Magic Words suck. Here’s Magic in the Moment.

Fighters are good at fighting. Their core mechanic is the same attack and damage roll used by every other class and creature. To do the thing they are good at they roll a d20, add some bonuses, and compare the result to a target number. This bare-bones framework has been used by players and referees to negotiate everything from kicking sand in someone’s eyes, to chopping off a tentacle, to winning at beer pong. Different people at different tables taking a shared notion of what a fighter ought to be good at, and making it work with a single codified mechanic.

Viewed from this perspective Magic Users are the first example of unnecessary complexity creeping into the game’s rules. It makes sense to a degree: strong humans exist ergo it’s easy to have a shared notion of what they can do. Fighters and Magic Users represent the extreme ends of a scale between the grounded and the fantastical; a scale which correlates linearly to class complexity. The less “real” a thing is, the more rules we need to understand it. But that gap between the least and the most complex class should be much narrower than Gygax intended.

I want to give Magic Users at my table set of simple tools. Tools both referee and player can hold the entirety of within their heads. Tools that can be twisted into different shapes to suit a million different situations. I want to harness the power of negotiation to give players a creative role in determining how their magic works, but I want that creativity confined strictly to the table.

Magic in the Moment

Magic users may know one Magic Word for each odd numbered level they’ve reached. They begin play with a single word randomly determined from the list below. New words (gained at levels 3, 5, 7, etc.) may either be rolled from the list, or discovered through play by some means acceptable to the referee.*

1. Fire	11. Bubble
2. Cold	12. Phantasm
3. Stone	13. Wall
4. Dark	14. Hold
5. Charm	15. Water
6. Slow	16. Gravity
7. Detect	17. Anchor
8. Animate	18. Separate
9. Nature	19. Create
10. Bone	20. Time

Magic Users may attempt to cast spells at any time by describing an effect which is supported by the words they know. For example, a Magic User who knows the word “Fire” might say: “I want to cast a spell…

• “to light all the candles in the room.”
• “to attack the goblin with deadly heat.”
• “to melt the manacles I’m wearing.”
• “to allow me to swim through that lava safely.”
• “to shape our campfire into an image.”
• “to neutralize the flaming oil they’re throwing at us.”

So on, and so forth.

After the Magic User describes their spell, the referee assigns a target number (discussed below), and the magic user rolls 2d6.** If they roll equal to or greater than the target number the spell goes off as it was described. If they roll less than the target number the spell fails. Failed spells may simply fizzle, or they may backfire more spectacularly depending on how badly the attempt was failed, and how the referee likes to run their game.

The base target number for any spell is 5 + the number of spells successfully cast. This resets each time the Magic User has a full night’s rest.

The base target number is intended as a starting point. It’s meant to be modified according to how closely the described spell matches the referee’s idea of what a Magic User is capable of. The referee should make every attempt to be consistent and communicative about their standards, and must be willing to negotiate. They have to be able to tell the player why the target number is what it is. If the player then wants to change the spell to get a more favorable number before they roll, the referee ought to allow that.

Some things simply cannot be done no matter how high the dice roll. If a first level character wants to use the word “Fire” to deal d6 damage to everyone in the world, the referee can just say ‘no.’ Ideally the standards will be consistent enough that players will learn how to reasonably predict what they can and can’t get away with. It’s the same as how some referees ground their rulings for fighters in real world history, while others ground their rulings in Conan stories.

I cannot dictate what level of magic power seems appropriate in your game. As an example, however, the difficulty of a spell might increase if:

• The caster is using more than one word.
• The spell’s connection to the word is tenuous.
• The target isn’t close enough to touch.
• The casting process is hindered in some way, such as the caster’s hands being tied, or attempting to cast without being noticed.
• The spell is in conflict with the environment, such as casting a fire spell in pouring rain.
• The spell has more than one target.
• The spell deals more than d6 damage.

Likewise, the difficulty of the spell might decrease if:

• The magic user is willing to spend extra time on the casting.
• Something appropriate is sacrificed, such as hit points, or a valuable item.
• Another magic user is helping with the spell casting.
• The spell is in concert with the environment, such as casting a fire spell in a volcano.

After successfully casting a spell, Magic Users may record the spell for later use. Each recorded spell may be used once per day without a casting roll. These still count as successful spells for the purposes of determining the base target number. Magic Users may know a maximum of one recorded spell per level. At any time they may forget a recorded spell if they wish to replace it with a new one.

Footnotes:

*Discovering a word in my game would require finding another magic user’s spell book, or performing some lengthy and expensive experimentation. Other referees might be satisfied to let a Magic User discover a word which they’d merely seen another Magic User use. Foolishly lenient referees might even let their players pick whatever words they like (scandalous behavior if you ask me.) In any event the important thing is that the player only have a number of words equal to half their level rounded up.

**If your game has ability scores, this roll would be a good thing for Intelligence to modify.

Thanks are due to Chris H. and John Bell for contributing to the development of this idea.

Post Script:

I don’t imagine the schedule of Papers & Pencils updates matters much to anyone but me. However, if you do care, be advised that I’m changing things up. For the past few years I’ve set myself a rigid 1-post-per-week goal. It was a good system for maintaining my work/life balance, but my priorities have shifted, and I don’t think a rigid schedule is a good fit for the way I do things now.

Going forward I’m only going to post something when I’m satisfied that I’ve completed something worth reading. That means fewer posts, but hopefully that lack will be compensated for by an increase in post quality. It should also mean that I spend less time writing filler posts when I ought to be getting the Duchy of the Damned Dancing Duke ready for layout.

I am fully aware that when I’ve attempted this approach in the past it has usually resulted in months of dead air. Sneeze sneeze, 2014, sneeze. I’ve got a different approach these days which I’m confident will be more successful. If it isn’t, I’ll just go back to a more rigid approach, easy peasy.

Thanks for reading!

(By the way: Magic Words doesn’t actually suck. I was just making a reference).