caster gains a different entity with it's own actions but loses his own actions.

You know - This looks very close to what I was trying to build a while back. Have you read it by chance?

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-11-12, 01:36 PM

I'm not sure. The stereotypical undead army would seem to require that kind of handling, sure, but what I have sketched out so far implies a more one-on-one relationship with typical summonlings whom you bargain with for services. Mass battle rules would be more intended for the small army of low-level followers a high-level knight or noble might be able to field, which I gather I has some precedent in older editions.

The armies of followers do have precedence, yes, and unless you put some artificial caps on them you can also have armies of summonlings or armies of dominated creatures. Which is why it would be nice to unify the mechanics such that "control 20 soldiers on the battlefield," "control 20 followers in a thieves guild," "control 20 summoned demons on the battlefield", and "control 20 dominated sleeper agents in the city government" all work roughly the same way. You're already partway there by modifying DCs based on social skill checks and being able to alter beliefs and motivations, so you might as well go all the way with that.

...Ah, wait wait wait. You can just use metagame resources to solve the metagame problem. Let the PCs accumulate Inspiration from vows and beliefs and so on, and allow them to spend it on dice rolls etc. in such a way that you can always shut down mind control by spending a point or two. The NPCs and random critters don't generally get Inspiration, so enchantment works normally on them, but only works on the PCs if the players are, uh, 'into it', so to speak.

Of course, if your Inspiration hits zero, you're vulnerable to mind-control, bleeding out, unpleasant crits, et cetera, but in that case... the onus is on the player to not hit zero.

I definitely think that this Inspiration system (which I would rename Conviction, actually, since it's more about firmness of belief than morale) is a better way to go than introducing a "feedback" mechanism only for Enchantment spells--particularly since the "make your save and see the caster" thing is more typical for Divination (Scrying) spells than Enchantment spells.

I wouldn't make it a PC-only thing, though; a sworn bodyguard, crazed cultist, or the like can be just as firm in their convictions as a PC can, and having a notable difference in the difficulty of enchanting Bob the Town Guard (who's only there for his paycheck and doesn't have super strong feelings about miscreants getting past him) versus Joe the Royal Guard (who is utterly devoted to his Queen and would die sooner than be turned against her) is better for worldbuilding than "these five random adventurers, and possibly their archnemesis, are inexplicably much harder to enchant than everyone else in the world."

What might be better is having 3-5 levels of Conviction, in the same way that there are 5 standard NPC attitude categories, and assigning different Enchantment difficulties to each. Herd animals, dimmer monsters, and cowards might be Spineless (the lowest rating), having large save penalties to being Enchanted and being easier to manipulate once compelled; fanatical religious characters, powerful solitary monsters, and heroes might be Unshakeable (the highest rating), being nearly impossible to compel unless you target a particular weak point like taking their spouse hostage or convincing them that their friends have betrayed them. PCs could then choose their rating while NPCs are assigned one based on personality--and you might find PCs who choose something below Unshakeable, indicating that they feel their PC isn't as firm in their convictions and they're okay with being Enchanted at some point.

So, maybe, the solution is to grid chart a mechanic table that group spells by effects - school one is debuffing, school two is buff humanoids, school three is controlling ground stats, school four is radiant keyword, etc. Also, opposing and overlapping schools.

Whether you believe that the schools hold up logically or not--and I firmly believe that they do, and that people who believe that they don't are looking at the bad spell assignments made in late 3e by lazy devs rather than at the lore and themes behind the schools themselves--the schools are, at the end of the day, a thematic grouping rather than a mechanical one. Keyword "schools" already exist in the form of descriptors, and combat roles make bad schools because not only are those incredibly restricting but it's much more common to have "multi-threat" spells that perform two or three different roles in combat (several spells can do battlefield control and debuffing and blasting, for instance) than to have spells that fully fit into two different thematic schools.

Personally, I think that the dispel magic spell needs to be broken down to components, as it has way too many applications.

That's already been taken care of in this fix, since counterspelling was already split out into a separate mechanic; while you could certainly split single-target dispel and area dispel into separate spells beyond that, there's no pressing need to do so in a build-your-own-spell setup where every other spell effect is similarly broad.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-13, 08:24 AM

Personally, I think that the dispel magic spell needs to be broken down to components, as it has way too many applications.
I'm kinda moving in that direction, as most spells have either specific counterspells or are better at countering spells within the same school.

You know - This looks very close to what I was trying to build a while back. Have you read it by chance?
Not that I recall, but feel free to link it.

I definitely think that this Inspiration system (which I would rename Conviction, actually, since it's more about firmness of belief than morale) is a better way to go than introducing a "feedback" mechanism only for Enchantment spells--particularly since the "make your save and see the caster" thing is more typical for Divination (Scrying) spells than Enchantment spells.
Things like having stronger convictions and/or willpower should in principle already be handled by will saves and the Vows system from the other thread, which could be extended to non-religious beliefs for other characters (the Compulsion rules already have some built-in penalties for overwriting the subject's beliefs.)

The feedback system might be possible to streamline or tone down, but I do rather like the idea of having extended psychic battles in some form or another, and even non-casters should have a reasonable chance of defending themselves in that arena. (There is technically a sliver of precedent for this in the description of the nightmare (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/nightmare.htm) spell, in that a targeted dispelling rebounds quite badly on the caster.) But I guess it needs to be playtested first.

Inspiration is already an optional 5e mechanic, so I was just borrowing the name, but I think the PCs just having a certain degree of metagame privilege isn't particularly unusual. The Artha system in BW isn't dissimilar, for example, and seems to operate fine.

Indigo Knight

2018-11-13, 11:35 AM

Whether you believe that the schools hold up logically or not--and I firmly believe that they do, and that people who believe that they don't are looking at the bad spell assignments made in late 3e by lazy devs rather than at the lore and themes behind the schools themselves--the schools are, at the end of the day, a thematic grouping rather than a mechanical one.
Some do, others don't. I think it's more on a case by case basis. The developers clearly didn't have an overarching idea in mind. And many weird occurrences appear.

Keyword "schools" already exist in the form of descriptors, and combat roles make bad schools because not only are those incredibly restricting but it's much more common to have "multi-threat" spells that perform two or three different roles in combat (several spells can do battlefield control and debuffing and blasting, for instance) than to have spells that fully fit into two different thematic schools.
All this is true. However!
1. The thematic grouping already lends itself to certain identity. A buffer will probably be Abjurer or Transmuter. Necromancer is more likely to have debuffs and damage dealing capabilities.
It also doesn't have to be a True/False thing. It could be more of a better spells for that school in that kind of way then in that other school.
2. The game already treats the schools in mechanicistly way. Specialization, Focus Feat, the dices you need to roll to succeed. The schools fails to act only as a fluff thing.

That's already been taken care of in this fix, since counterspelling was already split out into a separate mechanic; while you could certainly split single-target dispel and area dispel into separate spells beyond that, there's no pressing need to do so in a build-your-own-spell setup where every other spell effect is similarly broad.

Could you point me? I must have missed it.

