Magic system where spells have 100% success rate but magic resources (MP/slots) are very limited.
Magic system where you have to roll for every cast and bad rolls can cause bad things but without any magic resources.
Magic system where you roll to cast every spell but they are very easy and weak and you have to spend magic resources to make them powerful.
What type do you prefer?
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I prefer the third, but I admit I'm a boring person.
The mage vs. fighter power gap has more to do with casting time and breadth of spells known than whether you can run out of mana or not.
Middle.
What anime is this?
it's Roku de Nashi Majutsu Koushi to Akashic Records
Why not combine all three?
It's pretty amusing how gay those old fantasy pictures can be.
Magic system that incorporates super human fighter stuff, like say Tales artes and uses the third system. (Shinning Tiger Fang, Azure blade, etc)
Never understood why someone wouldn't use magic in a world full of magic.
Magic system where you have to know the Secret of X to do X magic, and magic just functions off of willpower and focus. Different Secrets combine to make new magic, like Life and Death making necromancy.
This is now a magic system thread.
Wasn't it already?
How would spells be handled in your example? Something like every spell has a list of required Secrets to cast? Do you need to track them down via spellbook, or can you cast any spell you have the Secrets for?
>Magic system where you have to roll for every cast and bad rolls can cause bad things but without any magic resources.
Nix the "without any magic resources" part and you'll have my favorite magic system.
I hate when dice can decide that your head suddenly explodes. It's stupid. Bad rolls will happen. Catastrophic miscasts are a retarded idea.
>bad rolls can cause bad things means your head explodes
It can be a little more nuanced than that, user.
Most miscast tables include retarded shit like that.
There are 135 Secrets and I make more as needed. Secrets come from gods that match their sphere, but not every secret is represented. Secret Keepers are very rare and there are only ~200 at a time, in a world with 200,000 people.
Magic is very blunt. Rituals and spells beyond things like fireball are pretty much impossible. However, the current villain, an immortal Keeper of Fate who now has over 30 Secrets, can do some weird shit. He recently made several semi-intelligent metal dragons made of flying blade crystals, then turned his mountain fortress into a colossal stone golem, which then walked over the edge of the world into a new plane.
Typing that I realized how fucked up my setting is.
>magic system where spells are commonplace and everyone knows them, but not varied in abilities. Very basic spells; basic levitation, telepathy, damaging energies, illusions, etc. Very basic spells that can have modular strength based on the complexity of the die rolled. Spells have no costing components, but if you fail your roll, you have to literally throw your dice away and buy new ones. The more complex and/or rare/special/pretty the dice are, the more powerful the spell. If you have no more dice to roll, you cannot cast.
Warhammer 40k ork player comes in with buckets of dice.
>"Hey guys, i'll be your artillery wizard"
It sounds pretty sweet, though. I definitely see how there would be a cumulative effect of gaining more secrets, as each new one combos off of every previous one, leading to exponentially more abilities and crazy crap like you described. I could also imagine working in mild Eldritch Horror themes of people going mad if they learn too many secrets or particular combinations (which could also be a way to prevent particularly broken combos).
If you get all the Secrets you become the overgod.
Some limiting factors on Secrets:
1. If you tell your Secret you don't have it any more. Secrets tend to run in the family, Keepers passing them down from their deathbeds.
2. Gods only give Secrets to their most favored servants. God luck getting more than a couple of gods to like you.
3. There aren't very many Secrets around.
Also, most Secrets don't give phenomenal cosmic power. A lot of them just give incredible skill in a particular area, a personality trait, extra senses, or passive auras or abilities.
Gust, the villain, kinda got a loophole. The whole story is too long, so in a nutshell, he was a Keeper of Fate chosen to scry what happened before the gods. However, the dark gods decided to dick the light gods over and got him cursed to become a weregecko (by his own god no less). Then they all gave him a shitload of Secrets for the lulz. He started off with ~15 Secrets and has gained more over time through:
1. Hunting down and torturing Keepers
2. One of his original Secrets was the Secret of Scholarship, which lets one find Secrets in mundane texts. It's an incredibly rare occurrence, but Gust is 500 years old. This is how he has several Secrets with no god that could possibly give them.
3. About 10 years ago he made a deal with a bunch of dead dwarven gods. They gave him all their Secrets, he would make the Frozen Blade Dragon to kidnap the dozen remaining dwarves of their nation from the goblins, return them to the gods' worship, and guard them for all time.
4. After the players defeated the Golden Blade Dragon and pillaged Gust's fortress, he started moving underground in a bubble of air, kidnapping Keepers and taking their secrets. He took a Keeper of Thralldom and is now just mentally enslaving Keepers.
A bit about the world. Keep in mind that I literally ripped the game out of Dwarf Fortress.
The plane the players are on is only one of six. The planet is a cosmic die, they are on side 4, so the number 4 shows up all the time. Each side is only about the size of Ireland. The moon and sun have square orbits, the stars are pinpricks on a cubic sky, and the corners of the world have boundaries around them where gravity flips 90 degrees.
The land is about 3-4 times as fertile as Earth. Forests look like jungles, jungles look like impenetrable walls of trees. The sun emits "magical" rays, which the plants catch. In places where the magical ozone is thinner, there are more weird plants and animals. In places like high mountains and barren deserts, the magic penetrates deep into the rock and supplies energy to the cavern ecosystems. This is why dwarves live in mountains.
Also I missed an important point: you can only go through each side boundary once. The sides of the cube are almost entirely unknown to each other.
>Never understood why someone wouldn't use magic in a world full of magic.
Because Martial=Mundane=Weaker than magic, or at least that's the case with anyone who started the hobby when 3.PF hit the scene.
is there a better reprint for this game?
>There are 135 Secrets and I make more as needed
Do you have a PDF or image that I can shamelessly steal?
I've got an excel document with the calendar and list of Secrets. I'll put it on google drive and link it later.
Magic is dangerous, even in children's fiction like Harry Potter things can go very wrong with spells.
that is the thrill of it. if you can't handle the edge, go play your comfy systems.
docs.google.com
Here it is for real this time. Deleted old post and fixed link.
>if you can't handle the edge, g
his point is that at some time of life, you will have a bad roll
so all mages will be fucked at some point of their life.
To do magic you do stuff in a specific order.
As long you do it in this specific order, you can cast the spell. If you do it in the really specific way under the specific conditions, the spell wont fail
There is per universe max mana allowed to be used at a time, not per person one. Active spells cost mana, using more mana than the universe has, automatically make the spell fail.
Universe has also a second stat, called max spell point.
Spells have mana value, but have a value called spell point that is higher than 0.
If the spell points of all active spells are higher than the max spell point, the time the spell will become active after you cast it will be: Time needed to this spell become active / (sum of all spell points of active spell points / max spell point allowed at the universe.)
Good show mate, I wish I had the dedication to come up with something like that.