[A Ladder]

Originally Posted by Shostak

If you want the RPM spellslingers to be powerful in Dungeon Fantasy style combat, why would you want to eliminate conditional rituals? With those, a character can prepare several powerful spells in advance, waiting only to be triggered. This is not dissimilar from D&D style Vancian magic. And, since the energy accumulation is all done well in advance, this can allow a caster to basically cast a spell per turn. Not bad. You can also consider allowing some advantages like Mana Sponge--its 135 point version allows Mana Reserve to regenerate at 10 MR/second. That's roll-free mana to power spells!

Man, one of the main reasons I stopped playing D&D was Vancian magic.

Let me clarify, I don't dislike the idea of charms, I dislike how they're implemented. The idea of making a few pre-loaded spells that are ready to fire off appeals to me. What I dislike about charms is that they are made under the assumption that you can use all of your FP, Mana Reserve, take as much time as you need to gather energy, and get sacrifice FP from your buds to make the most powerful charm you can squeeze out...and then do that again 15 to 20 times. And then when you need that time consuming spell you can fire it off in one Ready maneuver. It screams broken action economy to me.
When a party of adventurers is in the field (and not just combat) the wizards do not always have the luxury of sacrificing all of their magical resources (FP/Mana/Sacrifice) and all the time in the world (several gathering attempts) to cast each spell. I prefer my mages to think ahead and weight the options of Do I Blow All My Power Now vs. Do I Hold Some In Reserve, Just In Case and then seriously think about if they have time to fiddle with gathering energy for a spell.
With Charms, they can have MAXPOWERtm again and again and again and then they can have it fast.

If Charms were limited in how much energy you could pump into them I would be more inclined to try them. I might see if I just keep it to Safe Threshold + FP/Mana from personal sources and see how that works.

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

As evileeyore said, the problem isn't that the magic is flexible, it's when it has an elaborate design system to actually stat out a new spell.

Sorcery means building an ability out of traits and modifers; slow. RPM has its own design system, picking paths, negotiating Greater vs. Lesser effects, choosing all the options. Faster than designing abilities, but not something you really want to do in the middle of combat.

This might sound super meta, but I don't think I'd let my players improvise completely new spell formula in combat. I don't want Jason, the guy playing the wizard, to hold up playing the game by coming up with a brand new Ice Sphere Death Explosion spell on his turn. But I think I would be ok with a few minutes of Jason asking how the energy cost changes when he wants to put Explosion on his fireball.
Another way to say this: I think my players would understand if I told them "no, new spells take a while to work out the specific rituals/hand movements/words in game time. If you're ok getting skipped each turn (taking Concentrate or Do Nothing maneuvers) while you figure out effects and energy cost while everyone else takes their turn then go ahead. Otherwise, just stick to the rituals you know".

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

(If you pre-build lots of abilities/spells so they're ready to go in combat, then you're back to "choosing from a menu".)

I'm not against "menus" as a blanket rule, I'm against just one "menu". In fact, I plan to show the grimoire out of T:RPM to my players and have them sit down and work out a few spells in advance to get the hang of it (especially their combat spells) so they have a menu to choose against. I still want my players to be able to go "oh, this menu doesn't have all the options I want. I'm gonna make a new option!".