I’m sitting on the sofa, the contruction machines are hammering the ground outside, kids are shouting, the sunlight is streaming into the living room. My back hurts.
Helmbarten has three kinds of careers: fighters, mages, and rogues. They each get four advancement tables to roll for skills gained during character creation. For mages, many of these skills are magic words:
+-----+------------+---------+--------------+---------------+ | 1d6 | Aggressive | Passive | Manipulative | Transgressive | +-----+------------+---------+--------------+---------------+ | 1 | Fire | Healing | Charm | Shapeshifting | | 2 | Air | Sleep | Singing | Necromancy | | 3 | Water | Eyes | Diplomacy | Transmutation | | 4 | Earth | Doors | Illusion | Fusion | | 5 | Storm | Plants | People | Animals | | 6 | Fighting | Brewing | Writing | Planewalking | +-----+------------+---------+--------------+---------------+
Each of the magic schools also get non-magic skills: fighting if you’re into agressive magic (probably knife-fighting); brewing (of potions, most likely) if you’re into passive magic; singing, diplomacy, people (psychology?), and writing if you’re into manipulative magic (so if you’re trying to be a charmer or an illusionist, it’s more likely that you’ll learn a non-magical skill instead!); animals if you’re into transgressive magic.
I find these schools and the words to be fascinating. From the most obvious elemental magic (fire, air, water, earth, and lightning) giving you a kind of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” setting, to stuff that we know from D&D (cure light wounds, neutralise poison, remove curse, restoration for healing; sleep, deep slumber, hold person, hold monster for sleep; darkvision, true sight, clairvoyance, scrying for the eyes; arcane lock, knock, passwall, misty step, dimension door, teleportation for doors; entangle, speak with plants, control plants, treewalk for plants), and so on. You know how it goes: you see those words, you think of all the previous games you played, the movies you watched, and you match them up.
All that’s left is to agree at the table on how powerful these magic words actually are. Like: do you write a list of actual spells? Starting with fire: fireball, burning hands, wall of fire, ball of fire, fire bolt? Or is it more that if you have learned the magic word for fire, you’ve mastered the technique and so all that’s left is to determine how difficult something is, or how much damage it does?
As for difficulty, there are various ways to think about it. A modifier to the target number is easy to understand but hard to rule. It makes sense if your target number is always the same, 8. But still: +5, -2, I don’t know? Looks like the path to spell lists, again. I don’t mind spell lists, but if I have them, I want them weird and quirky, like the old D&D spells. That’s what my Spellcasters project is all about. I might be failing at it, but I’m trying. I’m thinking that if I want to do something different, then I need a coarser solution.
I’m playing in @wandererbill’s Traveller 5 game, and there one way to handle the difficulty is to determine the number of dice you roll. 2d6 ≤ attribute + skill is a normal check; use 3d6 for hard skill checks; use 4d6 for super hard skill checks, and so on. This is the part that I like best.
That’s why I need to establish at the table that mastering fire means you can summon flames, throw fire bolts, have burning hands (all of which is 2d6), but causing big explosions is hard (3d6), and summoning a rain of fire is super hard (4d6).
I recently had an amazing storm wizard generated by the online character generator:
Sturmmagierin **Dagoberga** 583GCA Augen-1 Bezaubern-1 Brauen-2 Diplomatie-1 Feuer-1 Fusion-1 Gestaltwandlung-3 Luft-2 Messer-2 Schlaf-1 Schrift-1 Singen-2 Sturm-7 mit Gefährtin **Chlodolind** 8756A6. Trägerin der *Dornenkrone*. – Helmbarten Character Generator (German)
Helmbarten Character Generator (German)
Intelligence-16 (G), Storm-7. Wow. What can happen as you age is that your intelligence goes up. That means she can summon those tornados, for sure! Also note that in a fight her Endurance-3 means she has just three rounds before she’s exhausted. Anyway. What I wanted to say is that increasing the number of dice for difficulty is easy to do at the table and it conveniently collapses the discussion of “how powerful is this spell effect” from nine levels of D&D to three levels of difficulty for my kind of game.
We still have to wonder about damage dealing spells. My preference would be for almost all the magic not to deal physical damage. Looking at the list of skills, perhaps earth and fire are the only ones where we need to talk about damage? Since we already established that most weapons deal 2d6 damage, with the exception of the halberd dealing 3d6 damage, I think a nice rule of thumb would be this: a successful normal skill check deals 2d6 damage, a hard skill check deals 4d6 damage, a super hard skill check deals 6d6 damage – or it affects more targets. So we might ask: a tornado flattens this village – do most people survive? If many fall hunker down, some fall unconscious, most recover within an hour, then perhaps everybody just took 2d6 damage. Or we might ask: the greatest storm mage alive is frying the monarch with lightning – is there a chance for them to live? Probably not. Instant death sounds like 6d6 or more to me. Perhaps they’re lucky!
The important part is that those magic words are left mostly undefined. There’s a one-sentence description of each skill but it’s hardly enough. You have to decide what it means, just as for the non-magical skills. What does Oratory allow? You decide. In the rules, I’m trying to appeal to the game designer in us: discuss it at the table and write it down. That’s how you make the game your own. It’s the first step on creating your own edition of the game.
This goes back to rulings and collecting them into a body of rules that the table has agreed to follow.
I propose how this is going to fall out and there’s a little moment of silence where players can interject or propose a different ruling until we’re all as happy as can be, and play proceeds. – 2017-04-27 Rulings
The Grumpy Wizard says a similar thing about Swords & Wizardry Complete:
Swords & Wizardry Complete is an incomplete game. It’s incompleteness is its best feature. – Why Do I Love Swords & Wizardry?
Why Do I Love Swords & Wizardry?
We do it all the time: when does intimidation, diplomacy, insight, or lore apply? When do you have to roll for climb or athletics? You decide. I’m trying to blur the lines between such skills and the magic skills. And that means getting rid of specific spells.
I used to not like such magic word systems:
they result in free form results which you then need to interpret again and again. Or you can start writing them down, meaning that you will end up with a suggested list of spells of various power levels. You will simply give magic users more flexibility. Do they need more flexibility? I don’t think so. – 2019-01-23 Magic Words
At the time I was reacting to Nick LS Whelan’s post:
Magic Users may attempt to cast spells at any time by describing an effect which is supported by the words they know. … After the Magic User describes their spell, the referee assigns a target number (discussed below), and the magic user rolls 2d6. If they roll equal to or greater than the target number the spell goes off as it was described. – Magic Words suck. Here’s Magic in the Moment.
Magic Words suck. Here’s Magic in the Moment.
Thanks, Nick! I’ve changed my mind. 😀
#RPG #Halberts