Miscast tables

DCSS, like a lot of roguelikes, gives spells a chance to fail on you. Not just as in giving monsters saving throws, but as in there is a chance that characters themselves may cast a spell incorrectly. But one thing it does do that most roguelikes don't is sometimes produce randomized negative effects when a spell you cast fails. The more difficult a spell is to cast relative to your casting skills, the worse that effect can be. This can damage you, inflict (probably bad) mutations, or cause loads of other grief for you in any number of ways.

Exactly what happens may depend on the spell school of the spell you tried to cast: fire spells may cause a fire explosion, ice spells may freeze you, summoning spells may summon hostile creatures, etc. This makes the magic system feel a lot more real -- it'd be boring if the choice of miscast effect was completely unrelated to the spell being cast, and it'd be pointless to code in a number of different things that could go wrong for each individual spell, but spell-school-based spell failure effects are a nice compromise.

Sometimes, due to a fluke, they end up helping you out. I tried to cast a poison gas spell once and the miscast effect for that spell ended up flooding the entire corridor with exactly the same type of poison gas that I was trying to create in the first place, when the spell itself would have only covered a 3x3 square, further shrunk because it was in a corridor! I had poison resistance, so the gas didn't harm me at all, but it did make sort work of the goblins that were chasing me.

What tabletop RPG systems have similar miscast tables you roll on? How well do they work? I can imagine that there might be a more interesting range of possibilities in a tabletop RPG than in an incredibly combat-oriented and increasingly playstyle-restrictive video game.

Dark Heresy 2e, or possibly just Dark Heresy 2e's beta version, has specific perils of the warp results for different power groups (telepathy, telekinesis, etc)

How bad can those be? Are they just "Chance to corrupt yourself a little each time you incorrectly cast a spell" or "10% chance of annihilating everything within a 13-mile radius every time you cast a spell at all"?

Well, like in DH1e, they can end your character. There are PC ending results for each one, my personal favorite being for Divination, something like that you spend the rest of your life dazed and mumbling secrets that cause corruption and insanity in any who hear it on a round by round basis, necessitating immediate field euthanasia.

However by my calculations the most severe results on the tables were *impossible*. This suggests

IN DH 1e, the chance to become a daemonhost is something like 1 in 100,000 per power die rolled.

Overall DH 2e's beta test looked pretty sensible, but too much of a departure to be used, I assume. Still has loads of great ideas.

And I assume the reason that there were fuckups SO catastrophic that it is IMPOSSIBLE by the rulebook to get them, was that in a splatbook they could introduce things that let you push yourself even further with greater risk or whatever.

It's been awhile but I believe in 3.5 you could attempt to cast a higher level spell than you were capable of normally using a scroll but had to roll Spellcraft or Arcana or the like, and if you failed the check you got to roll on a table and get some bad shit and consume the scroll, usually ending with the scroll blowing up in your face but sometimes casting the spell with increased DC.

I'll see if I can dig up the actual rule or if I was high, I think it was in the DMG.

"Impossible" or not In theory I am no longer allowed to play psykers because I got this result twice in as many attempts to use psyker powers. As in I made a psyker and turned into a daemonhost my first attempt to summon a gun I prepared and wiped out the party. Then, when we started over, I made a new psyker went to heal a party member after our first combat and turned into a daemonhost again. Even when I cast psyker powers in practice I have yet to succesfully get a power off at less than daemonic incursion level of warp effect.

See, that kind of shit is impossible under a system like Crawl's because the severity of the miscast effects is entirely dependent on the difference between your skill at spellcasting and the spells casting DC. It's impossible for a first-level wizard get a miscast effect that will kill them outright (although they may get a miscast effect which causes an already-bad situation they're in to turn fatal) unless they're doing something that hampers their spellcasting ability, like armor.

I can see why the everpresent looming possibility of becoming a daemonhost might be a good thing for a setting like 40k, but it doesn't really strike me as something very fun for the player. The possibility can and very well should be there, but the player should be allowed to do what their character was built to do on a very basic level without endangering themselves or the rest of the party.

>penalizing the player for bad rolls on a meta level
Shit GM detected

Did he die?