Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Braids 03-12-06, 05:23 PM	Hey guys, For the past couple weeks I've been working on a new system of magic that is based on skills rather than our current class-based system. A rather large portion of this is made up of spellpoints as presented in Unearthed Arcana. As I have no experience with spellpoints I am asking for those who have used them to give me your opinions.. Please do not give me your opinions as to whether or not spellpoints have a place in D&D, I just want to know problems you have experienced on a mechanics level. Thanks in advance ~Richard Tator
BladeMage_1 03-12-06, 05:52 PM	The SP system in UA is a pretty good system. Especially with unexperienced players. What are you trying to go for with your system, I can't give you any more advice if I don't know what you are doing. Is this magic system going to be like Star Wars RPG force system?
Braids 03-12-06, 07:46 PM	The SP system in UA is a pretty good system. Especially with unexperienced players. What are you trying to go for with your system, I can't give you any more advice if I don't know what you are doing. Is this magic system going to be like Star Wars RPG force system? I don't need advise on how to impliment it, only an idea of what I should look to avoid when putting it together; but for any interested I will post the basic ideas. [I don't know how similar it is to star wars d20 since I have never played.] ~Each school of magic will have its own skill as. ~Healing will have its own school. ~Either Universal spells will have their own "school" with some spells being moved to that new "school" or I will move the universal spells to other schools, I have not decided. ~Each school will be based on a different mental stat so as to not take away from any stat. ~Your number of spellpoints will likely be based on the number of ranks you have in all schools. ~Your caster level for each school will be tracked sepparately and will be equal to your skill ranks in that school - 4. ~I will be using the vitalizing variant. ~I will be using an altered form of Generic Classes so that any character can have access to magic if they are willing to use their skill points for that. Though I have not set anything in stone because I'd like to hear what problems people have encountered with spellpoints so that I can attempt to bypass these problems with my system.
Millennium 03-12-06, 07:51 PM	It's video-game magic: click on the Magic menu and cast Firaga. An empty system, devoid of any meaningful way to integrate into settings, character personalities, or tactics. MP-based systems have their place: in the video games where they originated. But best to leave them there, for they have nothing to offer a real role-playing experience, and plenty to take away from it.
FriendlyBiscuit 03-13-06, 04:37 AM	What does Vancian casting have to do with roleplaying? That being said, I'll agree with you to an extent... picking your spells is a huge part of character creation and development. "I can fill a man's lungs with water, wither his limbs away to nothingness, and then raise his corpse to join my army!" "I can flow like smoke beneath a crack in the door, peer into your mind while you sleep, turn into an owl and fly out your window with my new knowledge." "I can blast you with fire, frost, and lightning! I can blow your boat out of the ocean!" All of these things are very different than "I have skill with Healing magic, Fire magic, and the ability to pick locks. Yes, that means I have the exact same spells as any other person who can heal or roast people." Only the most jaded, bratty powergamers are too impatient and bored to enjoy picking spells, in my experience. They want to jump right into levels and experience, so they either grab spells at random, or pick only the most useful and/or powerful spells... and I soon end up asking them to find another group.
CapnZapp 03-13-06, 07:32 AM	Just ignore 'millenium' - a lot of rpg's have had magic point based spellcasting for decades :) You might want to check out 'Elements of Magic' for a system that uses magic points instead of fire'n'forget magic, but still tries to maintain the same range of effects possible with standard D&D magic.
JulesCARV 03-13-06, 09:47 AM	If you're starting from scratch, I'd recommend using the psionics system over the UA spellpoint magic system. They're similar, but there are some subtle differences rooted in the fact that the spellpoint system is an adaptation of the Vancian slot system, designed to work with magical spells as written already, while the psionics system was written with its own powers in mind. For example, a spell point based healing menu might include cure light wounds (1 spell point, 1d8 + CL healing, max 5), cure moderate wounds (3 spell points, 2d8 + CL healing, max 10), cure serious wounds (5 spell points, 3d8 + CL healing, max 15), and cure critical wounds (7 spell points, 4d8 + CL healing, max 20). A psionic healing power, on the other hand, would be much simpler: It'd be a first level spell that healed, say, 1d6 damage (note: I'm not actually using body adjustment here, because that's a self-only spell, and dealing with empathic transfer and such would be too complicated for my purposes). Then, for every additional power point spent, up to manifester level, you could heal an additional 1d6. Instead of seperate spells with almost indistinguishable effects, you'd have one power. The same applies, for instance, to the comparison of the myriad "Summon Monster X" spells and "Astral Construct."
