Wizards & Witchery

[dorchadas]

I've been thinking about running a game of D&D, to the point where I actually bought some 5E sourcebooks. But not official sourcebooks--third party ones that overhaul the magic and combat systems called Spheres of Power and Spheres of Might, because I really don't like D&D's magic system and if I run a game I'd want to totally overhaul it. I write a lot about tinkering with the magic system, like in this post about Dark Sun's magic vs. psionics or this post about deciding between different magic systems for a homebrew game, but I've never really done a post about my problems with D&D magic, so this is that post.

When I first started playing D&D lo these many years ago, my main problem with the magic system was Vancian casting. I really didn't understand having to memorize specific spells beforehand, mainly because it didn't match any of the literary inspiration I had as a 5th and 6th grader--primarily Tolkien, Mercedes Lackey, David Eddings, Terry Brooks, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Darksword books, Tamora Pierce, and so on. Wizards in those books called up whatever spells they needed and mostly the disadvantage was exhaustion from wielding too much power, so I thought a mana or spell point system was superior and came up with several tries at implementing it, only one of which I remember--I just converted spell levels into spell points, so a 9th level spell cost 9 SP, and I added up all the available spell levels in the spell progression charts and gave them to casters as an SP pool which resulted in hilariously-overpowered wizards.

Nowadays, I understand that through design or happy accident, Vancian casting matches the choosing-and-equipment-loadout aspect of non-magical adventurers. Much like the party has to decide how many torches they need and whether to bring a ladder or rope, the wizard has to decide whether to memorize Knock or Acid Arrow and doesn't receive a pool of magic that they can draw from as-needed in the same way that torches and lockpicks aren't rolled into some kind of "dungeoneering gear" pool without differentiation. The party can bring torches or the wizard can memorize Light but if the torches go out and there's no Light backup, the party had better have infravision. In a game with strict equipment- and time-tracking like OD&D was, spell memorization works very well.

But I'm still not a big fan of it and I'd rather do without. However, losing the spell memorization aspect without any other changes makes casting classes far more flexible because of my other problem with D&D magic, which is that it has no limits.

One of the most important aspects of worldbuilding a fantasy setting is deciding on how magic works--what it can do and, even more importantly, what it cannot do. D&D's classic spell list encodes a lot of assumptions into the game that I don't like at all. Here's a list:

• Every Wizard Can Do Everything: The default in D&D is that wizards are generalists, with no limitation on their learning. Given enough time, a single wizard can learn how to conjure up illusionary armies, teleport, fly, throw fireballs, create equipment from nothing, freeze their enemies in place, animate the dead, protect their party from hostile weather, transform themselves or others into bird or beast, and much more. The only limit on their knowledge is access to spells, not the nature of those spells or of magic itself.
  
• There's No Incentive For Specializing: In previous editions it was possible to play a Necromancer or a Transmuter or an Enchanter and get extra spells of a specific school in exchange for not being able to cast any spells of the opposition school(s)--Xan from my Baldur's Gate II playthrough was an Enchanter and couldn't cast Evocation spells like Fireball, so I had to get more creative in my spell selections. D&D 5e has Arcane Traditions, but they just provide a slight bonus to one of the eight spell schools and no penalty, so a Necromancer can still cast illusion or enchantment spells, just not as many as an Illusionist or Enchanter.
  
• Mind-control Is Easy: Charm Person is a first-level spell, and while Charm Person doesn't directly allow mind control, the second-level spell Suggestion does. I definitely prefer settings where affecting the mind is much harder.
  
• There's No Strong Gradation of Spell Power: What I mean by this is that there's no rules for determining how powerful a spell should be or what its capability is other than "compare it to existing spells," and existing spells don't really provide a consistent guide either. A lot of high-level spells are just like lower-level spells with bigger numbers--compare Fireball and Meteor Swarm--and it's unclear what any specific wizard can do at a given power level. If the PCs have to go up against a 10th level wizard, they know nothing about what they're facing other than "magic" unless that wizard has deliberately chosen a specific focus, which as I said before there's no reason to ever do.

That's what I can think of right now.

Compare this to color magic in WFRP 2e, which is probably my favorite magic system of all time. All wizards are specialized in a "Lore" that links a small set of highly-themed spells together, so amber wizards can turn into eagles or force animalistic behaviors on their enemies or eat anything a pig could eat or hibernate for years, and azure wizards can call down lightning or predict the future or make perfectly-transparent glass. They're defined by what they can't do as much as by what they can do, and so there's an incentive for creative problem-solving as the jade wizard tries to figure out how "control of nature and the weather" can be applied to convincing the baron to stop taxing the serfs so heavily. Even ignoring the social consequences for using magic--this is a setting with witchhunters, after all--I greatly prefer it on a mechanical level. Instead of D&D I'd rather play some kind of..."Warriors & Witchery."

I could just run WFRP, and I've done it before, but this is about D&D. I did actually write a conversation of WFRP spells over to D&D, but it was for OSR systems and I'd have to check up on the D&D 5e rules if I wanted to do that.

Which brings me back to Spheres of Power above. It was originally a Pathfinder project and you can find the OGL wiki here, but basically it trashes the entire spell list and replaces it with 20 spheres focused around different effects. Death is about killing people, disease, and raising undead, Warp is moving things without crossing the intervening distance, Creation is about repairing objects or creating them from nothingness, Mind is interactions with thoughts and emotions, and so on, and any individual character can only gain a max of 30 different effects at 20th level, much less for half-casters like Bards. It's thus a lot easier to build the kind of world I like with limits on magic, because rather than have to go through the entire spell list and pick the banned spells, I can just say "Advanced Talents from the Warp Sphere are banned--in this world, if wizards want to travel long distances quickly, they either transform themselves into ravens or ride horses like everyone else."

Realistically, what I'd probably do to get the feel I want is:

• The aforementioned banning of Warp Advanced Talents
  
• Require the Creation sphere to be taken with the Limited Creation (Alter) variant, meaning wizards can only alter exiting materials, not summon it from nothing.
  
• Ban Mind entirely. I like the idea that if wizards want to change others' behavior they have to do it the old-fashioned way--with deadly curses that will kill the target unless they fulfill the wizard's whims.
  
• Maybe make some Spheres mutually exclusive. Life/Death, Light/Dark, Alteration/Protection, Illusion/Creation, I don't know.

I think that'd make a great game, honestly.

I was thinking I'd have to rewrite all the spell lists before I ever ran D&D again and I'm glad to see that someone else did all the work for me. Work smarter, not harder--especially if Intelligence is your Prime Requisite!

Comments

[chippedpaint]

I really like how the new ttrpg Quest deals with magic (and, actually, ALL abilities, whether they're magic or not). It uses specialization "trees". I put tree in quotes because it is more of a straight line. In order to learn the most powerful evocation available to you to buy (there are some stronger ones that can only be earned at the ST's discretion), you have to learn every other evocation in order first. Some of the abilities are free to use and other cost AP to use. You gain AP as you play.

There are a lot of things about Quest that are a bit too simplistic if you really like crunchy ttrpgs, but I think they actually landed on a pretty good ability system. And it's a highly customizable system (they encourage it!)

They're here: https://www.adventure.game/ but I kickstarted, so let me know in messenger (Fin) if you want to take a look at the PDF. I've been thinking about running a horror campaign incorporating 5E, Quest, and Sleepaway Camp, but we'll see if I actually ever get organized enough to start it.

[dorchadas]

Wow, adventure.game is an amazing URL. Props to them for getting it.

Those skill trees do sound kind of interesting! I would like to take a look, I think.