So, I was looking at Spamwarlord, and then decided to try and come up with another Spamgame.
What
are spamgames, anyway? I see them all over, but I can't figure out what makes them spam.
In Your Image: Mad scientist Roger.
Project Fate: Your super people hunted by government.
Aegis: Your nets humans via government surgery to defeat monsters threatening humanity.
Black Isle: Straight up horror game. On a mission exploring a newly discovered island. Bad things happen.
Spam Command: Goant monsters attack humanity. Your in charge of dealing with it. Managing resources and crew and research and projects. To bring the big buggers down.
Space Frontiers: Outer space adventure.
Myth: Truth of the Gods: A sci di take on mythology as the events happen on Earth rift as dinosaurs died out and before the ice age came about.
With just this it's hard to have an opinion on most of them. Like, "Outer space adventure," really? That could be soooooo many different things.
So if I was going to run a mage game, most likely it'd be in the image of my other mage games. Specifically, you have a bunch of skills you can use to more or less freeform create spell effects, you combine them for more complex/nuanced effects, and you gain experience in them by doing them. Bonuses or maluses to rolls apply inverted to experience gains, so more dangerous and reckless actions teach you more, while safer actions aren't as illuminating.
Currently, I'm mostly confident of the following schools:
Necromancy: Malign manipulation of life. Can damage, debilitate, and kill living materials and energies.
Vitamancy: Benign manipulation of life. Can heal, restore, and boost living materials and energies.
Destruction: Destruction and projection of things. Can launch, degrade, and shatter things.
Protection: Preservation and stasis of things. Can harden, protect, and resist movement in things.
Summoning: Summoning of complex things. Can call forth crafted items and living creatures from the beyond.
Conjuration: Conjuration of simple things. Can call forth materials and energies from the beyond.
Transmogrification: Alteration of form. Can alter the form of objects.
Transmutation: Alteration of substance. Can alter the composition of objects.
Elemental Schools: Fire, Ice, Water, Bone, Feathers, Glass, and so on. Can move and sculpt their chosen element, as well as alter its composition to an extent.
So the obvious example for combining these skills would be Necromancy, which can raise the dead, with elemental magics, which can control their element, in order to create Fire Zombies or Ice Zombies or Glass Zombies or whatever else.
Why somebody would want to create zombies whose flesh has been partially turned to glass is another matter entirely.
However, there's somewhat more nuance to spell combinations than this, in two different ways. One, combinations are not literally just dumping everything into one pile, so combining Protection with Destruction to shield yourself while attacking won't work- at least, not unless you can explain
how a single spell is using both capabilities to achieve the desired result. On the other hand, using Destruction and Protection to create a spell that weaves around a pillar is entirely possible, because Destruction can provide the force and Protection can provide the resistance to force- that is, the part where it stops going in a direction.
This, in turn, is sort of the ideal for all spell schools: Be intuitive and useful enough to serve on its own, but also nuanced and broad enough to allow interesting interactions when one gets down into the guts of it.
I have two bits I'm struggling with on this front. The first is which schools to use; as mentioned, I'd ideally want each school to be useful both on its own and with others, but I also want to make sure players have the tools to make whatever kind of character they want.
So ideas for new schools or bases to cover, questions about how to achieve specific ends, or critiques of the ones I've got up there would be nice.
The second thing I'm struggling with is power level. I would like some nuance between Knows Fire Magic and Does Not Know Fire Magic, and traditionally I've used a five tier list for this: Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert, Master. The problem is that this invariably ends up mushy and hard to use; players and GM alike consistently have difficulty figuring out what level an effect is liable to be. I'm not sure if I need a new system, should condense the old one, need to better clarify exactly what metrics put an effect into what level, or what.
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Topic: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block) (Read 407265 times)