Topic: Is a completely flexible spell system based on Action/Object aspects possible?

[tommysl]

Dear all

We have in my group long considered a more flexible version of HARP spell system. When we originally changed from Rolemaster to HARP, one of the main reasons were scaleable spells, as the system seemed very dynamic and flexible, and that you would be able to cast a lot of different things.

For a long while, we were very happy, but as the PC power grew, we discovered some flaws about the system (we think).

It turned out, in our opinion, that the spell arsenal that PC's had was not very large and diverse, and as level 25, they cast more or less the same spells as they did as level 10 just stronger versions. The PC's felt "forced" to put your DP into their attacking spells, in order to gain better attack roles, and rarely spent their DP to become more diverse.

This was kind of depressing, as we originally changed from Rolemaster to HARP to get more diversity, but at high levels we felt that we ended up having a lot less diversity.

The alternative ideas we had was that we could take the spell creating system in CoM, and put that into effect - on the fly. So we put all scaling options automatically on the spells. We further merged some very similar spells into one, e.g. Boost X stat all became the same spell.
Then we began to study the Object Aspect / Action aspect directives in the create spell section. And pretty much we decided we wanted to learn spells in that way - e.g instead of learning Boost Insight spell, one would learn the Action Aspect "Increase" and the Object Aspect "Body". And then these could be combined in any way imaginable. The trick then becomes "on-the-fly" to estimate PP cost of effects. The ideas was heavily influenced by a strong supporter of the Ars Magica system which I understand to be similar.

The costs of aspects in terms of DP would have to be rebalanced, as e.g the combination of "Heal" and "Body" aspect would encompass both Major Heal from the cleric sphere and Restoration. So one aspect buys many spells all the suddon.

Aspects also needs to be categorized in spheres, but I wonder if this is possible at all. For example, the cleric spell "Harm" is a combination of Harm + Body, but the Necromancer spell "Weaken xx stat" used the aspects Harm + Body + Reduce (I think) and this belongs to the necromancer sphere. So one cannot simply it seems map aspects to spheres.

The new CoM mentions that all cantrips, and spells in the revised HARP + CoM are creating using this system. So I'm in the process of marking all spells now on what aspect they belong to.

I'm wondering if anyone has though about such a system and already made the work. Or have thoughts about it in general, or have maybe experienced the same as us (that is the spell system in HARP on high levels seems to work not so well and become dull). The basic idea is to gain a lot of flexibility and enable creative roleplaying.

A final alternative solution could be to allow the "Change Effect" / "Enable other action" on all spells and heavily make use of them.

As a final question, since all spells have gone through this system, I wonder if it would be possible to obtain a list of all spells in HARP and what Aspects they belong to, as I suppose the authors have this. Spells like Major heal I wonder how is created as I can't map the scaling options to something specific. The same for e.g. "Disease" or "Unluck" on the necromancy sphere, how on earth are these spells creating using the system in CoM.

Thanks in advance all.

[Mitchiban]

I love this idea!!!

[GrumpyOldFart]

I have thought about it, and was in the process of examining these and other questions, when my house burned down.

I haven't given up on it, but I'm still in the process of getting RL sorted out enough to devote attention to reproducing my work and going from there.

[Marrethiel]

I've always like the RuneQuest system of casting sorcery spells.
You learn the bast spells as a spell list. So a Mage might learn Fire Law (which would include the spells from Magician Base) and then Open and Closed Essence as two seperate skills. This would be up to the GM to decide how many spells per skill.
EDIT Something like 1 spell per +10 skill bonus.
Then you have Duration, Intensity, Range and Targets (from memory, it has been a while).
So you want to cast a fire bolt, at base it would be like the HARP spell or the lowest level RM spell.
Then you can add say intensity (crit level) for someone who is in your face or range for an opening combat salvo.
Want to fly accross the continent? Add Intensity (speed) and Duration.

Every extra modifier would have a penalty and you only roll the lowest skill.
I'e wanted to add something like this to a RM game for a while but couldn't be bothred working out the maths to make it balance

[Luxferre]

This thread is gold!

I am working on the exact (and I mean exact) approach towards magic in HARP. Ars Magica (5th) meets HARP. I always liked the idea of free form magic. But I couldnt find out the possible and plausible costs for spells for now.

[GrumpyOldFart]

Costs are laid out in College of Magics, pp. 38-40. It's the same formula the authors use.

