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True Sorcery
The first of many discounted rpg books I bought at I-Con this year is True Sorcery, a sourcebook for d20/D&D 3.5 that presents a flexible new magic system.
The gimmick is that there are far fewer spells than in D&D, but each one represents a basic effect and you can "augment" them to create the strong stuff, at a higher cost and difficulty. The basic mechanic involves summing up all of your modifiers to get a Spellcraft DC (which you need to roll and beat), then using that to calculate casting time and "drain", which is nonlethal damage you take for casting the spell.
Now, I'll give the designers a lot of credit: They obviously put a lot of time and effort into considering power levels and balance, and I suspect they had a math major run through every single effect looking for break points and tweaking the numbers. The downside of this, of course, is that it means that every single spell (there are 53, you can eventually learn about 15 of them) has a different set of numbers for its augment effects, and as you can recreate almost every standard D&D spell, that's a lot of possible effects the DM has to remember. The flexibility comes at a cost of heavy, heavy number-crunching every time you want to cast a spell. Which means that, really, unless you've got a friend who's a lightning calculator, you'd never actually want to use this system in practice.
I still kinda like the book as a puzzle, though: How do I make this effect? What's the minimum level I need to be at to pull it off? What level do I have to be to cast it as a swift action? Which spell is the best option at any given level, and does it benefit you to specialize? As far as I can tell so far, you want to start with Force and Figment, and add Summon at 3rd, then start spending every feat you can on new spells at 5th level, because Shapeshift is nearly as broken as the Polymorph line, Create Energy has many of the advantages of the psionic energy abilities, Flight and Teleport are exactly what you'd expect, and both Telekinesis and Enhance Object seem to have a lot of creative uses. At 10th level, the general buff spell Enhance Person seems the big winner; and at 15th level the system breaks in half mimicing 8th and 9th level spells. Save-or-suck spells are somewhat less potent than in standard D&D3.5, because there are fewer ways to increase the standard save DC of 10 + 1/2 caster level + Cha mod. But I could be wrong...
In terms of balance, it actually seems pretty good as a self-contained magic system. It could be easily broken when combined with the D&D magic system because it relies on non-lethal damage, and the official D&D rules let you heal non-lethal damage with standard healing spells and double effectiveness--so one of the cleric's healing spells effectively restores magic points to the True Sorceror. If you don't mix-and-match, True Sorcery healing only lets you convert lethal damage into non-lethal. There's also an option to provide a "spell point buffer" instead of taking damage. Overall, True Sorcerors are weaker than D&D wizards at the typical break points and don't have the CoDzilla problem...at least, until I figure out how to properly break Shapeshift.
Also, credit to the designers: There are standard rules for D&D 3.5 and d20 Modern, plus the Thieves World setting, the Iron Heroes setting, and the True20 system. Having all of the conversion work done for you for a "slot-in" system like this is a big advantage. I wish more independent designers did it.
If you like working out optimization strategies and care less about using this in an actual game, then go for it. Cubby, you're welcome to borrow it.
The gimmick is that there are far fewer spells than in D&D, but each one represents a basic effect and you can "augment" them to create the strong stuff, at a higher cost and difficulty. The basic mechanic involves summing up all of your modifiers to get a Spellcraft DC (which you need to roll and beat), then using that to calculate casting time and "drain", which is nonlethal damage you take for casting the spell.
Now, I'll give the designers a lot of credit: They obviously put a lot of time and effort into considering power levels and balance, and I suspect they had a math major run through every single effect looking for break points and tweaking the numbers. The downside of this, of course, is that it means that every single spell (there are 53, you can eventually learn about 15 of them) has a different set of numbers for its augment effects, and as you can recreate almost every standard D&D spell, that's a lot of possible effects the DM has to remember. The flexibility comes at a cost of heavy, heavy number-crunching every time you want to cast a spell. Which means that, really, unless you've got a friend who's a lightning calculator, you'd never actually want to use this system in practice.
I still kinda like the book as a puzzle, though: How do I make this effect? What's the minimum level I need to be at to pull it off? What level do I have to be to cast it as a swift action? Which spell is the best option at any given level, and does it benefit you to specialize? As far as I can tell so far, you want to start with Force and Figment, and add Summon at 3rd, then start spending every feat you can on new spells at 5th level, because Shapeshift is nearly as broken as the Polymorph line, Create Energy has many of the advantages of the psionic energy abilities, Flight and Teleport are exactly what you'd expect, and both Telekinesis and Enhance Object seem to have a lot of creative uses. At 10th level, the general buff spell Enhance Person seems the big winner; and at 15th level the system breaks in half mimicing 8th and 9th level spells. Save-or-suck spells are somewhat less potent than in standard D&D3.5, because there are fewer ways to increase the standard save DC of 10 + 1/2 caster level + Cha mod. But I could be wrong...
In terms of balance, it actually seems pretty good as a self-contained magic system. It could be easily broken when combined with the D&D magic system because it relies on non-lethal damage, and the official D&D rules let you heal non-lethal damage with standard healing spells and double effectiveness--so one of the cleric's healing spells effectively restores magic points to the True Sorceror. If you don't mix-and-match, True Sorcery healing only lets you convert lethal damage into non-lethal. There's also an option to provide a "spell point buffer" instead of taking damage. Overall, True Sorcerors are weaker than D&D wizards at the typical break points and don't have the CoDzilla problem...at least, until I figure out how to properly break Shapeshift.
Also, credit to the designers: There are standard rules for D&D 3.5 and d20 Modern, plus the Thieves World setting, the Iron Heroes setting, and the True20 system. Having all of the conversion work done for you for a "slot-in" system like this is a big advantage. I wish more independent designers did it.
If you like working out optimization strategies and care less about using this in an actual game, then go for it. Cubby, you're welcome to borrow it.
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