I'm kinda moving in that direction, as most spells have either specific counterspells or are better at countering spells within the same school.
How does casting both haste and slow affect a target?
Are there other pairings that have the same relationship?
Is there a difference between countering, negating, depressing, banishing or nullifying?
Do I need to know to cast the spell to counter it?

Not that I recall, but feel free to link it.
I will try to find it.

I understand that your work is mana-based, is that right?

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-13, 11:47 AM

How does casting both haste and slow affect a target?
Are there other pairings that have the same relationship?
Is there a difference between countering, negating, depressing, banishing or nullifying?
Do I need to know to cast the spell to counter it?
I don't think haste and slow have actually been covered yet- there was some discussion as to whether to file it under evocation or universal- but the notes for each school generally make some mention of which spells are 'opposites' (evocation is here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?571150-Refactored-3e-Spell-Lists&p=23490182&viewfull=1#post23490182).) At the moment there's no particular difference between countering a spell on the fly or nullifying a longer-term status-effect.

Mana-based is the idea from the other thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?570982-Skill-based-Spellcasting), yes, but at the moment the school descriptions just specify spell-level rather than mana cost, so in principle they could be adapted to regular vanceian casting.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-11-13, 03:37 PM

The feedback system might be possible to streamline or tone down, but I do rather like the idea of having extended psychic battles in some form or another, and even non-casters should have a reasonable chance of defending themselves in that arena. (There is technically a sliver of precedent for this in the description of the nightmare (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/nightmare.htm) spell, in that a targeted dispelling rebounds quite badly on the caster.) But I guess it needs to be playtested first.

Extended psychic battles seem like more of a psionics thing, if you're planning to split that off like you are animist/druidic casting. But if you do include those, I'd think those should be more of a separate subsystem, or at least its own spell seed that can be deliberately cast, rather than something that can be randomly triggered by casting an Enchantment spell, if only because the logistics of "Surprise! Sudden sub-encounter!" in the middle of a battle or infiltration would be kind of a pain.

Inspiration is already an optional 5e mechanic, so I was just borrowing the name, but I think the PCs just having a certain degree of metagame privilege isn't particularly unusual. The Artha system in BW isn't dissimilar, for example, and seems to operate fine.

Re-reading what you wrote, I think I misinterpreted what you meant; when you said "shut down mind control" and "become vulnerable when it hits zero" it sounded like an Exalted-style perfect defense or an ongoing passive "I'm a PC" immunity (which is a degree of metagame intrusiveness that's fairly out of place in D&D), but if you merely meant something like 5e inspiation or 3e action points where it makes it more likely to resist mind control in a way indistinguishable in the fiction from normal luck or willpower or whatever, that's probably fine.

All this is true. However!
1. The thematic grouping already lends itself to certain identity. A buffer will probably be Abjurer or Transmuter. Necromancer is more likely to have debuffs and damage dealing capabilities.
It also doesn't have to be a True/False thing. It could be more of a better spells for that school in that kind of way then in that other school.

The difference is that the thematic groupings include combat roles, rather than being defined by them. Buffers are often Abjurers and Transmuters, but Abjurers and Transmuters are much more than just buffers, and it's much more likely for a player looking at the schools to pick a concept theme-first ("I wanna be a demon summoner, so I'm going to play a Conjurer!") than role-first ("I wanna be a battlefield controller, so I'm going to play a Conjurer!").

2. The game already treats the schools in mechanicistly way. Specialization, Focus Feat, the dices you need to roll to succeed. The schools fails to act only as a fluff thing.

I never said that schools are (or are trying to be) mechanics-agnostic, just that they're a thematic grouping first. And where they do intersect with mechanics, it's fairly important that they act as thematic groupings more than combat-role groupings.

Detect magic, for instance, will tell you the school of a magic trap's effect, and it's much more useful to know that a trap is, say, a Conjuration trap ("Okay guys, we're probably about to get teleported somewhere or have to face some monsters, get ready!") versus a Necromancy trap ("Okay guys, instant-death trap ahead, anyone have any Fort save buffs?") than that it's a blasting vs. debuffing trap because "damage" and "debuffs" are far too broad a category to reason about or prepare for.

Also, it's much more useful to have subschool mechanics so that your illusions work the same way, your teleportation works the same way, your polymorphing works the same way, etc. for thematic consistency and making reasoning about similar spell effects easier, as opposed to having all your blasting work the same way, all your personal buffs work the same way, etc., because again, "blasting" and "personal buffs" are so broad that you don't get any benefit for putting common mechanics in subschools instead of the spells themselves.

Indigo Knight

2018-11-13, 04:28 PM

Do note that I'm not requesting that the schools be buffing, debuffing, etc. More so that aligning the existing schools on the coordinates of mechanics could help. Maybe.
Anyway, it is a moot point.

I found it.
http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=18327.0

Also, you may want to look at the post here, since it's connected to the spells.
http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=16005.msg283165#msg283165

Is there a summary page for current status of your homebrew?
Cheers

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-14, 01:03 PM

I found it.
http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=18327.0

Also, you may want to look at the post here, since it's connected to the spells.
http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=16005.msg283165#msg283165
Cheers. I'll try and take a look over the weekend.

I don't really have a central repository online at the moment, but I might put one together a bit later.

Anyhoo, last major batch of spell domains for a while (some of which might not be strictly functional since they refer to transmutation/thaumaturgy effects,) but mostly ready to go. Rules for Conjuration, and then some general-purpose Divine spells intended for each of the major alignments.

CONJURATION SPELLS

General Conjuration Modifiers
Distance:
+0 a hundred feet
+1 a mile or so
+2 100 miles
+3 anywhere on earth
+4 to/from another plane
Planar Connection:
+1 per 2 outsider levels beyond level 4
Volition:
-1 if creature is on friendly plane
+2 if creature is on hostile plane

Sending (level 1)
Allows communication with a subject remotely.
The subject must be known first hand or uniquely identified-
certain divinations may be helpful in this regard.
Modifiers:
+0 Conveys short message (25 words or so- a simple dialog check)
+2 Allow dialogue for 10 minutes- allows full dialog scene
+1 per level of Enchantment you want to apply to subject
+1 per level of Illusion you want to apply to your appearance

Teleport (level 2)
Transports the caster to a distant point (or plane.)
Passengers (can stack):
+0 personal
+1 4 additional minute/tiny creatures
+1 2 additional small/medium/large creatures
+1 1 additional huge creature
+2 1 additional colossal creature
Accurate targeting still requires beating a static DC of 10.
+0 if area is highly familiar or closely studied
+5 if area is uniquely described or studied on map
+10 if area is seen casually or known by rumour
+5 per level of Planar Binding or other opposed enchantments
If targeting fails by 10 or less:
You appear in a similar location within range at GM's discretion.
If targeting fails by more than 10:
All subjects take 2d10 damage and you must re-roll.

Planar Binding (level 3)
Makes it impossible to cast Conjurations.
Cannot move/act at all if you're an Outsider.
Can be voided at will by caster, which can be used for bargaining purposes.
Lasts 1 minute/level.
Potency +1: increase duration, increase save DC by 2.

