[DF] Easy arcane magic for Dungeon Fantasy

[Langy]

Originally Posted by Gnome

It sucks if all you want to do is direct damage--innate attacks are built specifically for that purpose. But a DF wizard ought to have utility, and it's hard to do that efficiently with powers. And you can still have direct damage in your bag of tricks.

You seem to keep missing that I have been assuming that you'd have other spells available (probably from a spells-as-skills system) in addition to the innate attacks; you'd wind up having exactly as much versatility, doing more damage at higher range, with less point investment.

With that 20 Lightning Stare skill, you can hit someone for 2d for no FP and the various cool "lightning" effects. Or choose to spend more energy and do more damage. That's versatility. And it's built into the system for you. If you want to do magic-as-powers, you have to build it from scratch. For beginners who want to play wizards, I just give them a couple of sample spell-lists to choose from that I know will work well and highlight the most important spells.

Sure, you have to build it from scratch, but the normal magic system is boring, annoying, horribly written, and just generally sucks. You have to do a massive amount of rewriting in it just to make it work with 4e, since it wasn't actually updated from its 3e edition iteration.