Ok so in my game Ember the laws of magic are stripped away, making it difficult to predict and even more difficult to control.  I don't want the "mages" to be severely disadvantaged but I also don't want people flinging fireballs like a frickin' pez dispenser so I've come up with this idea.

When you cast magic the problem becomes that you will frequently conjure too much magic, the leftover remains in your body as it was not dispersed with the spell and had no where to go.  This magic accumulates as you continue to cast spells until you have the time to discharge it, which takes a while and is risky, or you let it dissipate on its own which takes even longer.

Each spell has an amount of Arcane Overflow, this will be a dice roll, some spells will have the possibility of 0 overflow (1d4 - 1 for example) because the amount of energy needed is small enough that it's a bit easier to manage.  Other spells could have quite a bit more. 

Question 1: Is a set amount of Overflow better or do you all think rolling would be a better mechanic?

Each character who is capable of magic will have an arcane threshold (still working out how to determine the threshold so it's big enough to not be unfair but small enough so it's something that they want to be aware of, not something they just ignore cause they'll never reach it anyways). 

Question 2: Ok we all know a dude swinging an axe can cause a load of devastation just like a mage, but a powerful enough mage is gonna do that damage to cities or dozens of guys at once.  The fact that mages can develop to be decent in combat in my system, I think, evens it out a bit and actually makes the warriors at a disadvantage.  This is why I've given them this disadvantage, does anyone have advice on how to keep things balanced?

Question 3: What penalty should I give mages who go over their Threshold?  I want it to be dangerous and painful but just turning it into damage doesn't seem to fit right to me and I want the risk to be as much to others as themselves, plus it makes the following pointless....

??? Druids (Sanguimancers): These guys avoid the risk of overflow by instead sacrificing life force to cast spells, theirs or someone else's, releasing the energy through bloodletting.  This obviously causes damage to the caster, volunteer or victim?  Unfortunately using a victim guarantees corruption, and depending on the purpose you risk corruption even with a volunteer.  (Corruption is a mechanic I'll post about later because I'm working it out and having some trouble)  Note that these guys can only use Vitaemancy (life magic) and nothing else.  Thoughts?

??? Necromancers: One of my races can use Necromancy and no other type of magic, but they use energy drawn from the spirit realm which is far more predictable and easier to manage.  However I'm having trouble coming up with a weakness for these guys that will keep people from just playing them.  Sanguimancer's weakness is obvious, for these guys I'm thinking of something where they risk their soul disconnecting from their body or something like that since they exist in both the spirit realm and physical world at the same time.  Any ideas?

Well that's all I can think of to post, let me know what you all think and if you have any helpful ideas I'd love to hear them. 

Here's what I don't like about this:

You're asking players of wizards to do extra work (rolling overflow, keeping note of it, managing it).  But rather than getting a reward for that work, the work is punishment for playing a wizard.  I've been reading design blogs for Magic: The Gathering recently, so this is on my mind.  Their mantra is "every non-land card should be fun to play".  Translating this to RPGs, every mechanic should be fun to impliment.  Where's the fun in your mechanic? No one is going to enjoy doing this. 

That said, there are some things you can do to make it fun.

First off, choices are fun.  Incorporating a choice into your mechanics always improves the fun.  What if you can choose to ignore overflow if you take longer to cast the spell?  That puts a simple choice in the hands of the player, which is good.  Then you can funk it up with other types of wizard.  Druids can ignore overflow if they kill something.  Necromancers can ignore overflow, but they have to roll to lose something more valuable.

Those choices are good, but it's still essentially "paying to suck" - doing work so that something bad will happen to your character.  Not much fun.  A better way to do it?  Make overflow good.  That sounds crazy, but I think you can make it work.  What if Druids can use overflow points to kill things?  What if they have to use it to kill things?  It's great when they're in a fight, killing things left and right.  But when they want to do something else, they'll need a patsy at hand.  Clever players will double up - getting all their healing and buffing done in combat, where they can usefully use their overflow.

Necromancers - what if they have to use their overflow to raise the dead - to bring spirits back from the other side.  It's cool when you've got something to do with them, but at other times, when there's nothing but hostile spirits around, or when the locals won't take kindly to another zombie, it's going to get interesting.

Regular wizards are more of a challenge, so here's what I'd do.  Don't have regular wizards.  Why would you? The other types are way more interesting..  Give each type a unique thing that they have to do with their overflow.  Pyromancers have to make fire with their overflow.  Another kind have to cause pain - to others or to themselves. 

Anyway, that's what I'd do.

In terms of your first question, if what you want is for magic to be hard to predict and control, then perhaps using a random generator for overflow would be a lot better than a set (predictable) number. 

For question 2, I'm not sure what to say beyond playtesting.  I run into that trouble myself.

