|
...
I personally disagree with both of you, adding spells to a spellbook can be extremely costly after all with obvious adjustments made to the costs under this system, but I'm not going to sit here and make an enormous post on why this would work perfectly fine or even talk much more about it all.
I suggested a different version of the magic system and voiced an opinion for Paizo to read and possibly take parts of into consideration, that's enough for me. Hopefully they will break away from Vancian spellcasting in some way.
I'm not interested in having Pathfinder break away from Vancian magic because it doesn't make any sense. Personally I find that the way it handles magic is tremendously consistent and logical.
But here's the thing:
It isn't Pathfinder. Pathfinder is at its best when it's creating its own stuff and charting its own course. This is a great opportunity to do that. Come up with a magic system that draws on the lore and flavor of Golarion, the Runelords, Ancient Azlant, Chelaxian Infernalism, Nethys' Osiriani magic, the legacy of Nex and Geb. All that cool stuff.
Honestly I understand what with rollout scheduals and release dates that we're not going to see every vestage of legacy systems of magic and spells pulled out and replaced--but I consider every step forward to be progress toward making Pathfinder it's own thing.
Pathfinder 3.0 they'll revamp the spell system entirely!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm not interested in having Pathfinder break away from Vancian magic because it doesn't make any sense. Personally I find that the way it handles magic is tremendously consistent and logical.
But here's the thing:
It isn't Pathfinder. Pathfinder is at its best when it's creating its own stuff and charting its own course. This is a great opportunity to do that. Come up with a magic system that draws on the lore and flavor of Golarion, the Runelords, Ancient Azlant, Chelaxian Infernalism, Nethys' Osiriani magic, the legacy of Nex and Geb. All that cool stuff.
Honestly I understand what with rollout scheduals and release dates that we're not going to see every vestage of legacy systems of magic and spells pulled out and replaced--but I consider every step forward to be progress toward making Pathfinder it's own thing.
its functional but its not logical. there is no reason for instance, that a person shouldn't be able to memorize more 7th spells instead of a 9th levels spells.
spells being compartmentalize in the mind doesn't make sense. if the system were logical, then you should be able to memorize a certain amount of level of spells, and you would have the ability to organize however you want to.
the magic system much like a lot of game works, but its not really logical. much like how armor currently works in the game. functional yes, logical no
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My biggest gripe with Vancian magic is that it's built around daily usage, which causes everything else in the game to also run on uses-per-day, which I don't think is good for balance or narrative. I'd prefer to not have to stop and nap mid-adventure.
I strongly agree with this. Particularly at lower levels, players cast their spells, and after the encounter is over, they immediately want to end the day or sleep 8 house to get back to full strength. From a strategy standpoint, it makes perfect sense, but it beaks the flow, it takes extra time, and it's not how the world works in fantasy books and media. As a GM, you can work to fight it, but that's extra work, and your hurting the party to impose your sensibilities on the players. It's not a fun problem to deal with. I'd rather have system that allows the flow of encounters to keep going with less interruption. If magic needs to be nerfed a bit, that's fine
Its functional but its not logical. there is no reason for instance, that a person shouldn't be able to memorize more 7th spells instead of a 9th levels spells.
So there's so caveats when I say the Vancian magic system makes sense. For one, I'm talking about the 3rd edition take on it, not the Jack Vance based system from his far future novels where spells are living creatures that live in your brain or the early edition explanations that feel like they crib this. I'm talking about Vancian spellcasting as laid out in the box section 'What is a Spell' in the Magic section of the Player's Handbook:
"...Preparing a spell requires careful reading form a spellbook...or devout prayers or meditations....In either case preparing a spell means casting the first and lengthiest part of it. Only the very end of the spell, it's trigger, remains to be activated. After preparing a spell, the spellcaster carries it, nearly cast, in his or her mind, ready for use. To use a spell, the character completes casting it. Spellcasting might require a few special words, specific gestures, a specific item or any combination of the three. Even though most of the spell was essentially cast ahead of time during the preparation, this final action is known as 'casting' the spell."
So magic started as rituals, you'd have to spend minutes pouring over a spellbook doing long strings of gestures and intonations. Powerful, but time consuming. Then wizards discovered a way to do most of the casting in advance, leaving the last few words and gestures undone until the last moment. That's what we call spell prep--a mostly completed ritual waiting for the right moment. Wizards can only keep a few such balls in the air, however, as that's a lot of different words and gestures and component requirements to keep straight, and the rituals themselves are quite long and demanding. Thus there's only a certain number of rituals of a certain level that a wizard can keep straight depending on their level of magic. The earliest levels of spells have been known the longest, having been among the first invented, and thus have been simplified the most and made easiest to memorize and cast, though through metamagic one can tap into the power that the spells once had in older more complex forms--but at a cost.
Conceptually I love this. It makes so much sense. It's a fantastic way to see magic working. In implimentation, is it illogical? Well no, but it does have some issues. Is there anything that says that at a certain level you may only know so many spells of one level and so many of another? Probably not really, but by tradition wizards train their apprentices to hold themselves to those limits. What happens if they don't? Well for me, I'd have them roll arcana at escalating difficulty to see if they mess something up and accidentally release the wrong spell or botch the ritual and lose the spell--but as to the rules, they don't say.
Memorizing more 7th level spells instead of 9th? Well maybe, though I'm not sure it's a matter of stacking spells in your brain like Tetris blocks, so much as keeping the triggers straight and remembering where you were in each ritual when you tied it off. But could you? As a DM, I'd say sure. But you'd have to roll to see if you could keep it straight--maybe augmented by occasional Concentration checks during times of stress to make sure you didn't lose your focus and blank out the last part of one of these vastly complex spells that you're trying to keep separate in your head.
Now like I said, do I like it? Yeah, I love it. Do I think it has any business in Pathfinder? Honestly I'd like a system of magic that can accommodate a whole range of magical theories rather than trying to model everything using a very specifically Dungeons & Dragons style magic system.