Mind Rogue 03-14-06, 11:16 PM	I am working on a system that shares a few points but differs on others, but some things you may want to consider: There are 8 schools of magic, plus universal and healing. Assuming universal spells just get distributed, this gives you 9 different skills that you would need ranks in in order to cast all the spells. Presumably, the mage will max out two of these skills and then throw a few more into a couple more. However, this pretty much consumes 4 skill points per level, plus what they will be putting in for concentration. Then to top it off, they will be wanting to put more ranks into knowledge skills or other such stuff. As an effect, you would need to increase the skill points of the spellcaster, or else they will need an exceptional intelligence in order to have really any variety in spells at all. Also, you are going to increase the multi-ability dependency by assigning different schools to different stats. They removed this in the 3.5 psionics because it forced psions to spread their stats all over the place. Since you're only keying it to the mental stats, it's not quite as bad, but it is almost as bad since it still means they will be hard-put to have a good survivability stat and be really good spellcasters. For the system that I'm working on, I'm planning on diveying up the rolls of the mental stats: a higher intellect effectively grants more spells per day by adding to spellcraft, a high wisdom is needed to learn spells, and the saving throws are based on charisma. Thus, if you cast offensive spells, you need the higher charisma, but an abjurer might pick wisdom as the top stat so that she can get access to the higher level ones or intellect so she can use them more often. Then it becomes a matter of balancing between power, force, and quantity rather than picking two schools with the same primary stat and two more with the same secondary. I also hope you ment your caster level is ranks-3. At ranks-4, you need to be second level to be able to cast spells. Also, this forces an extra down deposit before you start seeing results. This is something you may or may not desire. Also, as I've mentioned before, the spellcaster needs more skill points. However, since in generics you can pick your own class skills, and your system works vaguely the way I think it works, there is no reason to pick spellcaster; you simply choose expert and invest your skill points in casting skills. Basing spell points on skill points is something that I think would be incredibly difficult to set up. With how the UA and XPsi systems are set up, your consumption per spell goes up as you increase in power, in addition to the fact that you cast more spells. As such, your mp increase is somewhere around being quadratic. However, with how I think your plans are, they would increase linearly with a huge amount to start with. As an effect, you could cast lots of spells at 1st level, but very few at 20th, the opposite of how it should be. Finally, since I expect that your casters will be able to use certain spells a lot, you may want to change some spell targets and/or durations to reflect this. The spell system that I'm working on theoretically allows for unlimited casting since the spells deal damage, and having a good spellcraft skill allows for some mitigation here. Thus, some spells have reasonably long duration and touch target, so they might theoretically be in effect all day on the entire party (something I wanted to avoid). As such, I cut the duration on cat's grace and the like (down to 1 min/level). This allows them to last an entire battle, but they won't be continuously under its effects because they would make very poor walking time. Mage Armor, on the other hand, becomes a personal spell (like the psionic power Inertial Armor), so little benefit is gained from using it over and over again. You may want to generally look at the Expanded Psionics Handbook, but the Complete Divine Spirit Shaman and Complete Arcane Warlock I think might also be useful. The Sprit Shaman is pretty much a bridge between traditional Vancian magic and the borderline fluid magic (aka. the sorcerer and the other spontaneous casters that are poping up all over the place). Meanwhile, the warlock gives some ideas on how to try to balance having unlimited (or near unlimited) magic. If you look, you'll see that all of it's buff spells are personal in range, and so they are arbitrarily given 24 hour durations just because it is assumed that he would just recast it every so often anyway. Unfortunatly, I don't think I can say more without knowing more about your system. However, since I was just pretty verbose, you might count that as a blessing.