[Zhaleskra]

As someone who really doesn't like "laundry lists" of spells that do the same thing slightly differently, I don't think of this as a problem. I have experienced systems that I feel over simplify casting as well. For your efforts, perhaps a tiered aspect system.

This comes from the video game Ephemeral Fantasia, and I'm not certain I'm remembering correctly:
Flame < Fire < Light, for example.

[GrumpyOldFart]

What I had was an idea of more complex and powerful spells requiring simpler forms as prerequisites.

For example, in order to be able to learn Fire Bolt, you had to already know the Ignite cantrip (Create/Fire), and the Arcane Bolt Universal spell so you know the Bolt aspect. However, if you didn't know the Create Water cantrip, you might be able to cast a Fire Bolt, but you still wouldn't be able to cast (or even learn) a Water Bolt. The biggest problem I ran into is that in the original spell and cantrip lists, there were a lot of aspects that weren't covered at all in cantrips and Universal spells. And to be fair, some of them probably shouldn't be covered at that simple a level, either. Transform (Major) and Planar come to mind.

Very nearly all of the issues I have been facing all year regarding the loss of my house (along with basically every legal document that has ever had an impact on my life at all) and the settling of my mother's estate are now taken care of, so I should be able to start putting things back together soon. If I ever get something I consider workable enough to justify it, I'll submit it to Nicholas. If someone thinks we should collaborate on this, by all means say so.

[pyrotech]

I've seen a similar system to what Grumpy is talking about in the Gurps base magic system.  Granted that system takes it a few steps too far in my opinion, in that it is very complicated to figure out exactly which spells require which spells to learn.  As a matter of fact they have released entire flowcharts to help people figure this out. 

All in all I like the idea, but would prefer a simpler implementation than Gurps used.

One way that it could be done in HARP is to treat each prerequisite in a similar manner to combat maneuvers.  So if Fireball requires Firebolt which in turn requires Heat, then the mage could have no more ranks in fireball than they had in firebolt and heat.

The other way I could see this done is that the mage must have enough ranks in the prereq to be able to cast it before they can learn the dependent spell.

Both solutions have their advantages and each may work better in different campaigns.

Regards,

[GrumpyOldFart]

I wasn't even going to require more ranks in the "junior" spell than the "senior" one.

The other way I could see this done is that the mage must have enough ranks in the prereq to be able to cast it before they can learn the dependent spell.

That. If you're going to learn "Bolt" spells, you have to know the simple, Universal "Bolt" spell well enough to cast it. If you're going to learn fire spells, you have to have the ability to cast at least one fire-related cantrip. All it requires is for spell descriptions to list the aspects involved, which I consider to be a good idea in the first place.

So if Fireball requires Firebolt which in turn requires Heat...

I wasn't even going that far. Fire Bolt Requires the ability to create fire and the ability to shape a bolt. Fire Ball requires the ability to create fire and the ability to shape a ball. If you can conjure fire, a puff of air and a drink of water, and shape a ball or cloud, you can cast all 3 of the related elemental ball spells... but you still can't cast a bolt until you learn how to shape one. But once you do, you can suddenly learn all 3 of those related elemental bolts.

[jdale]

GURPS has an alternate improvisational magic system that combines nouns and verbs to achieve similar flexibility. Rather than the default system which has prerequisite trees. I thought it was fun and worked well until the characters got fairly advanced. (The default system works well enough, but it felt too dry to me.) The point where characters could do everything was achieved much too early, and made things boring again for different reasons. Flexibility very easily becomes power. Ars Magica deals with this by making everyone play mages, so there's no need to worry about balancing mages against anyone else. (Mage the Awakening basically does the same; it gets out of control even faster.)

I do like Zhaleskra's idea of tiered aspects, which potentially increases the number of gradations and means there is more to work towards. I think you'll still run into the problem of too much flexibility eventually, but if you can push that point back far enough it could be ok. I think it does require that there is a point where you say, ok, you understand "fire" well enough and there is no point in developing it anymore. You can move on to the next thing(s) now. If you never reach that point, you'll never want to diversify your DP spending.

