I have no idea what magic system to use

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frontiernet.net/~jamesstarlight/RunicMagic.html

I was more thinking about this: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWMm8DhWwdf8Fish_AIU6soxnFEChz1U8

Well shit, what are you trying to do? Do you want something heavy or light? What's the cosmology? What's the focus of the game? What's the power level?

You gotta give us something before you go back to choking on that dick, OP.

>I have no idea what magic system to use.
For what?

Anything but spell slots. Spell slots are the worst.

Spirit magic. Basically some combination of the ars goetia, SMT, politics and pokemon. Wizards don't have any power themselves except what's granted to them by patrons and what they can extract from servants

What system are you playing?

Spell slots are fantastic for dungeon crawlers.
Resource management and all that.

The fluff's pretty much always been shit, mind you.

powerpoints do spell management significantly better, and no I'm not talking about d&d psions or whatever.

This.

Spellslots are fine for clerics or whatever, but if you want to do proper arcane magic, spellpoints which can adjust the strength and function of spells are the way to go.

Spell points have some problems. First, they're obnoxious and fiddly. Second, everything has to be balanced against everything else, because you have the flexibility to spend your spell points on anything you know. No job of balancing is perfect, and that makes it much, much harder to do well.

I actually like the way the vancian magic of D&D divides spells into different tiers that only have to be considered against each other (not that it always does a great job within this context, mind you). The problem I have with vancian magic is the whole "per day" thing, which results in drastically different caster strength in long dungeon slogs compared to one-in-a-day events. Also, since it can be hard to predict ahead of time how long a period you're going to need to stretch your spells out across, it can be easy for a caster to effectively run out through little fault of his own. And at that point the whole party can suffer from a significant reduction in their utility without his magic. Of course, spell points have similar problems, but it's a bit easier to have them regenerate over the course of active adventuring.

I personally think that GURPS Sorcery is nice although I would have the small modification that players have to buy specific nouns and verbs and all spells they buy must fit within their nouns and verbs they bought.

I actually made a homebrew system based off of that idea that I'm probably never going to GM ever or finish properly.

what an asshole

>First, they're obnoxious and fiddly.
How? Spell costs 5 points I have 40, I now have 35 and a spell is happening. Boom done.
> Second, everything has to be balanced against everything else
You mean like assigning spells to spell levels for their slots? I'd much rather pay 5points to cast a spell and hope its worth more than my 4point alternative than hope that this 5th level spot isn't worse than a 4th level alternative.

Powerpoints are a base unit and thus the granularity of their recharge can easily be controlled. A powerpoint can recharge every 5 minutes thus allowing a 5 pp spell every 25 minutes. The same cannot be said for slots as their segregation makes non-daily regen significantly more fiddly (Oh I gain a 1st level spell every 5 minutes but then how do I gain a 5th level spell? Is it every 25 minutes or do I have to forgo my other spells to get that? Do I gain it every 25 minutes and also gain a 4th, 3rd, 2nd, 1st during that time? That'd be silly. So the only real option is to either stagger spell regain (arbitrary at best) or not give a fuck and say daily to be done with it).

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