I'm sick of magic systems. I hate how every spell has a discrete effect...

I'm sick of magic systems. I hate how every spell has a discrete effect, and you have to read through a big long list of bullshit to pick out a couple spells, and how fucking obtuse most magic systems are in general.

>HAVE YOU TRIED NOT PLA-

Yeah yeah, give it a rest. Fact is most systems are that way, D&D or not. The whole point of a tabletop game is that you have a human to adjudicate results for you. If I wanted inflexible spell lists then I'd play motherfucking Skyrim

So hit me Veeky Forums. Gimme the best, nonstandard, most nontraditional, off the wall improvisational magic systems you've got lying around.

Try FATE, or to be more specific, the Dresden Files game.

Also, try playing with a not-shit GM. i.e. The 5e basic cantrips almost all allow you to light candles, campfires, things like that as one of their effects. A good GM will allow you to use that to set on fire an enemy you've doused in oil or something. The rules are just guidelines to play, not anything ironclad.

The key is to make it compelling storytelling. Don't just use it as a cheat button.

Monte Cook's World of Darkness. My understanding is that spells can be made more or less on the fly by magicians with the attributes you ascribe to it making it more or less difficult to cast.

Have you looked at Ars Magica and Mage: The Awakening?

GURPS Thaumaturgy also has similar system.

Oh, forgot about that one. Loved Thaumaturgy.

In general, games which focus primarily around spellcasting will have much more flexible and open-ended systems. Games which feature spellcasting alongside other options will have more concrete and inflexible systems, largely in the interest of balancing them against other game elements (though often not terribly successfully).

No, get the fuck out

If you're too lazy to read through a couple pages of spell descriptions and spend minimum amount of time and effort building your character, you shouldn't be playing a RPG. Go be a brainlet somewhere else.

Time Wizards. You get one spell based on a mundane occurrence during the day you became a time wizard, and that spell can have any effect you can conceptually tie to the exact wording of your spell.

For example, you have the spell "Putting on the bathing suit". You can use the spell to get a discount on any item by having it's price "Put on a bathing suit", thus becoming "relaxed".

Not user, but I'm replying with the screencap for any poor souls who aren't familiar with it.

Have you tried The Runed Age? It's magic system allows you to create any spell you want.

>Monte Cook's World of Darkness
All you had to do was say Mage: the Awakening and you wouldn't have looked like a COMPLETE retard.

DID SOMEONE SAY MONTE COOK

>in order to play an rpg you have to spend 30 minutes filing paperwork first
'No'

>It takes me 30 minutes to read and understand a game designed for children
'You are retarded'

Jesus fuck, that's obtuse and it took me 10 minutes, but I finally get it. Damn son.

TRY GURPS ALREADY YOU FUCKING BRAINLET.

ACCEPT THE POINT BUY.

this, only shit GMs care about muh balance, board games are not videogames

Burning Wheel has an interesting variation. The basic rules do use the standard where you pick from a spell list. However there's also the option to instead (or also) have your character learn the components of spells, which can then be combined to create an effect without using a specific spell.

I love the system, but
>Ars Magica
>not obtuse
There's a reason I've never been able to run a game of it with my group, and it's not the setting.

But user, that's not balanced. Surely you wouldn't want to imbalance the game would you? Veeky Forums tells me that Wizards are already OP.

Why do you hate martials so much user?

How does suggesting that make me a retard? OP wanted a new spell system, some people already suggested MtA, and Monte Cook's World of Darkness is a choice. It is a real book.

You could try and make something out of this...

Because that game is AIDS and Monte Cook should never be allowed near a publisher again

>I'm sick of magic systems. I hate how every spell has a discrete effect, and you have to read through a big long list of bullshit to pick out a couple spells, and how fucking obtuse most magic systems are in general.

That's intentional; it's to simulate the experience of being a wizard and having to go through years of intense study to figure out how to do magic.

I spent my whole life studying magic and now all I can think about is getting laid.

I mean, seriously. All I think about are girls. Like all the time.

I'm starting to feel like females don't actually exist. Like they are just mythological creatures in some fantasy books. I have no positive memories of interacting with females other than my family.

I just feel like people are having these crazy sex orgies all the time and not inviting me, cause I wasted my life trying to learn how to cast fireball.

I could probably make explosives out of urea nitrate by boiling piss, but I can't even talk to a girl without losing my shit.

>it's to simulate the experience of being a wizard and having to go through years of intense study to figure out how to do magic.

And for wizards I actually quite like that. It's a nice little bit of player and character confluence. I just dislike it for every single other class. Did the illiterate druid spend years reading books out in the wild? What about the cleric? Did the sorcerer who never spent time studying magic judt one day memorize a bunch of spells?

My ideal magic system would be something that I can plug in for other classes, and which feels different from wizard spells. They should have more potential, but be more sporadic. So the cleric gets miracles, the druid can interface with nature, and the sorcerer can manifest power in unpredictable ways.

>he thinks olive oil or whale oil will just set people on fire like modern fuels

kek

I hardly think that's the intent. If anything it was likely to make the magic system more comprehensible at a first glance, or more likely than that; vancian.

It's also one of the things I dislike most about D&D. The fact that wizards apparently find spells laying behind the couch and have no more knowledge in the subject than to use them as is. If you know how to cast a fireball but don't know how to tune it down to light a candle, for example, that can only mean that you haven't bothered experimenting at all which makes you less than human. You're an actual retard who doesn't deserve to live. Someone ought to come to your house and put a fucking nail between your eyes, you worthless piece of shit.

