More fine tuning for spellcasting rules and other...

TAG: #CORERULES

I had the chance to get the feedback from Marco on his playtest experience and hereby a summary of his findings: he agrees with Sergio’s view about the spellcasting system and once I explained him the changes I deployed, he felt these are going in the right direction. He also suggested me to somehow “cap” the possibility to open a Secret Sorcery word at the inception since a player could speculate on this and basically allocate 1 point to a singe SS word for each and every available point of his PC. Fair point again! Kudos to Marco as well!

I made my mind up about what Marco reported me and came with a couple of proposals; due to the “strong” position they take against spellcasters I decided for the time being to keep both options within the Expanded Rules and not change the Core Rules. I feel them extremely interesting and useful however I want to keep the spellcasting framework as it is for a certain period to seize if the current changes are working.

With reference to the “cap”, any character has a max number of SS words he can use with no constraints: this is 3 + Erudition (the Intellect US). In case the player decides to have more than this number of known SS words, the GM rolls without sharing the results to the player and identifies those words which are within the above mentioned threshold (ideally by splitting with a fair proportion principles and elements). Any other SS word exceeding those can be cast with a malus of -3 without revealing this to the player. The player will realize as he uses the “over-learnt” words that the spells fail with a higher probability than other words… the KUP model is therefore back again! There is no need to go ahead in the explanation…

With reference to the unbalance between fighters and spellcasters, another measure that can be adopted is a change in the main game mechanic for spellcasting: the player is not entitled to determine the dominant word in a spell, the “main” word is going to be automatically defined as the one with the lowest score among the two (in case of tie, the player is free to decide) and this is called “leading word” of the spell. This shift from “dominant word” to “leading word” brings a huge consequence: the player needs to completely review his strategy in the ES point allocation (a possible model with the “dominant word” was to maximize all the elements and keep at the minimum the principles for a good outcome in terms of spellcasting). In terms of updates in the rules, this means a change of a single sentence with no further amendments but, in reality, this is a game-changer. For this reason, I will keep this option within the expanded rules and possibly ask to someone who is going to start a new playtest to try this version instead of the “dominant word” rule.

Then, some minor add-ons on the errata have been inserted: I added a couple of clarifications to the spellcasting mechanics; the first one is that the size of the target is relevant in terms of number of affected creatures (i.e. a spell cast against a large creature counts as if there are 2 medium-size creatures); the second one is that the option of “hit” a target underlies the fact that a spellcaster needs to have one or more points allocated to the ES Combat art with thrown weapons (and for this purpose the ES belongs to the spellcaster career). The errata corrige document is now available as well as the “leaflet layout” version.

Last but not least I would like to report a very interesting post by Marcia I read during the weekend: it is about the difference between damage reduction and damage resistance. Despite the fact this topic has been discussed in many communities (in particular at least from the advent of D&D 3E), it was an interesting reading since this gave me the opportunity to think that I somehow managed to modify these concepts in the VI·VIII·X core rules: as a matter of fact a kind of reduction/amplification of the damage is present when the size of the opponents is different and both to hit and to damage scores are affected… I didn’t realize that until I read the post of Marcia!