Spell Casting and Learning Walkthrough

## Spell Casting

Spell casting is an exciting and important part of every young witch, wizard or magic user's life, but it is also very dangerous! Before you start waving your wand around all willy nilly, please familiarize yourself with how the casting system works at Hogwarts!

This guide will assume you've read the official guide on Spell Casting and Spell Learning, and will act as a small walk-through/tutorial for those who might still be having issues, or just want to see an example of the casting and learning process in action.

## Ready to Cast!

So, you're a young witch, wizard or magic user ready to cast your first spell, how exciting! But there are a few things you should know first.

**First**: Ask permission first! Do not randomly cast spells on students unless you want to make them mad, there's a good chance you'll get jinxed in return if you cast on them without asking permission!

**Second**: Make sure you're not in the hallways or outside of a classroom! Casting in the hallways is prohibited, and if you get caught you could lose House Points or even worse, get detention!

*Note: You won't get in OOC trouble for either of these rules, but your character might get in IC trouble if a teacher catches you! Keep in mind the main rules still apply:* Do not control another character’s actions, injure or somehow change another person’s character without first asking the player’s permission. *So be sure to ask permission OOC before you cast at someone's character!*

Now, with those two things in mind, all you have to do is put together the information you've learned from the previous links and the Spell List to get casting!

### Casting

To cast Lumos, a very simple spell everyone should learn very early on, you type this:

* **!cast lumos**

After you cast, @Sir Cadogan will reply to it and let you know if it worked!

If it **failed**, it'll look like this:

File:Lumosfailed.png
If it **succeeds**, it'll look like this:

File:Lumossuccess.pngThe first line will tell you the result of your cast, how high you rolled, and the DC (how high you need to roll to succeed) of the spell. The second line will break down how it got to that result, so it's:

Your Dice -> [What you Rolled] + [A/B/C Modifier or Destiny Points] + [!learn modifier]

## Modifiers

While you should know about them from reading the earlier document, here is a quick rundown:

* **A - Assisted**, as in your cast is being assisted by teacher, or a student who has *proficiency* in the spell. When you cast assisted, your dice will be temporarily increased from 1d4 to 1d6!
* **B - Burdened**, as in your character is currently learning the spell by themselves from a book, or is otherwise tired, injured or unable to cast at their best. This subtracts 1 from your roll.
* **C - Combat**, as in your character is in combat! If you are fighting against something or someone, even casually, you should *always* use C. It doesn't mean much during your first year, but will become more important in your later years! It's good to get in the habit early!
* **D - Defense**, as in your character is defending themselves! This is also used in combat, and works in the same way as the C modifier, but it's for defensive spells. Like the C modifier, it doesn't do anything during your first year, but it's important to get in the habit.

There are two other modifiers, V for Non-Verbal, and W for Wandless, but those are not modifiers you would successfully be able to use as a younger student, and you don't need to worry about them until your later years.

## Spell Learning and Using Modifiers

So you've casted your first spell, Lumos, and that was great! But there's this really rad spell called **Dens Lucet** that brushes your teeth for you! You love this spell as much as you love dental hygiene, but it's a hard spell for a first year and you want to **master** it! How would you go about doing that?

Well first you need to check what kind of spell it is in the Spell List! In this case, Dens Lucet is a **researchable** spell, which means you can learn it on your own time outside of class! This is how you learn it:

* **!learn dens\_lucet b**

**!learn** is a command that will allow you to try multiple times to **learn** a spell. You can only do **one** successful learn per day, but you can try multiple times if the spell doesn't succeed the first time!

So lets say you just tried to !learn your new spell, and this was the result:

File:Densfail.png
Oh no! As you can see you only rolled a 3 of the needed 4, and with the -1 from the B modifier brought it down to 2! As you can see, even if you rolled a 4, with the B modifier you wouldn't be able to succeed! What do you do?

You use your **Destiny**!

## Destiny Points

For this spell, since it requires a DC of 4 and your dice is only a 1d4, you can use **Destiny** to temporarily power up your spell and add extra points to make it roll higher!

First years only have **2 Destiny Points** a day, so use them wisely! You can use them to help you !learn spells, or during exciting RP scenes to make sure your cast goes off. How you use it is up to you, but for this example we're going to try learning again, only this time with our 2 Destiny Points!

* **!learn dens\_lucet b 2**

Now, as long as you roll above a **2**, it should look like this:

File:Denssuccess.png
For our example, you rolled a 3, got a -1 due to the B modifier which would have left you at a 2, but thanks to the destiny points, it brings you back up to a 4, meaning you successfully practiced the spell!

### Spellbook

So what does a successful practice mean? Well, it means you can now use this command:

* **!spellbook**

To take a look at your spellbook and see your spell learning progress! You'll be PM'd a list of spells, and it should look like this:

File:Spellbook.png
That means if you successfully !learn *Dens Lucet* two more days, you'll get a permanent +1 modifier to that spell and make it easier to cast! Nice!

Also, it's worth nothing that **after** you've covered a spell in class you don't need to use the B modifier for learning anymore! So any class specific spells you can just use **!learn spell\_name** with no other modifiers, unless you want to use some destiny on it to increase your chances of learning!

You also don't have to use the B modifier for casting researchable spells at all! As long as you're **casting** and not **learning**, you can just use **!cast spell\_name** without the B modifier!

To find out what spells you have learned in class, check **#spellbook-first-year** in the Discord!

Thank you for reading, and remember: If you have any questions, feel free to ask a Staff member or anyone in **#questions-and-answers**, they'll be happy to assist you!