Bront's Forums

Hi all.

Welcome to the Spell Research Design Lab, here we are constantly working hard designing the next RPG's game mechanics.

this thread developed from talking with my wife about the Magic system in D&D (all current incarnations), I wanted to create something simple yet flexable and could grow with the chatacter with out having five thousand spells in dozens of books.

My initial idea is you give the player the option to build their spells, (maybe a spell point system of sorts)
choosing damage type (fire, acid, cold, sonic...ect..)
Range (touch,close, med, LOS...ect)
"power level" how much damage will it do.


each choice modifies the DC for creating, casting, resisting....ect

It would also be cool that this would give the player their own flavor (not just another fireball) and get some use out of researching spells, as well as being able to modify the spell on the fly by modifing the casting DC.
and with a little flavor change it could be used for Psionics too.


what do you think .....what are your suggestions......


Jovis
Spell research lab
Looking forward...to building the future.

Good idea, Jovis.
Combat spells are gonna be easy (read:complex tables/charts/graphs[that gamers usually dig anyway]). I would recommend taking a few choice spells from each spell level. Gonna hafta make a graph of sorts, with room for improvement. Spell resistance, wether it has a saving throw, range, type of damage (elemental, holy/unholy, force, physical, etc). Arbitrarily (sp?) assign points to the varying levels of potency. Find the average, and voila! You have a point total to work with for each spell level, and have already determined how expensive in points it is to make the variables better. You may need to have an increasing scale for things like damage codes, and stuff. So you could have a 3rd level spell that does tons of damage, but they get a save, it is a touch attack, is subject to spell resistance, close range, etc.

And non combat spells? I dunno.

I love spell point systems.  I've always looked for a way to make it truly work without making higher level mages much more powerful.  I love the idea of researching the spell and being able to modify it on the fly as needed.

I agree that combat spells will be fairly easy to incorporate, as for non-combats, let's see.  Maybe go with a base cost depending on what level the spell is, the number of people it effects, the range, what effect you are going for, if it effects objects, and things of that nature.  I'll be more then happy to help out in whatever way I can Jovis.

I know it will be a lot of work but I think it can be done.  I know that you could also use a system like the old Ars Magica, they used forms and arts of something like that were you power was based on combining an art and a form to get a magical effect.  Like if you wanted a fireball for instance, you would add Creao (sp?) and Ignas.  You could use that to determine the maximum spell/caster level the person can reach.  It also allows for specialization.

Now I'm tracking with you.  I like what you have so far.  Maybe you could make some feats to help mages with spell creation or modification as well since there will be mages that specialize in tweaking spells.

I like the table, it's pretty complete for the most part.  I can see myself wanting to sit down and figure out a few spells as they are in the Player's Handbook to see how they score as a constructed spell.