What I would do with magic
Jan. 17th, 2021 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethMagic rules are weird, especially when they interact with other stuff.
Like, Pathfinder, has Headbands that increase your stats. Great. Excellent. Get a +6.
Get it to the stat you base Leadership on and you can have half your Followers leave if you ever take your headband off.
And come back when you put it on.
I have been fiddling with rules and the Deck of Many Things and got a character with four Throne cards, a Headband of Vast Intelligence, and 50000XP.
So I want to open a magic school.
As you do.
Thing I would do with magic: share it, as rapidly as possible.
Magic schools are weird in an xp dependent world though. Like, do you just have them fight things in relatively controlled conditions? You let them read books and copy from spellbooks once they're able, but the actual teaching, there's few rules for that. REtraining, no problem, but training in the first place?
Just some random rolled years.
Though you can also retrain NPC to PC levels, and children in theory start with NPC levels. But if you do that it cost a bunch of money and takes much less time.
2d6 years for a human to become a first level wizard as a teenager. Could be 17 and a wiz kid or 27 and, you know, getting there eventually.
And that's just humans. Elves are 10d6. And start aged 110.
Would being a magic teacher be like teaching musical theatre? There's words and motions to memorise, a wizard might not literally make a song and dance of it but it's the same manner of gig. But wizards are Intelligence based, not Charisma, so it's not a performance skill, it's knowledge. Memorising. Complicated things.
Linguistics is an Int skill too. Could be magic is like learning a complex language.
... says Young Wizards...
I do not feel well suited for teaching as a profession.
There's an archetype, Instructor, where you get an apprentice (one, only) and they follow you around and, if they survive, level up a bit behind you. Seems more like it.
But then if you stop adventuring and start building magic items you still have an apprentice?
Would you get xp for building things then?
When I try looking around the internet for advice on xp awards the top answer is always someone going
drop xp and just tell people to level up when they get there in the story
and they never seem to notice that they've just removed the training wheels not the problem.
oh well.
Magic school in a story would be like whatever drives the plot. It could involve exciting combat sequences or boring classes where you can gossip with your mates. Or anything else. That bit in Dr Strange where he gets knocked out of his body, for instance, or getting left in the cold.
I'd want a magic school but I'd also want to avoid students.
... very Unseen University...
I was trying to understand metamagic and I realised I'm not going to until I play a bit, because metamagic is what you apply when you want to exceed current limitations, and I dont know which ones would be annoying. Spells all look pretty nifty from here.
Prestidigitation and Fastidiousness are excellent spells, they do cleaning. Consider how much of life is just trying to get things clean, and then consider spells that make them clean themselves. World changers.
They'd even help with the plastics in the water problem, because not washing clothes, just magic cleaning.
The really handy Purify Food And Drink is a clerical cantrip, not a wizardly one, so a wizard wouldnt learn it. But it seems to be possible to build magic items without knowing their component spells, just takes a lot more Spellcraft, so a water purifying spell should be doable. Purify one cubic foot per caster level per combat round. It says suitable for drinking, rather than chemically pure, so it do depend on details how useful it is. But once built a purifier would work for thousands of years, which seems a bit handy.
Obviously you could also just make a decanter of endless water, but that is new water that wasnt here before, so it would very slowly fill the world up. Up to 50 gallons per combat round, which is 50 gallons in six seconds. Adds up eventually.
Okay, fiddling with magic rules is never going to be terribly productive, but it's twiddling ideas around. Sometimes they're fun.
Next thought: use alignment checking magic on the way in, or on the way out?
... if it's reasonable to use at all.
Only non evil students can graduate?
In the real world, nightmare. In a world built on the assumption it is objectively measureable... still the most annoying part...
Like, Pathfinder, has Headbands that increase your stats. Great. Excellent. Get a +6.
Get it to the stat you base Leadership on and you can have half your Followers leave if you ever take your headband off.
And come back when you put it on.
I have been fiddling with rules and the Deck of Many Things and got a character with four Throne cards, a Headband of Vast Intelligence, and 50000XP.
So I want to open a magic school.
As you do.
Thing I would do with magic: share it, as rapidly as possible.
Magic schools are weird in an xp dependent world though. Like, do you just have them fight things in relatively controlled conditions? You let them read books and copy from spellbooks once they're able, but the actual teaching, there's few rules for that. REtraining, no problem, but training in the first place?
Just some random rolled years.
Though you can also retrain NPC to PC levels, and children in theory start with NPC levels. But if you do that it cost a bunch of money and takes much less time.
2d6 years for a human to become a first level wizard as a teenager. Could be 17 and a wiz kid or 27 and, you know, getting there eventually.
And that's just humans. Elves are 10d6. And start aged 110.
Would being a magic teacher be like teaching musical theatre? There's words and motions to memorise, a wizard might not literally make a song and dance of it but it's the same manner of gig. But wizards are Intelligence based, not Charisma, so it's not a performance skill, it's knowledge. Memorising. Complicated things.
Linguistics is an Int skill too. Could be magic is like learning a complex language.
... says Young Wizards...
I do not feel well suited for teaching as a profession.
There's an archetype, Instructor, where you get an apprentice (one, only) and they follow you around and, if they survive, level up a bit behind you. Seems more like it.
But then if you stop adventuring and start building magic items you still have an apprentice?
Would you get xp for building things then?
When I try looking around the internet for advice on xp awards the top answer is always someone going
drop xp and just tell people to level up when they get there in the story
and they never seem to notice that they've just removed the training wheels not the problem.
oh well.
Magic school in a story would be like whatever drives the plot. It could involve exciting combat sequences or boring classes where you can gossip with your mates. Or anything else. That bit in Dr Strange where he gets knocked out of his body, for instance, or getting left in the cold.
I'd want a magic school but I'd also want to avoid students.
... very Unseen University...
I was trying to understand metamagic and I realised I'm not going to until I play a bit, because metamagic is what you apply when you want to exceed current limitations, and I dont know which ones would be annoying. Spells all look pretty nifty from here.
Prestidigitation and Fastidiousness are excellent spells, they do cleaning. Consider how much of life is just trying to get things clean, and then consider spells that make them clean themselves. World changers.
They'd even help with the plastics in the water problem, because not washing clothes, just magic cleaning.
The really handy Purify Food And Drink is a clerical cantrip, not a wizardly one, so a wizard wouldnt learn it. But it seems to be possible to build magic items without knowing their component spells, just takes a lot more Spellcraft, so a water purifying spell should be doable. Purify one cubic foot per caster level per combat round. It says suitable for drinking, rather than chemically pure, so it do depend on details how useful it is. But once built a purifier would work for thousands of years, which seems a bit handy.
Obviously you could also just make a decanter of endless water, but that is new water that wasnt here before, so it would very slowly fill the world up. Up to 50 gallons per combat round, which is 50 gallons in six seconds. Adds up eventually.
Okay, fiddling with magic rules is never going to be terribly productive, but it's twiddling ideas around. Sometimes they're fun.
Next thought: use alignment checking magic on the way in, or on the way out?
... if it's reasonable to use at all.
Only non evil students can graduate?
In the real world, nightmare. In a world built on the assumption it is objectively measureable... still the most annoying part...