Magic Words

Here's something I like a lot. 

If you don't want to click the link, here's the gist:

Spell lists suck. You know what doesn't suck? Magic words. If you look through the spell list and take the words, you can recombine them into new spells and have a lot of fun doing it.

That's it. Go read the blog post.

Alright, you done there? Check this out, too, if you liked it.

As I've written before, I'm working on my own heartbreaker, which is really just a set of house rules that I like and have used, plus a couple of things that I want to try out. And minus all that dumb shit that shouldn't have been in there in the first place. [1]

One of the things that I wanted to deal with was magic. Writing a list of spells sucks, and playing a wizard who summons his arcane might from what amounts to a really boring shopping list also sucks. What super sucks is that you have in front of you all of the spells in the game [2] and so magic battles come down to figuring out what the other wizard shopped for and hoping that your selections were more appropriate to the situation.


At first, I was going to write up a spell system where you took a handful of fairly vague spells and then rolled dice and built it on the spot. If you've got Weather and you rolled 3d6 for a result of 15, now you can look at your list of spell effects and... let's see, change the weather to stormy for 1d6 turns!

Pretty good way to avoid having to write a list while still keeping magic a little unpredictable. You just describe the effects you can get and how high you need to roll for it, you keep wizards from all doing the same thing, and you never know what the other wizard's going to get up to even if you know that he likes blasting things.

But I like this better.

So you're a first level wizard. You have X magic points available per day for your spellcasting. [3] You also have a couple of words, rolled randomly from a list. Write down what they mean, and tell the GM what you want them to do (more or less).

Spells have levels, determined by the amount of MP you spend to cast them. A first level spell costs 1 point, a 2nd level spell costs 3 points, a 3rd level spell costs 7, a 4th level spell costs 18, and so forth.

The level you cast the spell at determines what it does. There's a smallish chart- a spell that takes an attack roll does 1d6 damage to a single target per level. If it doesn't take an attack roll, then it does 1d4 damage. If it's an area attack, then divide up the damage. [4] Everything else is between you, the GM, and your collective senses of wonder and creativity.

What does "Hold Magic" do, exactly? Is it a counterspell (as Lum suggested), or is it a method for delaying magic (as in, a delayed fireball, perhaps). Does it let you capture a spell and use it later? Does it have a mnemonic-type "memorize more spells" effect (as in, holding the magic in your mind)? I dunno, man. You tell me. Go ahead and write up some spells and let's think it over.

The best thing, though, is that finding spells isn't about finding pre-made spells somewhere. Now you're looking for the Words of Magic, scouring seemingly boring tomes to find a veiled reference to a magic word, and hidden formulae- a ha, there it is! "Teleport!" Now what do I do with it...

And then at a certain level spellcasters should be able to chain more words together, right? Only now they cost double, or whatever, because "Teleport Unseen Fire" is a pretty cool spell and so is "Prismatic Steel Servant," and, again, I have no idea what those do because I haven't written it down.

Oh, also: Wizards need to write down their words into spellbooks. "Word" is a bit of a misnomer because wizards are actually writing down syllables in the language of creation which, as it turns out, is nearly incomprehensible to the human mind and only years of study, great note-taking skills and some fairly decent shorthand allows magic users to utilize. Capturing spellbooks gives you a chance to learn their spells and maybe even their words but it's not guaranteed and it's going to take you a while!

So that's what I'm working on including. Lemme know what you think.





[1] Man, people who don't have the same opinions as me are dumb! Right?

[2] Unless you invent your own spells, but that requires writing them up and then giving them to the players, who can still choose not to take them because they'd rather prepare the already overly efficient Sleep, Magic Missile, and Fireball. Your options thus are: A spell that's too efficient (and will get picked first now), a spell that's too narrow (that somebody might prepare once in a blue moon), or a spell that's really weird that somebody might pick because it's fun.


[3] I was going to do spell slots but as I was brainstorming with a friend, he was like "why not just use MP?" Here's the original idea: You have a handful of spell slots per day. They have levels- a 5th level wizard might have four 1st level spell slots and 2 second level spell slots. When you cast a spell, expend a slot. A spell counts as the level of the slot it's cast from- a fireball might do 1d6 damage per spell level, and magic missile creates 1d4 unerring force blasts per 2 levels. Or whatever. Magic points makes the math a little easier and lets you shoot lots of little spells during the day, if that's what you want, so it's a plus. And it's not that much harder to track, really.

[4] I know that this makes fireball a little weaker but honestly 5d6 damage (or whatever) is a lot and having a sort of choice between "do I plug this dude over here" or "do I blast minions" is kind of a neat choice.

Magic Makes You Weak

Magic is addictive. It's raw power as no human in the real world can understand it. It's the ability to reshape existence itself according to your willpower. It's difficult, complex, hard to control, and absolutely addicting the way only power can be.

The most learned and ancient wizards jealously hoard their tomes of lore and their magical items like another man would guard his children, or his life's love. The lesser wizards look upon the treasure troves with avarice, and spend their nights dreaming of more power. It becomes all-consuming. They can't resist.

What once started as a healthy, hale, friendly young man becomes a bearded, angry delver, little more than a knowledge thief. Their backs are twisted from compulsively reading into the night, their hair goes grey from the sheer strain of learning more and more magic, of learning to summon and bind creatures from another world. They spend their life force, their very vitality to learn more. And it's still never enough.

It's never enough power.


--

In Rodiel, the more magic you have, the weaker your character is. It's not the other way around (although it can look like it, at character creation.) If you have even an inkling of magic, you are a wizard. The magic calls to you, and your character is helpless before its call.