Summoning (level 4)
Summons a being from the outer planes into your presence.
There is no guarantee that this being will be friendly/compliant-
wise casters will, e.g, ready a Circle of Planar Binding first.
Modifiers:
-1 if a suitable host body is available and tenant is willing
+2 if creature is unwilling (allows will save)
Distance modifiers do not apply.

Banishment (level 4)
As Summoning, but banishes an outsider to it's home plane.

Word of Recall (level 4)
Nominates a 'home point' for the caster or an item in their possession.
At any subsequent time, the caster may return the object or item to
that point with no risk of mistargeting, regardless of distance.
does not bypass Planar Binding.
(Note: a contigency spell on the caster/object can trigger instead.)

HOLY SPELLS:

Radiance (level 0):
As Light, but 1 level higher.
Undead suffer 1d4 burn damage/level and a -5 save penalty.

Word of Peace (level 1):
Grants +10 bonus to a single persuasion test-
must attempt to defuse or de-escalate violence.
Can function as Banishment against compelled undead.

Exorcism (level 1):
As Banishment, but limited to malign undead and outsiders.
Requires successful dialog test or conflict scene.

Libation (level 1):
Requires a dish of clean water.
Allows Close Wounds, Purge Affliction or Heal as potion at +1 level.
Can create Holy Water, dealing 1d10 damage to undead or evil outsiders.
Can be used to purify food and water as a separate casting.

Close Wounds (level 1):
level 0 is 1d4 damage to fatigue, +2 to Craft[Healing].
level 1 is 1d8 damage to fatigue, +5 to Craft[Healing].
Stacks with +1 level.

Purge Affliction (level 2):
Provides victim fresh save and +10 bonus vs. poison/disease.
Provides +10 bonus to Craft[Healing] vs. poison or disease.
Allows counterspell attempt vs. curses or enchantments.
Stacks with +1 level.

Heal (level 3):
Pick an effect:
Re-attach lost limbs, eyes, organs, et cetera, if present.
Permit subject fresh poison/disease save with +20 bonus.
Immediately restore 10 injury, each +1 level stacks.
Restore 4 points of ability damage, each +1 level stacks.
Remove 1 negative level, each +1 level stacks.
Regenerate lost limbs: +3 spell level.

Resurrection (level 4):
Restores a deceased person/creature to life
Combines contact, summoning and regeneration of remains to restore a deceased person or creature to life.

Condition of Remains:
Body is < 1 day dead and mostly intact: +0
Body is mildly decomposed or missing a few parts: +1
Body is heavily decomposed or badly fragmented: +2
Body is only present as trace remnant: +3
Body is entirely absent: +4 (must identify subject uniquely)

Volition modifiers for Summoning still apply in addition to the modifiers above. As per the terms of Sending
and Summoning, a dialog test or scene may be required to convince the subject to return, but the spell does
guarantee the provision of a healthy host body, which may improve your bargaining position.

PROFANE SPELLS

Miasma (level 0+):
As Darkness, but 1 level higher.
Deals 1 fatigue/round to living and -1 to all tests.
Restores 1 HP/round to undead.

Death Knell (level 1+):
As Sleep, but results are fatal.

Contagion (level 1+):
Applies disease with a save DC of up to 5 + (5x spell level.)
If successful, the disease immediately advances 1 stage.
If the disease is already possessed, it advances 1 stage further.
Also deals 1d4 + 1 damage per spell level.

Can be used to contaminate food or drink with the given disease-
in this case there is no bonus damage or stage advancement.

(Baseline disease: 1 day onset, 1d4 Str damage/day, save DC 15.)

Word of Doom (level 3+):
As Compulsion, but must be phrased as task to fulfill.
Cannot directly alter beliefs/vows, but lasts until task is fulfilled.
Every day the victim does not pursue the task, they gain 1 negative level.
If the victim loses all levels, they are destroyed, body & soul.

Seal Affliction (level 3):
Renders the effects of any other normally-temporary harmful spell or condition permanent.
Subsequent attempts to cure or remove the condition must oppose a +15 DC or +3 spell level, whichever is appropriate.

Destruction (level 3+):
Deals 1d8 damage/level, ignores armour and damage reduction, no save.
If the victim is killed, their corpse is reduced to fine ash.

Soul Drain (level 5):
Bestows one negative level on the victim each round.
Grants effects of level 3 Heal spell to caster each round.
Requires concentration, victim is allowed fresh save each turn.
If victim is killed or reduced to zero levels, their soul is consumed.

Summon Undead (level 3+):
Combines contact, summoning and binding of undead.
Have the body: -1, Deceased in past 24 hours: -1
Mass Summoning: +2 (affects x5 subjects, can stack)
Souls with no current outsider levels are forced to gain 1 level of Lemure.
If the body is missing entirely, only Lemures with incorporeal traits may be summoned.

Volition modifiers for Summoning apply as normal. More powerful undead can be raising using the usual summoning rules for outsiders, but the spell level may have to be adjusted appropriately.

NATURE SPELLS:

Abundance (level 1+):
Multiplies food and water from an existing source-
either current rations, fruiting vegetation or an animal carcass.
Converts 1 unit of rations into 4.
Multiply effects x4 for each +1 spell level.

Envenom (level 1+):
Applies poison with a save DC of up to 5 + (5x spell level.)
If successful, onset period is ignored.
May be applied to weapon or food/drink instead of direct casting-
If it hits, no initial save is permitted, but onset applies.

(Baseline poison: 1 minute onset, 1d6 damage/round, save DC 15.)

Awakening (level 2):
Grants an animal the Awakened trait, allowing them to acquire skills
and feats without restriction. They may also learn (though not usually
speak) human languages, and gain +1 to Int/Wis/Cha.

This spell also establishes a telepathic bond with the creature, allowing
for sight through their eyes and mutual communication. Any such bond
beyond the first requires concentration to maintain.

Can be revoked by the original caster, or made Perpetual.

Wild Aspect (Level 1+):
Lasts 1 minute/level.
Grant attribute bonus within range of particular species' stats.
Maximum bonus matches spell level.
Examples:
Cat's Reflexes: max +4 Ref
Bull's Strength: max +4 Str
Owl's Wisdom: max +4 Wis
May also be used to confer natural feats of lower point cost than
the spell level.

Wild Shape (level 3+):
As Polymorph, but 1 level higher, and must be instantaneous.
Form is limited to familiar animal species, may revoke at will.

Call Of The Wild (level 3+):
Functions as Mass Summoning for animals of a particular species within
a given area. Distance modifiers apply instead of extraplanar origin.

Summon Elements (level 3+):
Functions as either a Call Fire, Call Ice, Call Lightning or Call Wind
spell of 1 level lower, or as a Summoning spell of 1 level lower, for
Elementals only.

Control Weather (level 4+):
10 times normal casting/preparation time.
Functions similarly to a +20 bonus to Knowledge [Weather] tests, with
a +5 bonus per additional spell level.
Note that particularly intense weather can confer bonuses to casting
and preparing certain Evocation spells.

