Valusa Zagnol wrote:
Richard,
Good framework for reviewing. I like your description of levels of magic competence:
Amateur (Raven) Low Level Professional (better than Raven, less powerful than company wizards) Professional (One Eye, Goblin, Silent, and Tom-Tom) Good Professional (Smoke) Great (The Circle of 18, New Taken) Great with Experience (The Ten Who Were Taken) Extremely Great (Dominator, Lady)
I broke it down that way because there were characters that fell into each category. Alas, Warhammer is based around amateur and four professional levels so that is what the people at Green Ronin used. They also seemed to have broken their own rules to give Lady the same power level as the Dominator, but I didn't crunch the numbers.
In my opinion, a good gaming system would make it possible, with a great deal of play, to get to the Great level; but only epic-level play should get to the Great with Experience level, and the Extremely Great should be on a par with demigods. (Well, the Dominator was, essentially, a demigod; Lady, however, was much less than that.)
It's been a while since I wrote the review, but if memories serves then to get to the fourth order (Dominator, Lady) you needed spellcraft at +32, something that you need epic for.
What would be interesting would be a system that allows one to craft one's own spells, as the Company wizards did. I've just started playing Fantasy Hero, where all spells have to be crafted by the players; it's a helluva lotta work, frankly. Could one combine a Fantasy-Hero kind of magic system with a d20 framework? I'm not sure.
There have been various systems that encourage custom magic creation - Ars Magica springs to mind, as do the WW Mage games. I've heard that Monty Cook's huge city book that WW published has some stuff on custom spells, but it's a huge book with a ridiculous price so I'm not sure. But it could be done. The main problem would be balance - players are great at exploiting the various loopholes of magic, always ready with a 'yeah, but...'. The person running the game would need to be able to balance things well and be trusted by the non-spell casting characters. But customizing games can be fun. I've done some before, and I understand that world of Steven Brust's Vlad novels was taken from a D&D game he was involved in - all the races were renamed, magic got split into two main paths (neither divine), and other changes happened. Richard