Ken McKinney's Sorcery

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From: bell@cs.unc.edu ((bell@cs.unc.edu))
Date: Tue 09 Jul 1991 - 09:56:33 EEST

It seems to me that there are two fundamental _game_balance_ problems with
the default sorcery system, and your system mainly addresses one of them.

First, there is no difference in difficulty between casting a weak spell
and a powerful one, so beginning sorcerers will be as incompetent at
casting damage boost 1 as damage boost 18. Thus, the DB 18 is a viable
option for any sorcerer who can garner the necessary MPs. Your system
addresses this issue to some extent, by limiting the size of spells by
one's runic skill. Some sort of minus to the skill for larger spells
might be a little "smoother", as there wouldn't be this magical threshold
beyond which a character can't cast a spell but below which any level of
casting is easy. A way to do this might be to replace:

        A sorcerer may put as many points of Law into a spell
        as his Law percentage divided by 5.

with:
        A sorcerer may put as many points of Law into a spell
        as his Law percentage divided by 10 without casting penalty.
        Each additional point of Law reduces the casting chance by
        5% (10%?).

The second major problem is that if you can cast a powerful spell,
there's
little that prevents you from doing so lots of times. For example, if
you
can cast one damage boost 5 with duration 10, every ally you have will
soon have that spell on every weapon. I don't see how your system
addresses
that beyond making it impossible for beginning sorcerers to behave in this
fashion by limiting how powerful a spell they can cast.

My feeling is that the best approach to the latter is to make long
duration spells difficult to cast by requiring something "expensive"
driving them, be it some sort of power-created item, a bound spirit
with the appropriate runic associations, a (very) large number of magic
points, a long ritual, or something of that nature. Otherwise, you will
always be seeing this threshold of the sorcerer either can't cast the
spell
at all, or can cast it for everyone.

Don't misinterpret my remarks -- I think there's a lot of good ideas in
your system, and I'd like to see it developed. I may start a campaign
soon using a lot of the ideas there. I'd also be interested in seeing
rules for casting spells of less than 10 minutes duration -- allowing a
caster to trade some duration for some intensity or range.

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