Balancing magic without prerequisites

[foxanik]

Hello and welcome!

I decided to clear nearly all the prerequisites for spells, besides attributes and Magery, becuase I find it extremely non-userfriendly to force player to choose X spells before he can cast the one that he actually wants to.

Of course I get that you need to learn the alphabet to be able to write, but if player don't think he needs Create Fire spell but wants to have Fireball it's okay for me, otherwise he would have to take some spells that he probably would not even use.

So there it is - spells that don't require to know any other spells to cast them.

But it'll happen sooner or later when some caster will want to make him really overpowered and it will be easy because he can get straight to really powerful spells and here is my dillema - how should I balance magic but yet keep it prerequisiteless?

Any ideas you've got there?

[JMason]

GURPS already has a system that does this, clerical magic. Check the advice set for that. Also consider the spells in Basic as freely avalible, or make your own "common spells" list. Then require that others need a teacher or spellbook to learn.

[Ashtagon]

I think Thaumatology has some advice on how to replace spell prerequisites with either skill prereqs or advantages or both.

[Anaraxes]

To each his own. I always found it bizarre that a wizard that could create a ball of fire could not create simple fire or light a candle, particularly if they're supposed to be learned sages studying a coherent body of knowledge.

But there are settings or concepts that are one- (or several-) trick ponies with scattershot effects. However, those might be better suited for building magic powers using Advantages (see Powers), or perhaps an improvisational magic system if you just don't like to write down lots of spells.

Setting-wise, keep in mind that if powerful magic is easy to pick up with a couple of points, it's likely that a lot of people have powerful magic. I'd also expect that anti-magic will be very much more common than usual.

Here's a Krommquote stating that prereqs aren't all that important for balance purposes:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.p...66&postcount=8


Some past threads on skipping prerequisites.
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?p=610265
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?p=1470149
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?p=717113
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?p=720482

[Kage2020]

Originally Posted by foxanik

Any ideas you've got there?

I actually started to do this as an option for using the skill-based Magic for an Earthdawn/Shadowrun game before I went down alternate routes. IIRC, Thaumatology: Magical Styles has some advice on this subject.

[Faolyn]

On my blog I have a leveled magic system, where spells have a required minimum Magery level but no specific spell prereqs. You could always do something like that. I did mine for Magery levels 0-6, to mimic the way Clerics work in DF, but you could do it to any level of Magery.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by foxanik

But it'll happen sooner or later when some caster will want to make him really overpowered and it will be easy because he can get straight to really powerful spells and here is my dillema - how should I balance magic but yet keep it prerequisiteless?

Any ideas you've got there?

You wanna know the truth? The really powerful spells aren't nearly as useful as the cheap spells you can easily cast or maintain for free with a skill level of 15. Prereqs (apart from magic aptitude) are less about balance than they are about the absurdity of a character who knows how to create a firey explosion but not how to do anything less. The reason why clerics don't have prereqs is because they have no understanding of what they are doing. They're just asking the big guy for an intervention.

[simply Nathan]

A +30% Enhancement on Magery is enough to justify the change if your're worried about balance (making Magery 0 cost 7 points and each level thereafter cost 13).

Alternatively, buy a separate Charm perk for each spell bought without prerequisites; spells are already going for 1 point each so spending 2 instead isn't going to hurt much if you're ignoring two or more undesired spells in between.

[Pragmatic]

Doesn't Thaumatology discuss setting up each College of magic as its own Bang Skill? Then all the prerequisites do is cause increasing penalties?

So you can have Fire!-15. To cast a spell that has 2 prerequisites, you take a penalty of (off the top of my head, don't take this as the RAW...) -2 to cast, an effective skill of 13.

That way, you can have all the spells, without worrying about prereqs.

[Faolyn]

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Doesn't Thaumatology discuss setting up each College of magic as its own Bang Skill? Then all the prerequisites do is cause increasing penalties?

So you can have Fire!-15. To cast a spell that has 2 prerequisites, you take a penalty of (off the top of my head, don't take this as the RAW...) -2 to cast, an effective skill of 13.

That way, you can have all the spells, without worrying about prereqs.

Page 75. The penalty is 1/3 the number of prereqs.