| Ssoulner |
When I was young, I used to play this game with my cousin where he and I wandered around outside, roleplaying to each other. We had our own world with its own magic system. Recently, I thought it a wonderful idea to convert this magic system to Pathfinder, because that's what me and my cousin play now.
Part 1: The currency of magic
So in our fantasy world, you cast spells as such: you would take mana from your mana pool and weave it into a spell which then launched at your enemies or something. Now let me explain my terms.
Mana are basically these omni-present, all-encompassing strands of blue, glowy magic energy you could find anywhere throughout the world. All creatures had a mana pool, which was constantly filling itself with mana from the outside world. Trained spellcasters, called "mages" could use their mana to cast spells. I think there actually used to be three classes - wizards, sorcerer and mages. The major difference between them was that the wizard required a staff to cast spells, the sorcerer required a wand and the mage just used her hands. We basically only played mages.
When translating mana into game mechanics, I thought it would work best if we treated a mana pool like your hp total. You have mana dice (hit dice) of different sizes, which are modified by your charisma (as I understand it, charisma is the "opposite" of constitution) and you gain a new mana die each level. In order to represent the mana pool's constant gluttonous absorbing of mana, your mana recharges at some rate, I decided on 1/round.
In me and my cousin's verbal roleplaying game, mana came in many different flavors, representing various conditions or places in the real world. For instance, underwater you'd find a lot of watery mana, and in the air you'd find air mana. In order to then cast spells of a certain element, for instance fire, you'd need the corresponding mana type, in the case of fire spells it would be fiery mana.
I decided to do away with the different types of mana, because I couldn't see it possibly being what you might call "fun". So you wish to use your cool fireball ability? Better sit next to a campfire for a couple of hours to get that mana back!
There were also way too many different types of mana. This is because I used to open a dictionary page with all the adjectives on it, to then just tack those adjectives in front of "mana". This resulted in gems such as: Bewildered mana, repulsive mana, hideous mana, foamy mana or glossy mana. Obviously, I ditched these.
Part 2: Spells
One of the consequences of designing a magic system when you are eight to ten years old is the relative lack of complexity. Most of the spells revolve around "shoot blobs of magical energy at opponent". There is also a lot of design by escalation, so you might have a spell called "laser", which allows you to continually channel a thin beam of magic energy and then another spell called "beam", which is the exact same as laser, only bigger.
Speaking purely historically, when me and my cousin played, you'd have to learn each new spell from someone who already knew it. This is something I decided to do away with, because I felt like it didn't really add anything, but you could use this as a rule if you want. There aren't very many different spells as of right now, so this could be a way to make the spells feel a bit more special.
Now let's explore one of the spell cards I wrote up:
Pulse
School Evocation (mana); Level mage 1st
CASTING
Casting time 1 swift action
Mana cost 3 points
Extra attacks 11 (+2/+3/+5/+6/+8/+9/+11/+12/+14/+15/+17)
EFFECT
Range close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Effect blast of magical energy
Duration instantaneous
Saving throw fortitude negates (see text); Spell resistance yes
DESCRIPTION
You fire a blast of magical energy. Make a ranged attack, if it hits, your target takes 1d8 magic damage. Extra attacks from this spell can be divided up amongst all creatures in a 15 ft. radius.
OVERCHARGE
1 action (50%)—target falls prone (fort save negates if large or huge, bigger is immune)
2 actions (80%)—damage increases to 1d10, target is knocked back 5 ft. (fort save negates if huge or gargantuan, bigger is immune)
3 actions (90%)—pulse explodes in 15 ft. radius burst, creatures in area take 3d8 magic damage, fall prone and are knocked back 10 ft. (fort save negates if gargantuan or colossal)
Right away you can see a lot of the formatting is the same as a regular DnD spell. The spells still have schools, a range and most of them still allow spell resistance.
This spell card is for "pulse", the simplest spell out there - it's just a blast of energy. But there are some terms that need explaining:
Extra attacks - In order to simulate unleashing devastating waves of spells into your enemies, I decided to allow spells to receive extra attacks based on how skilled of a mage you are. This works very similarly to a high base attack bonus. I go into more detail on how it works in the full document.
Magic damage - When writing this up, I ran into a problem - what kind of damage does blasted magical energy deal? I thought force damage would be too overpowered - there's a reason magic missile only deals 1d4+1 damage, after all - and I thought mere bludgeoning damage would be terribly underwhelming. So I decided it would be magic damage. Magic damage is basically bludgeoning damage, but it can get past DR/magic and it can affect incorporeal and ethereal creatures. A bit of both.
Overcharge - When casting spells in our fantasy world, you could decide to just keep putting mana into your spell to make it bigger and more dangerous - this is called overcharging. So, you can decide to spend more time and mana casting your spell in order to gain some benefit. The percentile number in brackets represents the chance of a mishap - basically, the spell exploding in your face.
Part 3: Elements
In order to make things more complicated, everyone in me and my cousin's world had their own element. This is an innate connection to some part of the physical reality which allowed you to cast special, element-specific spells and elemental versions of regular spells. So, a mage with earth as their element could, when casting pulse, instead of shooting a blast of magical energy, shoot a hunk of dirt.
Part 4: Conclusion
If any of the things I talked about seem mechanically interesting to you, you can check this link for the full story: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AnQS3USOLiFLQscqdjTJQ7Bqz0jsI6XA/view?usp= sharing
If you think none of what I said made any sense or if you thought it was all stupid and badly designed and dumb, please let me know by responding!
I'm very interested to hear what you all think, I haven't playtested this thing yet, so it may be total crap, but I wanted to share it anyway.