From: barth@wam.umd.edu (Kevin J. Barth)
Subject: Re: new magic system??
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 22:08:49 GMT

In article <1993Jan25.112302.6222@ifi.uio.no> kjetilgr@ifi.uio.no (Kjetil Granlien) writes:
>
> The other day I was thinkin'.. (yeah it hurts)
>
> I'm about to start a new campaign, and was wondering if I could change
>anything of the old system to make it even better.. or more fun.. 
>
>Magic is a huge part of my usual worlds and the player willl not do without
>it.. So I thought if I could make the magic system better.. . 
>
>Then I thought of this.. No big change other than no spells are pre
>defined.. All spells must be made by each player. New rules for creating
>spells is required, but more than that it should be easy.
>
>What would we get... A very personal spellcaster. Sure, the spells would
>be very similar to each other.. at least some of them. I'm sure all would
>make the Fireball. 
>
>But I'm also sure that a good player with some imagination could make
>something out of this possibility.. 
>
> I haven't tried this yet.. What is your oppinions about it??
>What changes would be required? Would it be easier to roleplay?
>
>Mail me or post your opinions.. 

Well, I have been playing in a campaign of this sort for about three years
now, and it has its advantages...but also some major disadvatages.

First, the plusses:

1) No two characters have the same spells, and sharing is not allowed (since
   one character's spells would not be easily understood by another).  This 
   results in far more interesting campaigns, since you don't have every 
   first-level character casting magic missile every time he has the chance.

2) The method fosters a lot more creativity among players, as they can no 
   longer just pull spells out of the book to suit their needs.  It also 
   makes players really THINK about what they are doing, since they had to
   create the actual verbal, physical, and material components.

3) roleplaying is enhanced, if you don't mind magic-users acting like a
   real magic-user would.  By this I mean that the casting of spells 
   is no longer a simple "I cast fireball" and rolling the effects.  In
   our campaign, if you don't actually go through the motions, repeating
   the incantation, doing the somatic movements, etc., the spell fails
   at best and backfires at worst.  This means that to cast a spell can 
   take 2-3 minutes real time to accomplish, more if it is of higher level.

The disadvantages:

1) The DM is put under a lot more pressure to adjudicate spells, and figure
   what will and will not work.  This makes his job a lot more difficult, 
   especially when he has three mages in the party, each working under a
   different conceptualization of magic. 

2) Our DM has always insisted that we get what we work for.  Therefore the
   road to creating spells is a long one and difficult if you are going
   to do very many of them.  Further, before you can start doing this,
   we were required to write a conceptualization of magic, to provide a 
   framework for the various effects that we were attempting.

3) Non-spell users get quickly bored with this constant hocus-pocus, feeling
   left out of the action often, and tend to want to switch classes, thus
   compounding the problem.

4) Finally, PC magic users under this system tend to be rather vain about
   their spell effects, since in all probability they are beyond the 
   comprehension of anyone else at the table.

All in all, then, I would cautiously vote FOR independant spells, as long 
as you dont mind the additional work and the game-time delay that they tend
to introduce.

Anyone else have experience with similar systems, and know ways around the
pitfalls I pointed out?

Kevin Barth
barth@wam.umd.edu



Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.dnd