gcs
gcs copied to clipboard
richardwilkes
Allow Spell difficulty to be based on a Skill
Long story short: I am building a magic system using Modular Abilities and "Magic as Powers" (Sorcery). I am manually creating the "spells" in the spell list (with a cost of 0). However, in my magic system, the player needs to roll against their Thaumatology skill to activate the spell. So I would like to be able to pick that as the starting point for the difficulty.
I can almost "cheat" by selecting IQ, and then a level of difficulty (VH,H,A,E), but when the cost is set to 0, it deletes the SL and RSL columns (https://github.com/richardwilkes/gcs/issues/424).
The idea is that the spells themselves are free. The players are paying for the spell slots.
The individual magic "recipes" are closely guarded secrets. So finding a new one is a treasure worth having.
So now scrolls of spells, are a worthwhile treasure item. Also, researching one of your spells to make it slightly better, makes for a worthwhile downtime activity.
With "magic as skills" and "magic as powers", you usually have to pay character points to learn a new spell. And I did not want to do that.
Spell recipes will be a limited resource that I can hand out to player characters. Without worrying about whether or not they have enough character points to "buy" the spell
An issue with this is the impression it gives for those playing by standard rules that suddenly 0 points allows you to cast the spell, which isn't the case, as you do need some experience with the spell (measured as at least 1 character point spent) to enable its use.
Of the various issues, this is the highest priority, but again, I don't know how easy it would be to include "Skill" as a default in the Spell defaults selection menu. I only made this request because it looks like Skill 'defaults' and 'Spell' defaults share much of the same options.
You can get some of this by using Ritual Magic Spells instead of standard ones. You'd need to set the Base Skill field to the skill you want to base the magic on, and the College field on the specialization of that skill (with no specialization, the ritual magic rules default to a -6 penalty). The prereq count field is essentially a penalty to the base skill (more prereqs == harder to cast).
Not a 1:1 match, but might be workable for your custom system.
I just closed out another issue of yours that was asking for sometime similar. I did that based on the fact that spells, both in RAW as well as in GCS, don't have any concept of defaults, which is what this seems to actually be asking for.
Anyway, I'll leave this open for now, although I currently don't have any interest in the work necessary to make it possible -- but perhaps someone else will come along and work on it.