Learning Spells

[WillisRBC 21]

Hi all.  I have a question I haven’t been able to find the answer to.  Do you learn spells like talents, kind of like force powers in Star Wars, or do you just get access to all of them when you train the magic skill?

[TheSapient 596]

The book implies that characters just have access to them.  I think there will be a ton of table variation on this.  For the game I'm building in my head, I'm thinking that characters will have access to the base powers of spells, but will have to come across formulae to cast any variation of a power.  Then, I'd allow in game research to mix and match known upgrades to create new variations.

[Direach 323]

One idea I was toying with for spellcasters, to reflect advancement in skill, was to limit a caster to casting difficulties no higher than their ranks in their magic skill. So starting out, you're limited to spells with a one or two difficulty, then gradually you can cast more powerful enhanced spells.

[JohnChildermass 58]

I am still itching to play the magic rules as written, maybe with some ideas from the sidebar regarding in-game limitations on increasing the magic skills. Unfortunately, my current setting doesn't use magic rules at all.

[Swordbreaker 632]

Depends. If you're using the spells from the book as-is and just letting the players formulate their magic freely, then you could probably do without an XP gate.

If you, like me and as presented in the sample characters from the Runebound module they played at GenCon, have created multiple spells using the ones in the book as templates, then I plan to use a tier 1 ranked talent that offers one new spell per rank.

[Dragonshadow 401]

On 1/12/2018 at 11:02 PM, Direach said:

One idea I was toying with for spellcasters, to reflect advancement in skill, was to limit a caster to casting difficulties no higher than their ranks in their magic skill. So starting out, you're limited to spells with a one or two difficulty, then gradually you can cast more powerful enhanced spells.

If I may make a suggestion: go with skill + 1 difficulty.  Being able to push your luck is part of the fun of this approach.  It cuts right to the heart of the story the negative dice can tell.

Or, perhaps upgrade all dice for difficulties above your skill level but don't cap the difficulty.  So a three difficulty spell cast by a skill 2 caster is two difficulty and a challenge (PPR).  Sometimes you gotta take a chance...

Edited January 14, 2018 by Dragonshadow

[Direach 323]

Most likely they're going to have an implement, so they're getting some leeway already. It's not a mechanic I need to worry about for a while, I'm using different spellcasting variations for my current game.

[tafattel 68]

14 hours ago, Dragonshadow said:

If I may make a suggestion: go with skill + 1 difficulty.  Being able to push your luck is part of the fun of this approach.  It cuts right to the heart of the story the negative dice can tell.

Or, perhaps upgrade all dice for difficulties above your skill level but don't cap the difficulty.  So a three difficulty spell cast by a skill 2 caster is two difficulty and a challenge (PPR).  Sometimes you gotta take a chance...

I’ve implemented a simliar magic system in my own project.  Spells with a difficulty higher than a character’s magic skill cannot be learned.  The character, however, can attempt to read the spell to determine what it is (I like the idea of wizards and such discovering their magic as opposed to simply getting a new spell) and perhaps save it for later.  In such cases, the difference between the difficulty of the spell and the skill rank is how many difficulty dice the challenge dice are upgraded to.