ORDER SPELLS:

Note: Anathema is the designated 'other' for the cleric in question- a despised enemy to
be hunted and destroyed, such as undead, hostile outsiders, wiley fae or chthonic aberrations.
Options are much as per the description for a Favoured Enemy, but usually specified for each
divine patron's domain.

Commandment (level 0+):
As Compulsion, but 1 level higher.
Must relate to a religious tenet or article of faith.

Discern Truth (level 0+):
As Discern Mind, but 1 level higher.
Limited to revealing falsehoods or major ommissions, not thoughts or language.

Bless Weapon (level 1+):
Grants a weapon +1 to damage and +1 to hit.
Lasts until discharged, may be cast during attack.
Effect is doubled vs. Anathema.
Each +1 spell level stacks effects.

Shield of Faith (level 2):
Grants +1 to AC, or +2 from the fore.
Lasts 1 minute/level.
Further +1 bonus vs. Anathema.
Each +2 spell level doubles effects and extends duration.

Sanctuary (level 1+):
Enemies must make a will save vs. spell level to attack the subject.
Anathema suffer a -10 penalty to the save.

Consecration (level 3+):
As Permanency, but applies strictly to divine spells cast upon a piece of
equipment or holy ground.
Optionally, holy ground may be granted a permanent bonus to casting
spells from the same divine patron as the caster.
spell level 4: +1
spell level 5: +2
spell level 6: +3
spell level 7: +4
spell level 8: +5

Mark of Justice (level 3+):
As Compulsion, but 1 level higher, and limited to providing terms of
release or atonement after the serious violation of a law.
Must have indefinite duration, but cannot be dispelled.

Immovable Object (level 4+):
Lasts 1 round/level.
Grants DR 10, +5 Str and +5 to all saves, immune to knockback, trip etc.
Each +1 spell level grants +2 DR, +1 Str and +1 to all saves.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-14, 01:21 PM

Extended psychic battles seem like more of a psionics thing, if you're planning to split that off like you are animist/druidic casting. But if you do include those, I'd think those should be more of a separate subsystem, or at least its own spell seed that can be deliberately cast, rather than something that can be randomly triggered by casting an Enchantment spell, if only because the logistics of "Surprise! Sudden sub-encounter!" in the middle of a battle or infiltration would be kind of a pain.
That's true, now that you mention it. The GM would probably have some discretion over whether to use a contested skill roll or an extended dialog scene, but it would be tricky to figure out how the latter would work in the middle of a larger battlefield situation.

I'm probably not going to make any specific effort at replicating psionics- I've got quite enough on my plate with the current bestiary and feat system.

Re-reading what you wrote, I think I misinterpreted what you meant; when you said "shut down mind control" and "become vulnerable when it hits zero" it sounded like an Exalted-style perfect defense or an ongoing passive "I'm a PC" immunity (which is a degree of metagame intrusiveness that's fairly out of place in D&D), but if you merely meant something like 5e inspiration or 3e action points where it makes it more likely to resist mind control in a way indistinguishable in the fiction from normal luck or willpower or whatever, that's probably fine.
Well, 'vulnerable' in the sense of 'more likely to happen', sure. I might still allow auto-shutdown specifically for mind-control through (or something like 'roll automatic 20 at the cost of 2 Inspiration'.)

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-11-15, 09:43 PM

CONJURATION SPELLS

General Conjuration Modifiers
Distance:
+0 a hundred feet
+1 a mile or so
+2 100 miles
+3 anywhere on earth
+4 to/from another plane
[...]
Planar Binding (level 3)
Makes it impossible to cast Conjurations.
Cannot move/act at all if you're an Outsider.
Can be voided at will by caster, which can be used for bargaining purposes.
Lasts 1 minute/level.
Potency +1: increase duration, increase save DC by 2.

Summoning (level 4)
Summons a being from the outer planes into your presence.
There is no guarantee that this being will be friendly/compliant-
wise casters will, e.g, ready a Circle of Planar Binding first.
Modifiers:
-1 if a suitable host body is available and tenant is willing
+2 if creature is unwilling (allows will save)
Distance modifiers do not apply.

I notice that the Summoning seed has a "Distance modifiers do not apply" note but Planar Binding does not; is that an oversight, or are you changing Planar Binding to a more 5e-style "bind something that you already summoned with another spell" effect?

HOLY SPELLS:
[...]
Resurrection (level 4):
Restores a deceased person/creature to life
Combines contact, summoning and regeneration of remains to restore a deceased person or creature to life.

Condition of Remains:
Body is < 1 day dead and mostly intact: +0
Body is mildly decomposed or missing a few parts: +1
Body is heavily decomposed or badly fragmented: +2
Body is only present as trace remnant: +3
Body is entirely absent: +4 (must identify subject uniquely)

Was it intentional that all of these effects are -1 spell level from their core equivalent (base effect at level 4 is equivalent to 5th-level revivify, and resurrection without a body at level 8 is equivalent to 9th-level true resurrection) with no side effects like reincarnate's random new body, raise dead's level loss, etc.? Nothing wrong with that inherently, but I wasn't sure if you meant for the new social test required to resurrect someone to mitigate those factors or if you just meant to add that in on top and the different levels were an off-by-1 error.

NATURE SPELLS:
[...]
Awakening (level 2):
Grants an animal the Awakened trait, allowing them to acquire skills
and feats without restriction. They may also learn (though not usually
speak) human languages, and gain +1 to Int/Wis/Cha.

If you don't want to go with 3d6 mental stats (and that's fine, given the interaction with metamagic effects), you might want to have this give a larger bonus (+1d6ish, perhaps) or at least set Int to 10, since (A) it's usually cast to give an animal average-human-like intelligence and dealing with a companion that can no longer be Handle Animal'd yet is too dim to be useful on its own can be a pain, and (B) having Int 3 gives them very few skill points to play with, which negates some of the "can acquire skills without restriction" benefit unless you plan for the Awakened trait to give them some bonus points to make up for it.

Wild Aspect (Level 1+):
Lasts 1 minute/level.
Grant attribute bonus within range of particular species' stats.
Maximum bonus matches spell level.
Examples:
Cat's Reflexes: max +4 Ref
Bull's Strength: max +4 Str
Owl's Wisdom: max +4 Wis

This can be problematic, since on the one hand you usually get a +4 to given stat with a 2nd-level spell rather than a 4th-level spell so the 1st-level version of this isn't really worth casting, and on the other hand being able to get +9 to a stat is pretty darn strong if that translates into jacking up your DCs, giving you +70ish HP, or the like.

I'd suggest instead to have it be a Level 2+ spell that grants a flat +4 instead of a scaling +level, and have the +level effects be things like increasing it to hour/level duration (like the 3.0 version of the [animal]'s [stat] spells had), adding on a second stat boost, and so forth, so higher levels add versatility and reliability rather than power.

ORDER SPELLS:
[...]
Commandment (level 0+):
As Compulsion, but 1 level higher.
Must relate to a religious tenet or article of faith.

