18 hours ago
Monday, May 10, 2010
A Question
I've been meditating on spells in OD&D and the way Champions handles superpowers. The latter focused on mechanics and assigned a point value to each mechanic. Special effects — how those mechanics actually looked like in the game world — was entirely up to the player. Is there anyone or anywhere that tried to do this with a D&D spell list?
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There have been many replacement spell systems for D&D, but I think what you're asking is if there was a system that converted the underpinnings of the existing spell lists into effects-based build-your-own-spells rules.
There was a discussion on the Microlite 20 forums about a semi-freeform spell system, where 1 die of damage or healing is equivalent to a +1/-1 modifier or equivalent to one descriptive adjective, and the level of the spell is based on adding these up. But I'd have to track down that thread to remember the details. I participated in that thread and plan to rework some of my ideas into a system like what we're talking about here, but haven't gotten around to it.
I sort of did this with the psionic system on my blog, ages ago, but it's sort of disorganized.
Floating around there is some example of Fantasy Hero building D&D style spells. Also for GURPS 4th edition.
I have, at various time, considered using the magic system from Talislanta/OMNI in a D&D game. It's basically a massively simplified Effect's based system. Level would replace Magic Rating.
@Matthew: If we're talking about adapting other systems to D&D... the infamous Fantasy Wargaming system was clunky, but I was tempted in the past to convert the magic system to D&D. Each spell has a Degree of Difficulty, calculated from its effects, which could be used for a D&D spell level.
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