In game terms, it means that even a wretched role on the dice has hope. You may be a weakling in comparison to the Achilles standing next to you and the Hercules next to him, but you're a wizard. In more basic terms, you have magical talent if your ability scores are all fairly low, with your magic being stronger the worse the rolls were. Somebody with rock-bottom stats has incredible magic, for example.

I think it could be fun.

Mind Games: Magic and Interruptions

One of the key points about yomi, I think, and about mind-games in general is that there isn't any sort of feinting and counter-feinting unless you have an opportunity to do something about it. In other words, your actions aren't a sure thing anymore. When roleplaying online, or "RPing" (a term which I've always hated, but which seems to be the accepted term these days), it's considered common courtesy to only state that which your character is trying to do.

In other words, it's not "I kick you in the face and knock you over," but "I attempt to kick you in the face to knock you over" and then the other person agrees or disagrees, depending on their personal preference. Of course, in that case, there's a lot of dodging and blocking and negating going on, because it's a freeform system and there's no reason for anybody's avatar (usually riddled with overly masculine or feminine "cool" traits like being half-demon or having angel wings or unusually colored hair or some silly such, but that's neither here nor there) to get injured or killed or whatever.

But I digress. The important thing is that actions become interruptable, somewhere between where they start and where they end. And that's why I said in my last post that yomi and mind games have been in D&D all along.

Most people have had experience with magic-casting, and the way it's somewhat balanced by having the magic-user declare their spellcasting in the beginning of the round, and then having it occur sometime near the end of the round, after the guys with swords and arrows and the guys running across the drawbridge or wherever the hell they're going, then the wizard gets to throw his mighty fireball across the temple, or whatever it is that he's doing. If somebody even tries to put a sword in his guts, the spellcaster probably fumbles his spell.

So what you have is a sort of simplistic mind-game, where the wizard is trying to hide and the warrior is trying to skewer him with his sword, except that the wizard doesn't have a counter to the sword-stabbing. He can only run for his life, and the warrior can follow. The wizard needs something of an outside force to stop the warrior, whether it's a trap or mechanism or even something as simple as other people to stand in between him.

(Which brings me to an interesting parenthetical notation: maybe D&D's as popular as it is among Americans because of its fairly clear-cut class roles that are very similar to football; the wizard's the most important member and needs to be protected like the quarterback- the dwarfs and fighters are the linebackers. I dunno what the theifs are, but they can be the wide receivers. I dunno.)

The point is that there should be something the wizard can do to counter the warrior's rushing onwards other than "have other people deal with him." Wizards, both in movies and in literature, often have quick-spells to throw at a warrior, often with illusion or summoning of henchmen or something. Sometimes it's lightning bolts or gusts of fire that startle the warrior and make him back off, right? Then the wizard runs up his tower, and he's got a head start already. In game-terms, maybe the wizard's quick spell could force a saving throw of some sort, and if the warrior fails it, he's got to waste a round (6 seconds or so, I understand) doing nothing, or maybe it's just that the wizard gets a head-start on the chase.

Of course, the warrior hasn't got a counter other than maybe he could choose to either run him down or steel himself against the magic, and that'd be a pretty decent yomi styled decision to make, too. As the warrior, you're probably not alone. If you run the wizard down, you have a good chance of catching him if he decides to run. But he's probably going to shoot a fireball or something at you and even if you know it's going to be fake, it's gonna be bright and loud and you won't be able to see. That's if he doesn't do something dastardly like rearrange the room so that it's unrecognizeable. But anyways, you could alternately hang back and wait until he casts and then squinch your eyes closed, and then you tackle him since he wasted his time wiggling his fingers and stuff and now you've got him.

As the wizard, of course, you have three options. If the warrior runs you down, you throw a quick distraction spell at him. Of course you had one ready- you forsaw this occasion as an emergency you might want to prepare for. You have to weigh your options. If he runs you down, you can throw the proverbial wool over his eyes and try and flee. If he stands there and knows what you're up to, you can take advantage of his hesitation to take off and get a head-start in the footrace.

Or, you could say "screw it" and throw a real spell on his head. That'll show him.

Death by Mold / What's Next?

One of my players the other week died because they set foot in some yellow mold. The mold, being a weaker variety than normal, dealt less damage than it normally would have. After being burnt a little by its acid, they took note and decided to drop a torch on it.

Normally, it would have resulted in a normal bit of damage, but this mold happened to be underground in an extremely arid environment. The fire spread out, and burnt both the players for a tiny bit of damage, which unfortunately was more than the Minotaur ("reskinned" fighter) could bear. He died, leaving the cleric to flee back to the surface where the Minotaur's brother was waiting for the two of them to come out. When only the cleric returned, Minotaur II vowed to finish his brother's works.

Just a quick anecdote on one of my favorite player deaths. Set ablaze by a yellow mold's corpse! Classic.

Changing Magic Around

The more I look at the magic in the basic Labyrinth Lord game, the more I want to change it. It's not that the spells aren't evocative enough, or effective enough, or that they're terrible. Really, it's not.

Magic Users' Minor Abilities

I had an idea for Magic-Users, for any sort of game at all, but more useful for games which have severely limited spell slots, especially at lower levels. It was specifically designed for the incredible retro-clone Labyrinth Lord, but since it's based off the same sort of idea that oD&D, BECMI D&D, and AD&D were, I'm certain that it can be used for practically any system that uses Vancian magic.