Losing stuff like "Halt!" and "Flee!" on the command equivalent (since I assume no religion would have those relate sufficiently to its tenets to count) really cuts down on this seed's utility. Since Compulsion already has a check involved to persuade/coerce the target, what if rather than requiring a direct relation to religious tenets it instead provided a check bonus if the desired action related to a tenet of the caster's faith and a penalty if it went against one? That way, a Pelorite could easily compel someone to heal someone but would take penalties to compelling someone to attack an ally, a Banite could easily compel someone to surrender but would take penalties to compelling someone to heal them, and either faith could make vanilla compulsions like fleeing or halting with equal skill.

Consecration (level 3+):
As Permanency, but applies strictly to divine spells cast upon a piece of
equipment or holy ground.

Minor nitpick, but in core consecrate makes "holy ground" holy in the first place and hallow is the one that does the really-long-duration-spell-effect thing (and also consecrates it, but that's not the main reason to use hallow), so you might want to either change the name and introduce a separate Consecrate seed to consecrate an area, or allow this seed to do either one.

I'm probably not going to make any specific effort at replicating psionics- I've got quite enough on my plate with the current bestiary and feat system.

Honestly, with the seed-and-augment system being so close to 3e psionics augmentation already, it probably wouldn't be too much work to fold psionics into this as a fourth flavor of "psionic magic" alongside arcane, divine, and natural magic. You've already got the variable-energy-type blasting, extra-creature-type compulsions, and so on, and things like temporal manipulation, telekinetic control of things, and the like are already mentioned in your plans for further seeds.

The main psionic schticks you haven't covered or don't already plan to cover are (A) a build-your-own-summon system à la astral construct, which you could do as a pointer to your modular monster system, (B) direct-mental-attack powers like mind thrust (straight damage), ego whip (Cha damage), etc., which you could do as something like "As , but deals Psychic damage instead of its normal type and has no physical manifestation," (C) mental and physical splitting/merging like [I]schism, fission, fusion, metaconcert, and such, which either fall under your "situational casting bonuses" rules (metaconcert as a ritual-like setup, schism as a pseudo-Quicken at a penalty, etc.) or are kind of tricky and could be safely left out if you don't feel like tackling them.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-18, 07:03 PM

On Awakening/Wild Aspect: I think part of the problem here is that I'm confusing the attributes system for my custom rule-set with the stats for standard D&D (stats go from 1 to 5, not 3 to 18.) I'll need to clean those up and post separate versions, possibly.

Planar Binding has more in common with old-skool Dimensional Anchor mechanically, but I'm not too pushed about the name. The new version of Consecrate should be multi-purpose already, unless I missed something?

Was it intentional that all of these effects are -1 spell level from their core equivalent (base effect at level 4 is equivalent to 5th-level revivify, and resurrection without a body at level 8 is equivalent to 9th-level true resurrection) with no side effects like reincarnate's random new body, raise dead's level loss, etc.?
I think I just forgot about the level loss- I'll stick that in. The social test is a factor, sure, but more generally they're only lower-level if you can cast the spell immediately (it's assumed that souls which have been dead long enough for the corpse to molder or disappear have gained enough outsider levels that they're intrinsically more difficult to summon, even if they haven't reincarnated.)

Losing stuff like "Halt!" and "Flee!" on the command equivalent (since I assume no religion would have those relate sufficiently to its tenets to count) really cuts down on this seed's utility.. ...a Banite could easily compel someone to surrender but would take penalties to compelling someone to heal them, and either faith could make vanilla compulsions like fleeing or halting with equal skill.
Yeah, that's a good call. I've been thinking about a similar system of penalties/bonuses for domain spells, generic spells and 'opposed spells' for clerics more generally, so that would probably fit the mold quite well.

Honestly, with the seed-and-augment system being so close to 3e psionics augmentation already, it probably wouldn't be too much work to fold psionics into this as a fourth flavor of "psionic magic" alongside arcane, divine, and natural magic. You've already got the variable-energy-type blasting, extra-creature-type compulsions, and so on, and things like temporal manipulation, telekinetic control of things, and the like are already mentioned in your plans for further seeds...
...maybe. I suppose I could wedge in a few bonus schticks for direct mental duels or fission/fusion, etc., but I'd have to revisit the question and/or proper school divisions later.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-11-21, 03:31 PM

On Awakening/Wild Aspect: I think part of the problem here is that I'm confusing the attributes system for my custom rule-set with the stats for standard D&D (stats go from 1 to 5, not 3 to 18.) I'll need to clean those up and post separate versions, possibly.

Ah, yes, that would help. And attribute ranges and costs would probably be good to know for other aspects of the system.

The new version of Consecrate should be multi-purpose already, unless I missed something?

This Consecrate applies to spells cast on holy ground, but doesn't actually let you make a location "holy ground," is what I'm getting at. Unless that second "holy ground may be granted a permanent bonus..." clause is supposed to mean "the location chose can be made into holy ground, which grants a permanent bonus..." in which case the wording could use some clarification.

...maybe. I suppose I could wedge in a few bonus schticks for direct mental duels or fission/fusion, etc., but I'd have to revisit the question and/or proper school divisions later.

That's fine, you don't have to include psionics, I just figure that your initial reluctance was due to not knowing the system well enough to adapt it but the convergent evolution should make it easier to adapt than expected.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-22, 09:50 AM

Ah, yes, that would help. And attribute ranges and costs would probably be good to know for other aspects of the system.
I think I covered the basics here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?570982-Skill-based-Spellcasting&p=23441196&viewfull=1#post23441196)- you just split 15 points between 6 attributes, min 1, max 5. I've added some sketch-notes on the afterlife system as well, if you wanted to look over those.

Indigo Knight

2018-11-27, 05:38 AM

I don't really have a central repository online at the moment, but I might put one together a bit later.

Were you able to consolidate a page with your notes? Even a post in the thread will suffice.

Lacuna Caster

2018-11-28, 11:24 AM

Were you able to consolidate a page with your notes? Even a post in the thread will suffice.
I'm not a million miles from having all the various spell types and monster traits sketched out now, so I'll probably start collating them properly in a central location then.

Lacuna Caster

2018-12-04, 02:15 PM

Just gonna throw out the last few bits and pieces now- Transmutation, Thaumaturgy and Universal.

General Transmutation:

All transmutation spells allow fortitude saves and can be
countered by themselves. They also restore 1d4 + 1 HP per
level, with the exception of Disintegrate/Petrify.

There is no general Polymorph or Trait Morph spell. A separate
spell must be researched or learned for each particular creature
whose form the caster desires to assume, which requires a
tissue sample from that creature for research purposes.

Note: Any traits granted permanently must occupy available
feat slots- if necessary, the trauma of the change causes
other feats to be 'forgotten' and replaced, chosen at the
subject's discretion. Any feats that lack their prerequisites
due to changes in base attributes or species are also lost.

Note: Unwilling subjects must be either restrained,
unconscious, or targeted by a ranged touch attack to be
affected.

Onset adjustments:
Gradual (1d8 days ): +0, fresh save or 'dose' each day
Normal (1d4 minutes): +1, allows time for counterspell
Rapid (1 round ): +2, allows time for counterspell
Instant (once cast ): +3, can only counter when cast

Other adjustments:
Short duration (a few minutes) +0
Subject is unwilling: +1
Medium duration (a few days) +1, fresh save each day allowed
Permanent duration +3, unwilling subjects get repeated saves as per medium duration.