For question 3, the possibilities are kind of endless.  I mean, what if raising above your Threshold causes some random event to happen, either at the GMs desecration, or by rolling on a table.  This could be anything from simple damage in some cases to attempted demonic possessions. 

In terms of Simon C's comment, I like a lot of your ideas, however I don't think I agree that extra rules need to be a boost to your character.  Maybe I'm misunderstand this, but it doesn't seem that this system is much more complicated than a spell point system, and I know that playing a D&D sorcerer you need to keep note and manage what spells you cast.  I mean, neither system is the best in the world, but as the spell-casting type, I never felt burdened by things like this.  Or is it more complicated than I realize?

Although, I do agree that you could do a lot more with the overflow if you wanted to.  It would be neat if overflow was somewhat of a conflict gague.  What if it was something that hindered your spellcasting abilities, or hurt you, or something, but the more you had, the cooler things you could do? 

Simon (though if it helps differentiate us, Simon S)

Simons wrote:
What if it was something that hindered your spellcasting abilities, or hurt you, or something, but the more you had, the cooler things you could do? 

Wow guys!  Thanks these are great comments I hadn't even thought of some of this and both your ideas have me thinking.  I'm gonna work on this today but the idea in my head is this.

1: I don't want magic to be never-ending so Overflow will accumulate and if it gets to be too much you're risking some big ouchies with spontaneous arcane discharges.

2: But maybe Overflow could be something like overclocking your PC, it makes things way better but you suddenly have overheating and other concerns.  So the more overflow you accumulate the bigger the booms but you're taking risks when you approach your threshold.  I was also thinking that many spells might not have much overflow at all but then you can add overflow to it to make it nastier, basically as you pour more in more stays with you.

3: The special necromancers I mentioned are the way they are because of their race, so maybe they're free from Overflow but they also can't enjoy its benefits.  So if you want safe magic play them, if you want to make a bigsky boomsky play a normal necro?

4: Sanguimantic Druidism: Sounds like we're in agreement about the idea of druids spilling life force to avoid overflow and achieve greater effects?

5: I did intend to seperate magic into schools and each having it's own dangers when the magic discharges spontaneously, so let's say an elementalist discharge suddenly unleashes their element from nowhere torching a tree or freezing the ground around them but they have no control of what it hits.  This won't seem so bad in the wild but you drop this in a village and suddenly people get annoyed that their crops are frosted or their orchard is on fire.  Enchanters may accidentally curse an item they're working on or overload it and break it.  Charm magicians may flood themselves or someone else with negative emotions or positive emotions or hypnotize someone accidentally or who knows what. 

Necromancers on the other hand might discharge energy and accidentally raise an undead with a malevolent spirit.  Vitaemancers might discharge energy and accidentally reverse one of their healing spells or cause harm to someone at random.  I'm thinking that I want the effect to be the reverse of what the school intends OR an overwhelming burst of what the school is about like with the elements bursting out at random.  Or harming the caster of course.

6:Not sure what I would do to Arcanists as they just control magic itself not a specific school (think of them as the school of identify, detect, counterspell, etc)  Any ideas?

7:Should I make the schools easy enough for people to play as many as they want and be able to track all these things or should I make it so people really can't learn more than 1, maybe 2 schools?  The way I have it presently is you must (unless stated otherwise) take the Arcane School before you can learn any other. 

Thoughts?

So I've come to the following conclusions.

Sanguimantic Druids: Must sacrifice their own or someone else's life force to use magic without needing arcane energy and the risks it brings.  Obviously sacrificing your own brings its own dangers, and sacrificing someone else's well...that's a danger that might be worse than death.  This only works on life magic, sacrificing life for life.

Souleater Necromancers: Require a soul to cast their spells which they bind and slowly chew away at.  Without a spirit they have to find a new one, but how black is someone willing to make their own soul to achieve their ends?  After all there won't always be a wicked fiend to bind without guilt, sometimes all you have is an innocent farmer's spirit wandering about as the horde of monsters charge you.

"normal" Magic:  Each spell has an amount of arcane overflow, this number is random but relatively small, and each PC has an arcane threshold which is the maximum amount of arcane energy their body can absorb before they risk magical backlash which ranges from little nuisances to blowing yourself into tiny chunks.  A PC can choose to pump more power into a spell, and take additional overflow, to achieve greater results.  PCs can still cast once their arcane threshold has been passed but the more overflow they have the more chance of badness.

How's that sound?

Hi John,

If someone were playing universalis, they might spend coins from the games system to get 'Hey, magic has overflow involved' into the imagined space.

With overflow, are you designing a game system, or do you want to get it into the imagined space? And your just building mechanics to 'pay' for that, like a universalis coin might?

