How does WoP stack up to True Sorcery?

[Mok]

[Forgive me if this is a repost. The post monster seemed to consume the original post, but vomit up just enough to have the subject line appear in the forum.[

I find the concept interesting, though it still seems opaque, at least how I'd imagine it would go with some of the people I play with.

I'd been interested in seeing a system like this for d20 and a couple of years ago I picked up True Sorcery from Green Ronin. It's similar in that you are constructing spells on the fly, though with their system it is about constructing a spell, getting a DC, and then rolling a spellcraft check to see if you pull it off. Thus you had flexibility vertically and horizontally in terms of power. If you failed then you could take non-lethal damage and get the movie/book classic effect of the wizard getting exhausted.

Even with that system laid out, it also just felt to fussy for my players to embrace it. But what I'm wondering is for those who did delve into True Sorcery, how does it stack up compared to Words of Power?

The reaction I have to both of these rulesets is that I still want something simpler and more streamlined. I enjoyed the 3.5 psionics system, which did have some flexibility with scaling, but it was just vertical scaling. The power point pool was simple and didn't slow down play.

Ultimately, the flexibility is coming from being able to deliver just enough resources for the intended effect, allowing the caster to choose between going nova or firing off a zillion low powered effects over the course of the day.

[Greylurker]

This seems a bit simpler than True Sorcery, and I don't pass out if I try too big of a spell (happened a lot at low levels when I was using True Sorcery).

However there are not enough words given to us at the moment to determine if this is as flexible or not. The absence of Duration Words is pretty limiting for one.

With True Sorcery for example I once made a spell that threw a fireball and then animated anyone it killed as flaming zombies. Can't do that with the Words of Power that they have given us so far.

[LazarX]

True Sorcery isn't that much different from Ars Magica.

In Ars Magica every mage learned the 5 Arts, Create, Destroy, Perceive, etc... and 10 forms, Animal, Man, elements, Magic etc. and every spell used a primary Art and Form with secondaries if needed for prerquisite. i.e. if the spell used secondary arts and forms than the lower of the two would be your resultant score for rolling.

From there you had two c hoices.

Formulaic spells are pre-designed authored spells that have specific arts/form combinations and you cast at par to meet thier difficulty.

Spontaneous magic is where you defined an effect and a DM gauged the appropriate art/form combination and difficulty and you rolled at a -10 to meet that difficulty.

The system did not use spell points but essentially fatigue levels. If you rolled high enough you could avoid fatigue but it was fairly difficult to do so. Additional minuses would be assessed for avoiding incantation or gestures. And that would determine your spell cast.