If you want to ignore how vancian casting works in D&D, that's fine, but that's our fuck up, not someone else's.

There are plenty of systems that do it differently.

Hero System is my favorite system, but you've got to have a GM lay down some guidelines because "the power to do anything with magic" is ridiculously powerful without hard limitations.

I think a better question would be how do you unbork magic in dnd?

Maybe have spell points, and you construct spells on the fly out of different components that have discrete spell point costs amd modifiers. You then have a certain limit on how many spell points you can have in a spell, and a total number you can spend before exhausting yourself.

Although at that point you might just want something like Hero System that already has point based powers and endurance as mechanics.

>I'm sick of magic systems.

">I cast greater twinned maximized repeating chaining splitting homing scorching ray.
>I free action repeat it via Ocular blast.
>I belt of battle and repeat the above again.
>I greater celerity and repeat the above again.
>I had Glory of the Martyr which renders me immune to Daze so I repeat the above again until I run out of spells to do this with and my contigent greater teleport safely puts me back in my sanctuary demiplane where I use my enchanted bedroll to refill my spell pool in 2 hours.
>By the way my demiplane's flow of time is different, two hours is actually two minutes.
>I repeat the above of course."

Though I understand where you're coming from and how that would be absurd, wouldn't a really powerful wizard think of these kinds of things though? Especially the part about a slow time demiplane.

If you do not understand that rules give you options and opportunities, then perhaps you shouldn't be playing a caster.

>if you don't allow all the unintended bugs and combos you are not playing the game as written.

I think that D&D wizards' power is grossly inflated. This is dickery on a god-like level, molding reality like clay to serve you slavishly.

>unintended bugs
Because big fuck-off-i-win combo is such a novelty to Wizards of the Coast, amirite?

>Lel, look at me finding C R E A T I V E uses for prestidigitation
please stop

You cannot demand complexity and lack of bugs.
If you mix many sourcebooks, you will find bugs.
Exploit them ignoring any intended use and fluff is either a fun CharOpt exercise or being that guy.
3.X/PF have many problems by design, like how easy it to pass concentration or how the feat do not scale.
But the example given, with normal, non-sperging players, is not an issue.

>The whole point of a tabletop game is that you have a human to adjudicate results for you.
If you don't like rules and dice rolls, maybe you should just play freeform.

The way I see it (when I run games at least), is you get to use any "gamebreaking exploit" once, then it gets homebrewed into not being OP. So you better save it until a thematically appropriate time, because nobody wants to see you waste your godkiller insta-kill strategy on a measly goblin or something, (and story-telling being what it is, nobody wants to see you drop it round one of combat either in most cases. But that depends on the group/story).

Iron Heart surge works as memed once, then I take a pen to the book and change how it works so you can't abuse it again.
Commoner Railgun works once, before physics gets it's turn in initiative and goes, WELL TIME TO PATCH THAT.

Unfortunately this does have the problem that barring few exceptions, it does place the power VERY heavily in the hands of mages, but I've always tried to give out powerful/interesting magic items that might end up interacting in a weird way. The system is screwed, but I love taking advantage of bugs and rules interactions myself, so if a player finds something and goes out of their way to make it work just for me to go "Oh that seems way too powerful, I'm going to houserule that", then that's not fun for anybody. So they get their payoff, I say "that way powerful, let's try not to have that happen again", and everybody laughs it off and gets on with it.

The system is FAAAAAARRR from being perfect but for me what allows outweighs its problems.
Also, my players came from BECMI and AD&D 2nd so all that internet bullshit was alien for them, especially in the first iterations.

I can only watch with utter contempt the retards that think that having a toolbox means you have to use all the tools at once.

Mage: The Awakening has a good Creative Thaumaturgy system.

>Thinking its limited to D&D
Play
Another
RPG
Already

In most other games, the power level for magic is actually balanced because a) there are actually good reasons why you wouldn't want to cast spells all the time or b) every has access to magic, so trying to throw your weight around can and will be answered by an equally opposing force.

It's a bit hard to cheese games like VtM when you know that everyone around you is either just as strong or stronger than you are.

Apart from that's fucking wrong, why do you think they abandoned the idea of cross-play in WoD? Mages were literally walking automatic nuclear bombs, the weakest mage could destroy the strongest vampire on a whim.

I wasn't talking about cross-play faggot, I was talking about PvP with vampires vs. other vampires.

Even then, an archmage isn't going to go out of their way to swing their dick around when they know that at any moment, half a dozen archmages are swinging their dicks around too to fuck them up if they get too cocky.

>were
lol

Game is ded yo

I implement a spell fatigue system in my campaigns. All spells of fourth level and up generate half their level in Spell Counters. Using anything that raises the spell levels raises the spell counters appropriately as well. A 4th level spell gets two. A quickened fourth level gets four, etc.

After ten spell counters are acquired, a person can still cast spells but they suffer damage equivalent to 5x the spell level out of overwhelming arcane exhaustion.

patrician taste, user

Answer to everything is Unknown Armies

I made a One Shot RPG called The Sorcerer Supreme that might interest you. It definitely blurs the line between improv roleplay and tabletop game though

Nope. Mages are stronger than the others, the devs themselves have admitted that, but thats not even hyperbole there, that's just flat wrong.