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Old 05-04-2019, 06:07 PM   #2
William
 
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
Default Re: Personally crafted magic disciplines

Seems like magic would be extremely quirky, individualistic, and frankly quite rare, since if there are a million mages on the world (1 in 7,000 people), there's no way that a bunch of them didn't hit on the same method.

Perhaps every magical spell, power, or trick that you know has to be invented, and you have to be the one doing the inventing. In addition to Magery, I expect quite a lot of the most powerful mages would have Gadgeteering and Quick Gadgeteering for spellcraft.

I would certainly advise ignoring the prerequisite system. To invent even a standard sort of spell for oneself, at most you might use the prerequisite count as a guide to whether a spell was Simple or Average. To allow mages to master a variety of spells I would be fairly generous with the lower difficulty settings; inventing is hard enough already.

A variant would be to use improvisational magic like Path magic, with the inventions being the path skills themselves, researched using Thaumatology as the invention skill. Perhaps the invention is Simple, Average, and Complex, for your first (pick a number) skill levels, and Amazing after that. As soon as they have a path skill they can improvise techniques as normal.

If you want to ignore inventing, then perhaps use magic as powers, with each power requiring an Unusual Background of some GM-fiat amount.

If this is all for the use of players in a particular game, you could instead simply suggest to the players that anyone who wants magic can pick whatever system they like on the supposition that they have to have invented it themselves, and they should know the world is one where there are no standardized schools.
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