hawaiianbrian 03-19-06, 09:16 AM	Also, check out this thread: http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=601964 It is dealing with similar issues. I'll recap here what I said there: I spent a lot of time and effort into developing a skill-based magic system that is almost exactly like the one described by the poster right above me. I even had skills tied to spell schools, and I gave arcane spellcasters more skill points per level so they could purchase ranks, etc. Same thing -- almost scary. It seemed like it was balanced at first, but the more I looked at it, the more I realized it simply couldn't work. Here's why: Characters won't have enough points to max out every skill. So some skills ARE going to be maxed, others will be somewhere in the middle, and some others might dwindle at 1 rank or two their whole careers. In order to make it possible to cast low-level spells AT ALL for those low-rank skills, or any skills for beginning characters for that matter, you have to make the DC of cantrips and 1st-level spells low enough to roll a reasonable percentage of the time, like 15%. But for maxed-out skills, this means by the time the character is even mid-level, he can cast cantrips and 1st-level spells 95% of the time. In other words, the DC of low-level spells is below the skill rank of a high-level characters' max-ranks skill. No matter how high you set it, you can't strike a balance between low-level and high-level characters, because the power difference between those types of characters is so immensely huge. Over 20 points at least, more than what a single d20 can provide! The only solution I came across was to conflate all spells to a single skill. That way spellcasters who don't simply neglect their spellcasting should progress at roughly the same rate, a predictable and measurable rate. Specialists who want to become the "ultimate" fireball caster can take a feat or two to give them an edge with evocation spells and spells with the fire descriptor, but all told that will only put them about 4 - 5 ahead of other casters trying that spell. Much more balanced! Also: every spell level should increase by 2 points in DC to stay level with character progression. And you should work out a system of backlash or some sort of penalty for failure. 1d6 damage for every level of the spell, perhaps, or that you burn out and can't cast any more spells for a length of time. Another problem with a skill-based system is that it completely eliminates any difference between sorcerers and wizards. I compensated for that by saying both arcane casters must use a "focus" to cast spells: wizards must use some enchanted object, like a staff or something (could be anything, really), while sorcerers use themselves. Because backlash is so potentially deadly, esp. with high-level spells (I allow people to cast any level of spell they want, no artificial limits!), their focus can absorb some of that damage, using the hardness rating. Sorcerers use their total sorcerer levels as hardness vs. their own backlash. That was just what I came up with because I noticed backlash would fry most spellcasters instantly, even low-level spells! Plus it explains the difference and adds some interesting flavor. But whatever. If it all becomes too much work, which is kinda where I ended up, think of adapting the "overchanneling" rules from the Wheel of Time game. I don't know why they weren't included in the Unearthed Arcana! It's a nice system that allows you to cast spells when you're out of slots, or cast spells of a higher slot than you have, in exchange for risking backlash damage. Beautiful!
lordchronos77 03-22-06, 12:26 PM	Each spell will have an inherant difficulty (regardless of level). Your rank in Spellcraft creates an artificial limiter for whaty spells you can cast and learn. Learning skills is a Spellcraft skill roll (as normal) against the DC of the individual spell, using the skill in schools as a synergy bonus (one highest only) Casting spells would be a magic school skill roll (no synergy bonus from spellcraft). A failure within 10 points successfully casts the spell but the spellcaster takes extra damage from the casting of the spell (increase Die type by one), this cascade to 20 below the DC. A successful casting over 10 but below 20 points will decrease the die type by one, and so on. There are 11 levels of spells: d0 [cantrips], d2 [level 1], d3 [level 2], d4 [level 3] d6 [level 4], d8 [level 5], d10 [level 6], d12 [level 7], 2d8 [level 8], d20 [level 9]. Each level relates to the damage dice for arcane spell casting.