My OSR-compatible rules for wizards can be found right. . .
They include the Illusionist, Necromancer, and Orthodox Wizard (the most traditional one).
I think these wizard rules are cooler than a witch's tit and hotter than a witch's other tit, but if you aren't interested is wading through another homebrew in search of bits to steal, here are the parts that I think are the most hackable:
- I think the whole spell slots + casting dice is pretty elegant. It removes the whole quadratic wizard thing and gives players a clear idea of how much spellpower they have and are bringing to bear. (I actually give them aluminum casting dice at the start of each in-game day. It's very tangible.)
- Book Casting is a great ability. It actually makes wizards feel more like wizards, since they're wading into combat with their big dorky spellbooks out, chanting stuff.
- Vancian Preparation would be good to port into a 5e game, except maybe give a different benefit. Maybe +1 to the spell slot, can only be used 1/day.
- Giving mono-class bonuses is a great fucking idea and I'm sad I didn't hit on it sooner. Just: I think it's a good idea to incentivize the all-wizard party or the all-thief party. It makes the game experience more diverse, gives us more ways to play the game.
- You'll notice that a lot of the old-school spells are a lot more powerful, and a lot more hackable. A lot of them have multiple uses. I tried to make spells like feather(fall), floating disk, lock, and levitate more comparable to sleep on the scale of usefulness.
- Also check out the Illusionist's Final Doom where they turn into an illusion and get stuck there. There's enough there for a blog post on its own.
- I tried to give a lot of diversity in the undead that low-level necromancers can raise. They all have different functions, and the necromancer's corpse economy means that they'll have to pick their favorite.
How would you do half-casters like paladins? Would you just recommend multiclassing to get the effect a player wants?
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's the exact reason why I'm okay with multiclassing. Knight + cleric = paladin. Thief + wizard = arcane trickster. Et cetera.
DeleteAny time you read the phrase "corpse economy" you know it's a good blog post.
ReplyDeleteI definitely want to read this more when I don't have work, as so far I really like this. Especially the Casting Die Pool. I'm a bit of a sucker for die pools. One question for the scroll, would it be preferable to have the mishap happen on a critical fail, or even if the first Int check is failed by a certain degree of error? I feel it might be good to nix the second roll to keep it a bit more fast. Loving the pdf so far.
ReplyDeleteAwesome pdf. Let me know if you want proofreading feedback. Otherwise I saw only one substantive thing that struck me as odd: Fireball seems a little underpowered for a Legendary spell, especially because a save appears to negate all damage as written. Magic Missile at the same power level has no save and 1 more damage per die (but of course no 20' area effect).
ReplyDeleteYou're right, fireball should be save for half.
DeleteBut then again, legendary spells aren't supposed to be superior to other spells in all ways, just awesome reward spells that you can find at the bottom of a dungeon. Fighters are rewarded with legendary swords, wizards find legendary spells.
And yeah, it needs a bunch of proofreading. This is just proof-of-concept, at this point. Something useable.
Thanks, though.
Simply brilliant. Probably going to end up running something using the GLOG itself, and also great as a mine for ideas. [Apologies for deleted post above, had issues with blogger]
ReplyDeleteI really like the befuddled condition in particular.
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff, definitely going to lift the different kinds of raiseable dead for necromancers!
ReplyDeleteWhen an illisionist Final Dooms they should pop out of existence if there's nobody around to see them. They only exist as long as they're witnessed.
I really like the idea of making multiple undead from a single corpse:
DeleteSkinkite, skeleton, ghost, crawling claws, and floppy zombie with hook hands. Fuck yeah.
This is a really fun take on spellcasting! It seems like an elegant risk reward system to help give some more play than a single "magic hand granade".
ReplyDeleteDo you still like to require that the caster be able to speak and gesture with both hands?
ReplyDeleteI just love GLOG and its simplicity. I downloaded everything you published besides adventures. I was wondering something though. For the sake of simmplicity, why don't you use the concept of spell dice for fighter as well?
ReplyDeleteYou could go like this, but not limited to, having a number of combat dice equal to your constitution. You can use up to four combat dice or your actual level, wichever is lowest. Works the exact same way as spell dice with the added bonus that the harder you try to hit, the more likely you are to fumble or worse critical fumble (roll 1 - 1, or 1 - 1 - 1 in a single roll and gain something quite horrible like a dislocated shoulder or something like that for a fumble... muscle tear on a critical fumble)
The good thing is, rolling a single die prevents all fumbles.
If you hit, the target has the right to save under its own armor value. against 1 or 2 hits, saves prevent damage, on 3 or 4 save for half.
Combat dice would come back after a short rest -1D6 per encounter (resting cannot reduce the actual remaining combat dice) that day.
It could be used like that or with less dice for special attacks only, like spells.