[DF] Path/Book mages in DF?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Kromm

A Path/Book caster would enter adventures with charms prepared and use them up, not unlike how an artificer uses his Gizmos. Then he'd need time to set up new charms. The game effect would be a bit like a wizard who does everything via Delay, Hang Spell, and Link. Such a caster's ability to unleash prepared charms instantly and at no FP cost would be amazing, though! He'd just need to have other skills to fall back on after doing so.

Really, I think it all hinges on the rituals. Being able to hit the monster with a dead rat with a knotted string tied to it and have the monster cursed to -1 or worse on all dice rolls, or snapping a twig and unleashing a devastating blast of spirit energy, would be entirely cool. Don't think purely in terms of love charms and the like.

Sure, that would work, after a fashion, but there'll be more conflict between players and GMs, in terms of how much downtime there should be between adventures, and quite possibly also between those players who have characters who can utilize downtime on their own, to prepare for adventuring, versus those players who can only make use of downtime until their funds run out.

So either you'd have to accept the very real possibility of such conflict arising and staying around, or else create a rules solution. The most obvious solution would be to have preparer-ritualists need funds for their charms, so that they, too, run out of funds after a few weeks or at most a couple of months.

That boils down to letting some types of player characters create non-permanent magic items. I like it on principle, but I've actually never done that in my own homebrew RPG, Sagatafl, because I haven't been able to find a good and non-world-impacting mechanic to limit it (my solution to limit permanent magic items simply doesn't work for non-permanent ones).

World-impact is, at best, a secondary concern in DF, and anyway doesn't seem to be a real concern even in non-DF GURPS, so it is probably fairly doable.


Another solution is to use Modular Abilities. This means each ritualist must buy a number of Charm Slots or Charm Units, during character creation, and is then limited to using that number of charms per adventure, but can of course buy more Slots with earned experience points. This removes funds from the equation, and means there's a limit to how much downtime a ritualist can benefit from, although charm-creation still has to require time, otherwise a ritualist can make replacement charms every night before going to bed.