Words of Power: Why?


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


Forgive me if this topic has come up before, but I am relatively new to these boards, and to Pathfinder in general. Don't get me wrong, I've been playing 3rd Ed and 3.5 since they came out, but I've only recently learned of Pathfinder, and converted my entire gaming group over from 3.5 just a few months ago. Having recently picked up Ultimate Magic, I've come to very much enjoy alot of the rules presented within, but Words of Power seem to elude me. Upon reading the concept behind Words of Power, I really liked the idea, seeing quickly how it can especially help the spontaneous classes that only have a limited number of spells at their disposal. The rules seem simple enough, but the execution is where I'm tripping up, and here's why.

So you put together a target word and effect word, or target word and 2-3 effect words to create your spell. Okay, simple enough, but looking through the spells, I was looking to see how this works and set out to see how to create some of the iconic spells seen in the game. Here's what I came up with:

Mage Armor: Target - Personal (0), Effect - Force Shield (1). That's a 1st level spell. Okay, that works out, it makes sense.

Cure Light Wounds: Target - Selected (0), Effect - Lesser Cure, Boost (2). It's close, giving you Cure Light Wounds at 2nd level, but as a ray instead of touch, but it still isn't quite Cure Light Wounds, leaving you with the only wordspell you can use to heal someone at 1st level with being able to heal 1 pt of damage, or reduced to 1d6+(up to 5).

So those ones, along with all the Wall spells and Summoning Spells can easily be Duplicated. However, I started running into issues as I tried to duplicate some of the more powerful blasting and healing spells, as well as some of my favorite illusions. Here's a few that I've found that just don't want to line up with existing spells:

Haste: Target - Selected, Boost (3), Effect - Accellerate, Boost (3). This gives me Haste at 6th level. That's awfully late in the game. Unless I wanted to just be able to cast it on myself or one person, then it appears at 3rd, where it belongs.

Magic Missile: Target - Selected, Boost (3), Effect - Force Bolt (2). That gives me a 5th level spell that instead of dividing the damage how I want, instead deals 5d4 damage to a number of targets of my choosing. Okay, that's a bit more powerful, but there just doesn't seem to be a way to make anything close to magic missile, and 5th level seems like an awfully high cost for this minor effect.

Fireball: Target - Burst, Boost 20' (2), Fire Blast (3). This puts fireball 2 levels higher than where it belongs. Again, it just seems like a really big price to pay for some versatility.

So, in essence it seems like Words of Power don't actually give you all that much versatility. For most spells, you still need to take an effect spell to replace them, like having a word for Fireball, Wall of Fire and for Delayed Blast Fireball. Even then, Fire wall is still restricted that it can only be used with the Barrier command word, just like all Wall words, so in essence, you don't gain any versatility there. It seems to me that Words of Power actually don't give you any more versatility, they just allow you to pseudo-mimic metamagic feats, or change the targeting of your spells. But at the cost of many of your spells being at a much higher level. Is this how Words of Power are supposed to work?


As far as I know, you don't add Target Word and Effect Word levels together to get the spell level; you just take the higher one (this only applies to spells with single Effect Words; multiple Effect Words are covered by the special table). So, you get a standard Fireball with 20' radius at level 3, because Boost Burst is 3rd level, but the cost here is using the Boost meta word, of which you only have X uses per day.

Also, your boosting of the Selected word is awry; it says in Selected that 'This boosted target word increases the level of all the effect words in the spell by 3 levels.'. So, Selected stays as a 0th level Target Word, but Accelerate becomes 5th level (boosting it doesn't raise its level, as in the description, but boosting Selected means Accelerate becomes 5th).

Same applies for Boost Selected Force Bolt, where you get a 0th level Target Word (Boost Selected) plus a 5th level Effect Word (Force Bolt), hence a 5th-level spell overall.

Like many people have said in the testing, the point of WoP isn't to replicate old spells; it's to add versatility and do spells the old system can't even imagine (e.g. multiple damage types in one spell, etc.). But yeah, there are some bits of it which are lacking, mostly just in the variety of words; we need more, but I doubt we'll ever get them.


As I understand words of power, they're an older and, therefore, less refined form of magic. It gives you greater versatility in the effects you can do. You can basically create your own custom spells as you go without having to spend ridiculous amounts of time researching. That should come at a cost though. It is stated in the words of power section that word casters are the rarity, most often taken up by those who simply want to know all forms of magic. That said, at the later stages I would imagine it has some truly disastrous effects. Just be creative in the word spells you prepare each day.


WoP is not meant to emulate all spells.

Dark Archive

From what I gathered, yes, that's the way it's supposed to work.

It is supposed to mimic a less refined magic system, where the flexibility os selecting targets, effects, and meta boosting "on the fly" or with a greater customization degree is balanced by an higher cost in terms of spell level or less efficiency if the spell level is to be kept in line with the standard list.
The usual spell list is made of "refined" versions of the spells, honed by generations of magic users that have distilled the most effective/safe/easily available combination of spell effects at a given power level.

To sum up: you gain flexibility, which can be a small advantage (or a great one, based on different needs) at the cost of a lesser overall efficiency level. The overall gain of this system is highly situational.

It is a system that with a few props (spell cards for targets, effects and meta- words) works quite well with newcomers to the game and/or in a homebrewed setting where casters are slightly subpar when compared to the standard ones.

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