Today I’m going to talk about Mystic Powers; that is, Spells and Prayers. A few people have asked about this.
Mechanically, Spells work almost identically to the original
game. With a few minor caveats and clean-ups for edge cases, we then added
Abilities to grant a range of casting techniques.
The original material gave us details for four of the eight
Colleges of Magic. Unfortunately, they were all very different mechanically,
from the number of different Spell Components they used, to the number of
Spells available. I thus first added additional Spells to take them up to
twelve per college. I then adjusted the Spell Components to mirror the
distributions from the Bright College. This then left me needing to create
another four Colleges, which were heavily inspired by the Warhammer background.
However, it turned out that, even with them costing less to
learn, opportunity cost left a lot of the more marginal spells ignored by the
players. They were just found to be not worthwhile. I thus embarked on a MAJOR re-writing of the
Spells, to make every Cantrip roughly equal with the others, and likewise every
Ritual was made to be broadly equal. This had the added bonus that each type of
Spell could then have the same cost to learn, leaving less clutter on the Spell
Books.
The four different magic specialisation paths (Conjurer,
Enchanter, Mage, & Sorcerer) allowed us to give variations on HOW magic was
cast. They took some balancing. The power enhancements of the Mage where found
to be too narrow, and where widened. The Enchanter’s pre-cast spells where made
slightly cheaper, but he lost the “Wisdom” ability and +1 Int modifier, hence
giving a greater focus on the pre-cast spells. The extra casts available to the
Sorcerer originally had a risk attached, but this was removed.
The hardest to balance was the Conjurer. Removing “Wisdom”
and the +1 Int modifier certainly helped, and Channelling’s penalty on healing
Spells did likewise. However, the increase in Fame (to offset the reduced costs
of adventuring) and Experience (to offset the extra castings available) really
brought the path to balance.
Priests where my next port of call. It was decided that the
power of a Blessing should be slightly less than that of a Cantrip Spell, and a
Litany should be less powerful still. Like the Spells, Prayers were made to all
have similar power levels by type. The two variant priest types (Cleric and
Chaplain) gave some nice variety as to how Priests could work.
Putting Faith Points into place to power the Spells made the
Priest subtly different from the Wizard. However, it did mean that we had to
come up with a way for a Priest to increase the number of Faith available. This
proved problematic to balance with just money and Experience. It was then I
realised that the Priest’s powers having a fixed number of uses was akin to the
Enchanter’s pre-casting abilities, and thus we changed the Experience costs of
some Priest advances to be Fame costs instead. This forms a nice balance as the
Priest must pay for their powers regardless of if they are used, but always has
a free choice of how to use them. The Fame cost prevents the Priest from advancing
too fast, since they will bankrupt themselves otherwise.
