Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghostdancer
After reading up on your Wiki a bit, VariousRen, I've got a few questions and maybe a few suggestions. Take them all with a grain of salt.
- Healing: It occurs to me that you could create the same low-magical healing effect you want, while also allowing that one big instance of lifesaving magic by allowing supernatural healing to restore at most you HP every month or so and require bed rest for anything else. You could probably create a spell that would accelerate bedrest as well if you were of a mind. It still captures the "magic healing is rare/hard," while giving players options.
- Long Term Magic Healing: This penalty looks really harsh. Can I suggest using the Long-Distance Modifiers (p. B241) instead, reading miles as days. It's still harsh - but not super harsh.
- Magic Words: This is kind of neat. I just released something like this on my Patreon page. :-)
- Detect Spellcaster: How was the cost arrived at exactly?
- New/Modified Skills: Same here? Design-wise it looks okay, I'm just curious how you arrived at it.
Magic in genreal is as you describe it - "hand wavy" - but honestly, if you were to put some work into it (and I wouldn't mind giving it a go over after you're done) this would be perfect for Ritual Path Magic. Just disallow Ritual Adept completely and limit Magery so that skill levels are capped at a specific point. Overall, a very cool read, thanks again for sharing it. |
Healing: Field medic style magic is almost entirely untouched, chant magic allows a caster to throw major heals around every few rounds (20-skill seconds to cast) without any time penalty and get people back on their feet.
Long Term Healing: It really isn't as harsh as it looks on the face of it, because extra time can be used to offset the penalties (but not gain a bonus to skill). An hour of study knocks off -1 of the penalties, up to 30 hours knocking off -5. A successful casting of Body Reading halves these penalties (making it critical to a good long term healer). In play, this ends up meaning 3 days of study on an injured person, then casting a major healing for 8HP, rinse and repeat. It has struck a good balance between having a high HT score for good healing rolls, and magical healing to get you on your feet.
It also has two other benefits. Cleric style casters (Spell casters with chant magic and one college (Healing)) need to have a large supply of FP on hand during a fight just like other mages, so they can heal wounds right after or during. It isn't good enough to heal them in a few hours once you have time to rest, because then the penalties start to climb. In dungeon crawls it leads to a very nice "Press on injured, or back off for a week" feel. Finally, it explains why there are people with missing limbs, old war wounds, ect in a world where clerical magic is common.
Detect: It was based off of Detect (Occasional: People with Magery, 10), then adding Melee Attack (Reach C, -30%) to limit it to touch. 7 points seems about right in the setting, spell casters have a frustrating habit of not wearing tall pointy hats and robes in this world.
Psionics: Based very loosely on the bardic enthrallment stuff, but only in that it was based on skills. None of the PC's have taken up psionics yet, but one of the fights against a skilled psionic felt right, with the PC's being locked out of their body, breaking free occasionally and struggling one or two steps closer before the psionic regained control. It may need to be changed in the future, but for now it seems fine.
I'm glad that you are interested in the setting! If I had known about ritual path magic at the time, I probably would have used it! Now it's a little late to switch things out, but in the future I'm looking for a game to try it with.