Polymorph (level 0+)
Transforms a living subject into a genetic clone of another
creature or person, based on a pre-existing sample of their
tissues. Mental attributes are unaffected unless changes are
permanent.

Adjustments:
Same species, different individual: +0
Different species: +1
Is elemental or aberration: +1 (each)
Per 2 traits granted (round up): +1
Enlarge/reduce subject: +1 per difference in size category

Trait Morph (level 1+):
Confers one particular trait from the animal, plant or
infection list upon the subject. Must be based on a pre-
existing tissue sample of a creature with this trait.

Balance of Humours (level 1+):
Grants up to a +1 bonus/level to a particular attribute, at a
similar cost to other attributes. At most a +3 bonus or
increase can be conferred.

Can also stores another Transmutation spell in the form of a
potion, which remains stable for 5 + 1d10 days. If ingested
or injected, increases save DC by +5.

Airs & Vapours (level +3):
Applies the effects of any alchemical potion, poison or other
transmutation to all subjects within a spreading cloud of]
vapour. (If no potion is available, water may be used,
simply creating a translucent mist.)

The cloud always grants concealment to those within it's area
and extends for 4 5-ft squares per level. It also increases
any save DC vs. effects by 2. Lasts 1 minute/level.

Transubstantiate (level 3+):
Converts one basic element- air, earth, fire or water- either
wholly or partly into another. This can be used to create
bursts of natural fire, areas of mud, convert loose earth to
solid stone, or make liquids evaporate. While in liquid or
gaseous form, a substance can be sculpted, shaped or
dispersed as desired.

Extends for 4 5-ft cubes per level, lasts 1 minute/level or
until dismissed. Cannot be cast on living creatures or magic
items.

Can also provide a +4 bonus, +2 per extra level, to any
Craft [Alchemy] check.

Disintegrate / Petrify (level 4+):
Gradually either tears the subject apart on a molecular level,
or turns them to stone, starting with any afflicted extremity
(use the Critical Strike rules to determine initial loss of
limb or damage multiple.)

The victim rolls twice to save vs. progression- if both pass,
the spell is ended, if both fail, they take 2d12 damage and
must make another progression check, and if only one passes,
they take 1d4 damage and need not save again for 1 day. The
condition is exceedingly painful and normal healing may not
take place while the spell is in effect. Amputation of an
affected extremity does not suffice to purge the condition.

Onset adjustments reduce the progression interval to 1 hour, 1
minute, and 1 round. Other adjustments do not apply.

Disintegrate and Petrify counter eachother and must be learned
separately.

Thaumaturgy:

Mage's Weapon (level 1+):
Protects a weapon from rust or chipping, add +10 hardness.
Grants minimum +1 bonus to hit and damage, can hit incorporeal targets.
May also be cast on 20 bolts of ammunition or 5 thrown items.
Each +2 spell level increases the minimum hit and damage bonus, max +5.

Mage's Armour (level 1+):
Protects armour from rust or chipping, add +10 hardness.
Grants minimum +1 bonus to AC and DR, can block incorporeal attacks.
May be cast on the mage or their spellbook for another +2 AC.
Each +2 spell level increases the minimum AC and DR bonus, max +5.

Inscription (level 2+):
Store a Necromancy or Transmutation spell in a potion.
Store any other Arcana-based spell in a scroll.
Spell parameters must be chose at time of instillment.
Max spell level is 1, and increases by 1 with each +1 spell level.

Contingency (level 2+):
Trigger another spell that affects you based on trigger conditions.
Trigger conditions must be unambiguously specified based on traits
perceptible to a human viewer- a spoken name, species, sex, current
time, degree of injury, etc.
May also plug in a Divination spell to help identify conditions.
Max spell level is 1, and increases by 1 with each +1 spell level.

Perpetual [X] (level +3):
Lasts forever if it has a non-instant duration, affects the caster, item
or a willing subject. May have conditions, as Contingency.
Subject must retain (or be) the substrate item to gain benefit.
Requires masterwork item as substrate.

Circle of [X] (level +3+):
Applies effects of another spell with non-instant duration to any creature
or object that enters 5-ft radius. May have conditions, as Contingency.
Symbols may be drawn temporarily on surface.
Each +1 spell level increases radius by 10 ft.
Requires masterwork item as substrate for permanent effect.

Symbol of [X] (level +3):
Applies effects of another spell with instant duration to any creatures
within range, then goes dormant. May have conditions, as Contingency.
Symbol may be drawn temporarily on surface.
Requires masterwork item as substrate for permanent effect.

Mage's Staff (level 3+):
Permits enchantment of a masterwork staff (or wand) to provide a bonus
to other arcane casting. This provides a +2 Arcana bonus and 5 bonus
spell points.
Each +3 spell level adds another +2 Arcana bonus and 5 bonus spell
points, max +6/15.

Create Golem (level 4+):
Functions as Summoning for an Eidolon or Logos, but requires a golem
body be prepared in readiness.
A Golem's body can be considered either a type of full plate armour or
masterwork sculpture and may be crafted accordingly.
Steel: +20 HP, +5 per bonus, DR 5.
Stone: +15 HP, +4 per bonus, DR 5/blunt.
Clay: +10 HP, +2 per bonus, DR 5/blunt.
Wood: +5 HP, +1 per bonus, DR 5/edged, 2x damage from fire.

Universal:

Extended [X] (level +1):
Spell duration is doubled.

Distant [X] (level +1):
Range of spell increases 30 ft.

Empowered [X] (level +2):
Roll for numeric effects twice and take the better result,
OR increase damage by 50%.

Widened [X] (level +3):
Instantaneous area of effect is doubled.

Word of [X] (level +3+):
The spell allows no save for victims of level 4 or less.
Each +1 spell level increases max victim level by 2.

Mass [X] (level +4+):
Affects two creatures/level within 30 ft.
If the base spell is touch range, it gains a 15-ft range.
Cannot require concentration or negotiated outcomes.

Stretch Time (level 3+):
Haste +0: Subject gains 1 bonus action per round, +2 Reflex. Lasts 3 rounds.
Slow +1: Subject loses 1 action per round, -2 Reflex. Can stack.
Subjects with no actions cannot be interacted with.
Stop +2: You take a full round of actions for free. Can stack.
Other creatures and solid objects cannot be interacted with.

Wish (level 5+):
In a synthesis of several different schools of magic, you
reach back in the flow of time and space to some point in your
own past, and implant the knowledge of the future in your
past-self's mind with the intent of altering key events. For
game purposes, you rewind time back to that point and replay
the game- but the further back you reach, the more difficult
it becomes, and the more Inspiration must be spent.
Time back:
1 round: +0, 0 Inspiration
1d4 minutes: +1, 1 Inspiration
1d4 days: +2, 2 Inspiration
1d4 years: +3, 3 Inspiration
a lifetime: +4, 4 Inspiration
Note: This spell should probably not be cast as a unilateral
decision- any other player (including the GM) can spend a
point of Inspiration to allow their designated character to
either retain similar knowledge of the future, or simply to
cancel out Inspiration spent by the caster.

