Hello All,
I'm a long time lurker here, but also a long time player of D&D, and a fairly experienced DM, and I also consider myself a theorist on many different RPG Homebrews. But so, I have been developing for a few months now an additional mechanic to add some flavor to Pathfinder that I find lacking from when there were spell points in 2nd Ed: Being able to use your magical power for things other than the specific spells you are allocated by your class, so that your spellcasters become much more useful outside of combat and can be adapted to any situation. So here it is.
Apologies in advance for my verbosity.
Improvizational magic: As a DM, There have been many times where I have not have wanted the BBG to come up, and after preparation cast some total evilstorm of awesome that there is no spell for in the spell book, and there have been times that I have wanted his sorcerrous henchmen to be able to similarly go beyond the limited extant spell list. My players have sometimes wanted to be able to cast some ritual to be able to chop down sections of a forest, and I as a player have wanted to take my water-oriented Oracle's magic and use it to make a stairway out of a waterfall.
The method I've gradually developed, I term Improvizational Magic. It lets players push the bounds of what is possible, without becoming broken. It lets even a combat-oriented sorcerror become useful during the in-betweens of an encounter, when you throw a flying cliff in their way. It opens up nearly unlimited possibility while providing just enough rules so as to neither stifle it nor make it more broken than a certain kobold sorcerror with a repetitive name (many 3.5 players will know who I speak of...).
Here's how I've ruled it in the past:
1)The players propose an idea of what they want their magic to do (for instance, send a fracture into a rock to weaken it to collapse when the wizard is finished preparing Earthquake).
2) After hearing the proposed use of magic, he will think of a minimum CL that would be required for the improvised spell, and possibly have to tell the players, no, you aren't powerful enough to do that.
3)The DM will tell them what components they require (Almost always somatic and verbal chants/prayers, sometimes a material component, let him use his discretion), and what spell slots it will use and any required spells to know (more on this later), and how long it will take to cast, and rarely any skill checks it might take.
3a)Optionally, he can conceal these from the players if he thinks the caster couldn't figure these out (but that gets broken in its own right).
4)Then, they cast the spell or they don't, and it succeeds or sometimes fails, depending on how you chose to resolve it. Fairly straightforward process: plan, gather resources, execute, watch fireworks. The DM will go through a similar process in his head for whatever NPCs he wants to use this.
Now, this is entirely up to the DM, and it should be stressed that any new DM should get more experience under his belt first (it puts a lot of decisions in the hand of the DM, and a new DM would probably not know off the top of their head how to handle it well), and the potential for it to be broken (for instance, it should never really be able to magically conjure some boulder in the middle of a combat about 300 feet over someone's head). However, when used correctly, it rewards and promotes player creativity and can be used to make "Oh, a Wizard did it!!" actually, well, not just an excuse.
For some examples of how it would work:
Like above, lets say that my party wants to get at the evil Necromantic baby-eating Tiefling Lich of badness and pain inside his castle (Side note: Give evil NPCs less flavor next time). So, the part has fought through the ghoul-i-gator infested swamp , but expended quite a few spells in order to defeat the Acid Lizard King (Side note 2: Never make a boss themed after Jim Morrison again). However, the thing has no exits, being essentially a Borg cube on top of solid bedrock (Side note 3: remind players how much I appreciate putting up with my seemingly impossible challenges) and the wizard did not prepare Dimension Door/Teleport/Fly/etc. But the Bard still has a bit of song left in his flute, and so he proposes that they use magic to create a crack underneath the castle so the wizard could use his remaining spell of Earthquake to make them all an entrance. And so, I'd tell them, you'd have to make a ritual for half an hour, and need to expend 1 3rd level spell slot, three second and three first, and afterwards you would give up Shatter or some other sonic based spell for 2 days (more on this later), and you would have to make One/two/three DC 20 Perform checks, depending on just how big of a crack he wishes to make.
So they agree, and when the ritual portion is done, the crack goes off and he passes two checks, so I give him 100 ft of rock broken under the wall and 10 ft wide of cracking. The Wizard casts Earthquake, and there's a massive gaping hole into the castle. They go in and find it deserted.
Theat's because the Evil Lich of Evil is 20 miles away, on top of a mountain, and looking down on a peaceful farm valley full of still living corpses. And he wants to add every one of them to his undead army. So, he decides to use the impromptu magic mechanic to kill everyone and everything. Because his spell is significatnly more powerful, it takes him four hours to finish casting, requires 8 pints of blood, and a blood diamond worth quite a significant sum of gold, and won't be able to cast cloudkill after this for a week or create undead for 4 days. If the party somehow manages to find his teleportation circle, well, he won't be able to use any of his 6th or 5th level spells, and will only be able to cast two 4th level spells, two 3rd level spells, three 2nd and 3 1st level spells that day (minus whatever he had already used too). Well, since the entire party is out of reach, his casting succeeds, and everything dies and all animals become undead. (Yaaaaaay, Zombie Cows.)
Those two are similar to what I've had done before in a game, but each was original. To calculate fair costs only took me about 3 minutes per spell off the top of my head. It allowed the game to move along faster and better than anything else I've seen used, and nobody's head exploded trying to breach the castle walls (In reality everyone just failed their perception check badly. There was a hidden entrance, but bad luck happens, and innovation has to make up for it).
So, as can be clearly seen from this demonstration, this certainly isn't free: it took plenty of time for both cases, had a large immediate impact upon their casting abilities, and also effectively removed spells from their spell list for quite a while (Although no one has lived long enough in game to test if its broken or fair, banning a spell for a month wouldn't be uncalled for, if the spell was really, really powerful).
At the same time, because the DM has discretion over its usage, this isn't a gamebreaker against the storyline with proper DMing. It isn't a gamebreaker for the players since its effects are only temporary (even if they do get persistent at much higher power levels), and don't leave them completely helpless (or shouldn't, if I have my numbers right). So, from everywhere I've seen it, its a win-win situation, and a valuable addition to the game when used properly.
So, on with the C&C! Especially the C part!!
