Implementing Blue Magic

[Kruploy]

So I was wondering if it would be good idea to implement a form of blue magic in my games.

For those wondering, blue magic is a form of magic from Final Fantasy that allows the caster to learn spells from monsters after having said spells applied directly to the students forehead, preferably in a painful fashion.

The guys are bored of the vanilla spells and the fighter players constantly moan about having to be a paladin or a heling kit to cast spells and I think it would be a nice compromise.

What do you?

[AMFV]

I think there have been several attempts to homebrew it into D&D. But first what system are you using? Because that will make all of the difference in this particular thing.

[Rhynn]

Are you talking about D&D? Which edition?

[SassyQuatch]

You can try, but homebrew has proven that blue magic generally falls apart pretty fast.

Problems that arise:
A) blue magic ends up becoming regular magic because of how it becomes difficult to introduce creature-based abilities to the game.
B) poor balance from trying to give a mage a useful ability without making the threat too weak or too strong.
C) reliant upon the DM to pad encounters or provide separate blue magic encounters.
D) blue magic user tends to fall behind the power curve since there is no effective method of gaining blue magic outside of encounters.

Not that it can't be done, but most games require altering blue magic significantly, enough so that it often is better using a different system.

And with that comment I go off to make a Blue Mage class for my game.

[Admiral Squish]

Well, you could use my Omnomnomicon. I don't know if it's the blue magic you were lookin' for, though.

[Scow2]

Go with D&D's Blue Magic, and play a totemist! And homebrew new soulmelds that let you emulate the abilities of monsters you've seen before!

The "Form of X" feats from the Spell Compendium might make good SLAs to use in 3.5. Maybe.

[inexorabletruth]

Yeah… a class like that is pretty well covered by classes that already exist in the game. Also, a homebrew build would be hard to build and easy to break.

However, by dusting off your less-used D&D books, you can find some pretty awesome "magic" (for lack of a better word) variants, like Complete Psionic, Magic of Incarnum, Tome of Magic and Dragon Magic.

You can also consider certain off-the-beaten path feats like Aberration Blooded that will really change how your character looks and plays.

However, if you really want to implement a Blue Mage homebrew, consider allowing the character to steal special abilities rather than magic abilities. This more directly reflects the capabilities of the Blue Mage anyway… but I'm almost positive there is a class in Dungeonscape or something that does that already.

[NichG]

IIRC there's actually a PrC that lets you steal Su abilities off of evil outsiders, but its pretty obscure.

I'd just do it like the Final Fantasy games - not every enemy ability is learnable. Instead, perhaps you could do it by assigning an ability to every [Type] x [Subtype] combination. When the Blue Swordsman personally lands the killing blow on a creature with a given [Type] x [Subtype], they learn the corresponding ability.

[nedz]

3.5 does it rather too well:
Manipulate Form -> Pun Pun
But that's rather too insane.

3.5's Spellthief can steal SLAs, but this is more limited in use.

[FabulousFizban]

just adapt the sandman bard class from pathfinder