From: Ken McKinney (mad@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu)
Date: Fri 26 Jul 1991 - 09:56:33 EEST
[This seemed appropriate for the discussion list, despite the personal
address below, so I included it here. I trust you have no objection,
Ken? My response will be in discussion 23...]
Hey Andrew,
Thanks for the comments on my sorcery system. I agree with your comments re:
the game balance problems with the standard sorcery system. In addition, I
think that some spells should be fundamentally more difficult to cast than
other spells at the same intensity. That's why I put in the spell difficulty
numbers.
Your idea about changing the Law point formula is interesting. Lower the
number of Law points one gets for a given skill, then allow people to buy
additional Law points for reductions in skill percentage. I see some good
and bad points about this:
good : it removes the all/nothing approach -- someone always has a
finite chance of casting a spell of any size, given sufficient magic points.
It makes casting spells with lots of intensity or duration or range more
difficult in general.
bad: It's one more calculation the players have to make. I was wondering if
my system was already too complicated.
You have to ditch the ceremony skill or people just ceremony up their rolls
when they cast long duration spells. Actually, I was thinking ceremony might
be incompatible with my system anyway, in terms of game balance.
Some of my spells have high magic point costs but, in my opinion, shouldn't
be terribly hard to cast. Firebolt is an example. Your system makes them
extremely hard to cast. A sorcerer who wanted to cast a 2d6 firebolt in the
old system would need a Law skill of 50%, and would be able to cast at full
percentage. In your system, he would have a -25% chance to cast the spell.
(that is, his chance would be decreased by 25%). Actually, I guess I could
just reduce the difficulty numbers on these spells and it would still work
out.
Come to think of it, what if difficulty numbers were eliminated and
the balancing factor became solely the number of Law points for the spell?
That would make the rules less complicated, but you wouldn't have spells
which took lots of magic points but were easy to cast. I think that a
long duration light spell, for instance, should fall into this category.
Oh well.
Re: the problem with Damage boost: I think that much of this problem is
with the spell definition, and not the current sorcery rules. I think
they were too stuck on the "1 point of intensity equals 1 point of effect"
paradigm when they set up the rules. At this point I'm going with the
general idea in my system that the best you can get is "5 intensity =
1d6 effect", which trims down damage boost nicely.
Re: your point that sorcerers casting long duration spells on all their
buddies is a problem. Agreed. What if you had to do a 1 point ritual
enchant on an item/person before long duration spells would "take" on it.
Say additionally that the enchantment has to be made by the person casting
the spells. Also say that the body of a sorcerer and his familiar is
automatically enchanted thus in the apprentice bonding/create familiar
rituals. This takes the sorcerer out of his role of "long term party
enhancer" without keeping him from casting long duration spells on himself.
But some long-duration spells aren't game imbalancing. Say a sorcerous
glue spell that fixes a vase for the duration. Shouldn't a sorcerer be
able to cast something like this, a spell which lasts a long time but
then wears out and ends, without expending something permanently? Is
there a way to play-balance the spells like Damage boosting without making
all long-duration spells costly? That's what I would like to see.
I mean, with my system the way it is now a sorcerer will have to really
orient his character around being the damage boost person, and have high
skill levels, to keep the other player's knives sharp. In my experience
most players would rather be personally powerful than play in a support
role. Since I force them to make the choice (put points into flameblade
or fireball; the difficulty levels make it impossible for anyone to do
many things well) my feeling is the problem is solved. In addition, a
sorcerer probably won't have the correct runic associations to do the
equivalents of damage boost, mystic vision, spell resist, skin of life,
and damage resist all on the party. So the problem of the sorcerer
augmenting the party is reduced a little more.
I dunno, maybe I'm misunderstanding how people are going to use my system.
I assume that the sorcerers in the party are about as skilled as the
other members. I got a note from someone using my system yesterday; His
characters each had about 10 runes and 10 spells at 75% or better! This
is way above the power level I expected (imagine a Runelord type with this
many skills) but they each ended up having a couple of really easy spells
which they could cast at 100%+, and a couple of really awsome spells that
they could cast around 50-60% of the time. While this is "higher level"
than the game I would run, they seem to be enjoying it. I haven't bothered
to figure out how many years their sorcerers would have had to study to
get skills at this level.
Regards,
Ken
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