I have the various Crafting rules mostly worked out now, which are intended to complement some of these, and Necromancy is mostly done as well. Laters.

EDIT: Updated wording for Polymorph/Trait morph requirements.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-12-06, 02:56 PM

Each casting of Polymorph or Trait Morph with respect to a
particular tissue sample must be learned or researched as a
separate spell.

While limiting polymorph to not be "turn into any monster you've ever heard of" is definitely a good thing, I think this restriction is probably too punitive. Firstly, learning a spell is a non-trivial downtime investment (for researched spells) and/or opportunity cost (for automatically-learned spells, assuming you're keeping the "learn N spells on level-up" rule with the new system), and possibly takes up a precious spell known slot if your new casters have limited repertoires; I skimmed your other thread again and didn't see anything about learning spells, so this part is a bit hazy as to how much of an effect it would have.

Second, the restriction goes against the general increased breadth of your new spells; when "turn into an ogre" and "turn into a troll" are separate spells, but Call Fire is "cast any Evocation [Fire] spell you want," that's pretty limiting. And third, requiring the research and the body part renders the spell nonfunctional a lot of the time: if you research the spell before you get a body part, if you run out of harvested body parts and have to kill another monster for more parts, and so on then it's just a nonfunctional line on your character sheet.

So what I would suggest is splitting your spell seeds into two. Polymorph splits into Assume Form, which has the specific creature requirement but not the body part requirement (and is probably researched as "Form of the X" or the like) and works all the time, and Polymorph, which has the body part requirement but not the specific creature requirement and can turn you into anything that would fit into the formula for the level at which it it's cast. The same goes for Assume Trait (becoming Bite of the X or Claws of the Y or whatever) and Partial Polymorph, or whatever you want to call those.

That's probably enough control on those spells, because Assume Form for even a very good form still just does that, compared to the versatility of other spells, and you can control the power of Polymorph with appropriate monster-harvesting rules. And if dumpster-diving in combat is a concern, you can give Polymorph a long enough casting time to prevent combat use, which also fits the classic use of polymorph: people tend to have two or three go-to combat forms, and then hunt around for creatures with relevant senses, movement modes, special abilities, and such for out-of-combat utility.

Inscription (level 2+):
Store a Necromancy or Transmutation spell in a potion.
Store any other Arcana-based spell in a scroll.
Spell parameters must be chose at time of instillment.
Max spell level is 1, and increases by 1 with each +1 spell level.

Nitpick: Something like "Infusion" would probably be a better name, since Inscription only applies to the scroll portion of this seed.

Create Golem (level 4+):
Functions as Summoning for an Eidolon or Logos, but requires a golem
body be prepared in readiness.
A Golem's body can be considered either a type of full plate armour or
masterwork sculpture and may be crafted accordingly.
Steel: +20 HP, +5 per bonus, DR 5.
Stone: +15 HP, +4 per bonus, DR 5/blunt.
Clay: +10 HP, +2 per bonus, DR 5/blunt.
Wood: +5 HP, +1 per bonus, DR 5/edged, 2x damage from fire.

For clarification, this seed lets you summon any Eidolon or Logos (angels, modrons, inevitables, etc.), but they have to manifest in one of the four specified golem bodies (or, to look at it another way, it's a build-your-own-construct spell with four specific substrates), which modify the summoned critter's stats accordingly? That seems a bit overly complex; one of the benefits of D&D-style summoning where you grab a preexisting monster is that you can use the stat block as-is.

Expanding on my Inorganic Form feat suggestion in the other thread, I'd suggest having a Create Construct spell that just require an unspecified "appropriate construct body" and summons the creature as-is, and a separate Create Golem spell that lets you choose the exact Inorganic Form parameters for a corresponding golem body and lets you assign traits as desired--or at least have those as two different non-overlapping options for the same seed. Like the Polymorph stuff above, "I want to quickly summon/animate this particular thing" and "I want to custom-build a construct guardian/mount/minion" are different spell use cases, so splitting them up can actually be better and more straightforward during play.

Wish (level 5+):
In a synthesis of several different schools of magic, you
reach back in the flow of time and space to some point in your
own past, and implant the knowledge of the future in your
past-self's mind with the intent of altering key events. For
game purposes, you rewind time back to that point and replay
the game- but the further back you reach, the more difficult
it becomes, and the more Inspiration must be spent.
Time back:
1 round: +0, 0 Inspiration
1d4 minutes: +1, 1 Inspiration
1d4 days: +2, 2 Inspiration
1d4 years: +3, 3 Inspiration
a lifetime: +4, 4 Inspiration
Note: This spell should probably not be cast as a unilateral
decision- any other player (including the GM) can spend a
point of Inspiration to allow their designated character to
either retain similar knowledge of the future, or simply to
cancel out Inspiration spent by the caster.

With no specified/default parameters, a requirement for metagame currency, and an option to negate it, this doesn't seem like it should be a distinct spell at all, because it's basically "do anything I want that the DM will let me" (though the costless and un-negateable "go back a round and change things" option is basically the psionic power time regression and would work nicely if you do decide to port over psionics).

If you look at what the existing wish does, it's basically a spell to let you duplicate other spells you can't cast, either explicitly with the "duplicate Xth level spells from Y list" options or implicitly with the teleport-but-better, resurrection-but-better, etc. options, and the strength of this system is building spells from well-defined components, so if I were to include Wish as an option in this system it would be a spell that let you either (A) cast a spell using seeds you don't know, but at a higher minimum level or similar, or (B) exceed your normal limits to cast more powerful spells, but at a more significant cost (Inspiration, self-debuffs, etc.).

Lacuna Caster

2018-12-06, 07:55 PM

Thanks, Pair'O'Dice. I'll get back with some revisions over the next day or two, but I just want to say I greatly appreciate the depth of feedback you've been giving.

Lacuna Caster

2018-12-10, 12:46 PM

Actual revisions are gonna take me another while, so bear with me...

While limiting polymorph to not be "turn into any monster you've ever heard of" is definitely a good thing, I think this restriction is probably too punitive...

...Second, the restriction goes against the general increased breadth of your new spells; when "turn into an ogre" and "turn into a troll" are separate spells, but Call Fire is "cast any Evocation [Fire] spell you want," that's pretty limiting. And third, requiring the research and the body part renders the spell nonfunctional a lot of the time: if you research the spell before you get a body part, if you run out of harvested body parts and have to kill another monster for more parts, and so on then it's just a nonfunctional line on your character sheet.
Oh, the tissue-sample requirement is strictly with respect to the original research project- you don't need a sliver of wyvern-flesh every time you want to sprout wings, for example- just while you're in the lab. (And yes, rules for spell-research more generally are something I still need to cover.)