[Bruce]

I've thought about something similar but instead of it being like Ars Magica I was thinking more along the lines of the WoD game Mage. For all I know Ars Magica might be similar to Mage. I thought about the different skills (Aspects) needed to be able to cast different spells that essentially could be made up on the fly. The way I looked at it is that each aspect would be a separate skill and you would combine the different aspects (skills) to create various spell effects. It sounded like a great idea but I ran into a huge problem. The problem I ran into and what stopped me from going any further was balance. Right now at low levels the spell casting professions seem balanced with the no-spell casting professions. The mages spend a lot more DP's on spells and give up on a lot of the other skills they would need, but they gain greater power with the ability of spell casting. If I attempted to create a spell casting system that was more free flowing like Mage the overall DP costs would need to somehow balance out with the current system in HARP (at low and high levels) but also still keep the same power levels. I could not come up with enough "Aspects" to cover the same amount of DP expenditure per level and still keep it properly balanced. One idea I had was to have sub aspects of each aspect but that might make it a little more complex than what HARP was originally intended for. A not so complex alternative to Rolemaster.

Either way this sounds like a great idea and I hope you can get things figured out and still keep the balance. Please keep us informed!

Bruce

[GrumpyOldFart]

I can see the point about "the point where you can do everything being achieved too early." But keep in mind, what I was thinking was not a case of, "you know spell X and spell Y, therefore you can also cast spell Z." It was a case of "you know spell X and spell Y, therefore you have the knowledge grounding to be able to learn spell Z." The idea that each spell is an individual skill that you gain individual ranks in doesn't go away, nor does the scaling convention that you can't do _____ with a given spell until you have _____ ranks of skill in it. Really all it does is focus the kind of tutor you're looking for when you're wanting to expand your repertoire.

[RandalThor]

For me this is a little too much like the World of Darkness/Mage magic system which I found too wide open, especially when dealing with beginning magician characters. For arch-mages who have studied magic for decades and have learned many, many secrets to magic, I like it. But the codified spell system, with the scaling system seems plenty good enough for mages as they begin their careers. I also think that the players feeling they were "forced" to continue to increase a few combat spells says more about the campaign than the rules system. Several spells are still very useful when you only have limited ranks in them (say 3-5), so tossing a couple-few ranks in 2-3 new spells each level past level 10 should not be a problem, which would increase their versatility - though I don't think HARP was ever meant to equal RM in spellcaster versatility.

[Zhaleskra]

@jadle, GURPS did a Nouns and Verbs thing too? I know it mostly from World Tree, which admittedly borrows its magic system from Ars Magica.

[jdale]

I'm traveling and away from my books, but it was an optional rule, "improvisational magic as the only magic." Not sure it is in the current edition, I haven't kept up. But if you want more details let me know and I will check it when I get home. It was also inspired to some extent by Ars Magica, I think they did it first.

[Zhaleskra]

I get it, so it took Spontaneous Magic (as I know it from World Tree), and made it the only kind for an optional rule. Somehow, I don't know (*gets slimed*), I got the idea GURPS had done the nouns and verbs before Ars Magica.

[jdale]

The version I have is the version of GURPS Magic (1989) for GURPS 3rd edition, I believe the improvisational magic rules were first introduced there. There is an improvisation system based on spells you know, and a rune magic system that basically maps the nouns and verbs to runes and can be used as the only magic system. There was also a follow-up article in Roleplayer 19 (April 1990) about using that improvisational magic system as the only magic. Ars Magica was first published in 1987 so the idea was still pretty new, but it's pretty clear what inspired what.

GURPS encompasses a wide range of settings and rules. There was also a totally unrelated (later) ritual magic system in GURPS Voodoo which was pretty great for settings with low magic. (I used it when I was running something that could very loosely be described as Cthulhupunk.) It was also fairly loosely structured but along different lines. And GURPS Thaumaturgy was about taking elements of traditional magic systems that people believed and used in the real world, and applying them to making your own magic system for the game -- an interesting read but difficult to apply in practice. For all I know there are more magic systems by now.

Trying to get back to the other topics in this thread, one of the reasons Mage the Awakening gets out of hand more quickly is that it doesn't separate nouns and verbs. You basically only learn nouns and gets the verbs for free depending on how many "dots" you have in the Arcana (nouns). And there are only 10 nouns. So characters get very versatile very quickly. It is fairly simple in use, which I think is a design goal, but they were aiming for incredibly powerful and a campaign with all mages, so the fact that it gets out of control is not necessarily a problem for what it is trying to do. One thing the system does well, though, in my opinion, is the transition from improvisational magic on the fly to ritual magic, which is very smooth. The two aspects complement each other very well rather than one overshadowing the other.

[Zhaleskra]

I've played GURPS, 3rd Edition to be precise. Generally, I don't know when which RPG was released in relation to another beyond D&D in the late '70s, and everything else after that.