And if dumpster-diving in combat is a concern, you can give Polymorph a long enough casting time to prevent combat use, which also fits the classic use of polymorph: people tend to have two or three go-to combat forms, and then hunt around for creatures with relevant senses, movement modes, special abilities, and such for out-of-combat utility.
At the moment, the power of transmutations are mainly limited in that, by default, they have both gradual onset and short duration- if you want to transform in one round and for that transformation to last more than a few minutes, that's a +3 spell-level adjustment. In addition, the spell says nothing about your equipment or clothing remaining intact or conveniently entering hammerspace until you change back- the burden for managing all that is on you. By default, it's really more aimed toward the 'magical genetic engineering' use-case of trying to transform yourself or your hapless subjects into chimeric species of atomic supermen. Or, you know, other lame stuff.

https://i.postimg.cc/wjq19fZr/cure-cancer.jpg

For clarification, this seed lets you summon any Eidolon or Logos (angels, modrons, inevitables, etc.), but they have to manifest in one of the four specified golem bodies (or, to look at it another way, it's a build-your-own-construct spell with four specific substrates), which modify the summoned critter's stats accordingly...
What I was aiming for here is an equivalent to the 'possess an offered host body' option available to other summoned outsiders, with Eidolons/Logos getting the benefit of being able to 'possess' an artificial mechanical body instead. The rules regarding which traits they're able to express (or not) would be covered by the Manifestation skill (which I still need to give proper details on.) It's definitely intended more for the 'long-term minion-assembly-project' use-case than pronto-summoning, though again I probably need to revisit this with an eye toward Crafting skills.

With no specified/default parameters, a requirement for metagame currency, and an option to negate it, this doesn't seem like it should be a distinct spell at all, because it's basically "do anything I want that the DM will let me" (though the costless and un-negateable "go back a round and change things" option is basically the psionic power time regression and would work nicely if you do decide to port over psionics).
I think you're misunderstanding me slightly- 'Time travel' is kinda how it works in every case, including if you go back days or years, so the parameters are actually fairly specific: you rewind the entire game to a certain point in the past and play it over again.

Now, if you want to argue that paper/guesswork involved in rolling back time X number of days or years could be a lot of hassle for both the GM and other players... yes, absolutely. It's pretty much intended solely for cases where the PCs have absolutely screwed the pooch and want a do-over, and the metagame currency is part of the intended pricing/voting arrangement. At least that's the idea.

PairO'Dice Lost

2018-12-12, 02:25 PM

Thanks, Pair'O'Dice. I'll get back with some revisions over the next day or two, but I just want to say I greatly appreciate the depth of feedback you've been giving.

I'm happy to give it. You and I have fairly similar design philosophies as far as I can tell, and I've tackled a lot of similar things in vaguely similar ways in my houserules over the years as mentioned a few times, so I know where some of the common pitfalls are to help you out, and also seeing how you're doing things gives me some ideas and pointers as well to refine my own game.

Oh, the tissue-sample requirement is strictly with respect to the original research project- you don't need a sliver of wyvern-flesh every time you want to sprout wings, for example- just while you're in the lab. (And yes, rules for spell-research more generally are something I still need to cover.)

Ah, that's a wyvern of a very different color. The "casting with respect to a tissue sample" verbiage isn't clear about that at all; I'd rephrase that as something like "There is no general Polymorph or Trait Morph spell. A separate spell must be researched or learned for each particular creature whose form the caster desires to assume--Form of the Wyvern for polymorphing into a wyvern or Jaws of the Serpent to trait morph a giant snake's fangs, for instance--and researching a given Polymorph or Trait Morph spell requires a tissue sample from a creature of that kind to be obtained and incorporated into the research process."

Now, if you want to argue that paper/guesswork involved in rolling back time X number of days or years could be a lot of hassle for both the GM and other players... yes, absolutely. It's pretty much intended solely for cases where the PCs have absolutely screwed the pooch and want a do-over, and the metagame currency is part of the intended pricing/voting arrangement. At least that's the idea.

Yep, that's what I meant. A spell that's a pain to cast for everyone involved and is meant to be cast for metagame reasons to fix metagame problems is entirely different than what wish is intended to be, and the "Here, you can cast a spell you don't have access to right now at a moderate cost" aspect of the spell is worth preserving if you're going to have wish at all.

The go-far-back-in-time-and-change-things effect really should be more of a plot device ritual of some sort with ad hoc costs (so a DM can e.g. make it easy to fix something that he thinks screwed up the campaign but make it much harder to "save scum" the same mission a few times...unless he wants to run a Groundhog Day scenario, in which case it can be made trivial) than a standard spell. I know you have all sorts of cast-spells-as-rituals mechanics in your other thread, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all plot-device rituals have to be expressed as spells mechanically.

If nothing else, making it a not-a-spell means you can make it accessible outside of the standard spell level framework, which is good because it's a mechanic that lower-level characters would need more than higher-level characters on average. At high levels, PCs have more control over NPCs, the environment, the plot, etc. and so can try to head off "bad endings" with divinations, rapid-response teleports, and so forth, while at the levels when a party would really need to go "Dammit, we took so long riding here that we missed the Evil Ritual of Evil, we need to pop back a few days to get there in time" they can't cast 7th+ level spells.

Lacuna Caster

2018-12-17, 05:46 PM

Ah, that's a wyvern of a very different color. The "casting with respect to a tissue sample" verbiage isn't clear about that at all; I'd rephrase that as something like "There is no general Polymorph or Trait Morph spell. A separate spell must be researched or learned for each particular creature whose form the caster desires to assume--Form of the Wyvern for polymorphing into a wyvern or Jaws of the Serpent to trait morph a giant snake's fangs, for instance--and researching a given Polymorph or Trait Morph spell requires a tissue sample from a creature of that kind to be obtained and incorporated into the research process."
Sure, can do.

Yep, that's what I meant. A spell that's a pain to cast for everyone involved and is meant to be cast for metagame reasons to fix metagame problems is entirely different than what wish is intended to be, and the "Here, you can cast a spell you don't have access to right now at a moderate cost" aspect of the spell is worth preserving if you're going to have wish at all.

The go-far-back-in-time-and-change-things effect really should be more of a plot device ritual of some sort with ad hoc costs (so a DM can e.g. make it easy to fix something that he thinks screwed up the campaign but make it much harder to "save scum" the same mission a few times...unless he wants to run a Groundhog Day scenario, in which case it can be made trivial) than a standard spell. I know you have all sorts of cast-spells-as-rituals mechanics in your other thread, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all plot-device rituals have to be expressed as spells mechanically.

If nothing else, making it a not-a-spell means you can make it accessible outside of the standard spell level framework, which is good because it's a mechanic that lower-level characters would need more than higher-level characters on average. At high levels, PCs have more control over NPCs, the environment, the plot, etc. and so can try to head off "bad endings" with divinations, rapid-response teleports, and so forth, while at the levels when a party would really need to go "Dammit, we took so long riding here that we missed the Evil Ritual of Evil, we need to pop back a few days to get there in time" they can't cast 7th+ level spells.
Hmm. For my own part, I'm happy enough to do without Wish entirely. I think one can argue that Raise Dead spells arguably have a similar consequence-negating effect for high-level characters, but I might have to think about this and get back later.