Callan,

I'm really just trying to get a system for magic into the game that allows customizable magic, thus the ability to gain more overflow for different/greater effects.  I also want a great power/great responsibility situation where if you go nuts you suddenly find your spells biting you in the rear, but sometimes you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.  I'm shooting for more choices than just which spells to memorize for the day while still keeping it playable and enjoyable.

I am not actually familiar with universalis though.

Focusing on the great power/responsibility - you want these situations. But the design so far offers many ways of managing overflow to reduce it. The player will be actively avoiding the situations you want, and also because of that system percieves such situations as not what your supposed to enjoy in playing the game. To be clear, the player might enjoy great responsibility situations, but he'll see it as not the thing your supposed to enjoy in this particular game.

From what I've seen, systems where it's going to be a power/responsiblity situation either way get a clear message across. Because players manage stats to try and make it their prefered p/r situation. Which reinforces that power/responsibility is the games fun thing to engage (since there's no way to avoid it, it must be there to be enjoyed).

Maybe I'll have to give breaking the threshold some kind of advantage like the risk of backlash is the same no matter how much arcane overflow you get so you might as well really lay it on.  I do like the fact that mages with my present system will be forced to pay attention and really get the most out of their spells, I'm still just not 100% on how to handle it once they break the threshold, thoughts?

What about the spell not being able to end until the Overload is spent somehow?  So if you cast fireball, and your Overload goes past your threshold, it keeps burning until you can get the power back under control, using whatever specific rituals/mechanics that your character is based around.  This seems like a good basic effect for that kind of thing.  I wouldn't entirely rule out the possiblity of things just going completely wrong, like you cast fireball, but you get a 15' tall fire elemental instead.  He might burn what you want him to, or he might come after you.

What about the overflow being useful in small amounts, but extremely dangerous when there is to much of it? Then magicians would have some incentive to keep some overflow, but one the other side have to be careful not to get to much.

For example, "the more overflow, the easier it becomes to cast spells". Downside: "to much overflow, you become a being of astral space". For example, a voodoo guy would find it easier to contact loas if he has overflow, but on the other hand it would become easier for malicious spirits to take him over, too.

Ok currently what I'm going with for my game from the conversations I've had with some people and a few crumpled up copies of the magic chapter.

Arcane Energy flows through the world all around us, it is the elemental force of chaos and the fuel of magic.  To cast magic those rare people with the ability to must gather up this energy into themselves and manipulate it to do what they want it to do when they expel that energy.  Whenever a spell is cast some residual energy remains in the body of the caster, magicians can increase the power of spells by taking on more energy and thus more residual energy remains.  When a magician reaches a certain amount of overflow he can not absorb anymore and casting any more magic results in the energy escaping violently from their body causing them harm and sometimes even people around them.

Through playtesting I expect to find a good balance between character's max overflow and the amount of overflow each spell causes to a caster.  Any thoughts on this system?

One thought that occurs to me is that I'd like to see this worked into your overflow mechanic: the more skilled the mage, the more efficient their use of magical power (and the less overflow they accumulate).

For balancing mages vs. other character types, you have a ton of options. We just had this huge discussion over at Steve Jackson Games Forums on magic.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=35457

I tried to recap all of the possible balance positions in the thread (somewhere around page 30 or so).

"1): How often they cast
1a): Fatigue
1b): Expendable components that are prohibitively expensive to use
1c): Length of time to cast (really, 1 second casts seems waaaay to fast to me)
1d): Direct "can cast x times a day"

2): How many different things they can do
2a): Number of spells they can know (cost to learn the spell)
2b): Number of spells they can have "ready" (memorization for the day, etc.)
2c): Limit spell effects (no "replace the rogue" spells in the list)

3): In-setting counters
3a): Make some places/circumstances harder to cast in ("It's a New Moon, so add 5 to the difficulty," or "You are in a dry mana zone, add 5 to the difficulty")
3b): Increase the prevalence of counter-magic, either as a learned skill, mundane protections, or the like. I disagree that counters wouldn't be common if mages weren't common. People protect against unlikely, yet possible, dangers all the time, especially if the dangers are particularly nasty.

4): How risky casting is
4a): Critical failures of casting being worse than critical failures of mundane tasks that casting can replace
4b): Success rate of casting is lower than success rate of a pretty well skilled specialist"

Hope some of this helps!

-adam

Adam,

Thanks for the post and the points to consider for balancing.

I was thinking that perhaps a magician could increase the spell's difficulty to reduce the overflow, by being more precise with his magic consumption there is less residual magic but with precision comes difficulty as they try not to have too little either.  In this way more skilled magicians can be more efficient like you were talking about.

As far as how often they cast that was my purpose with overflow as I'm sure you could tell.

I've also tried to keep magic a very specific power, while a mage can cast a fireball to hurt people he's not going to outstealth the rogue, outfight the warrior, outshoot the archer, and so on.  My spell lists are remaining very elemental, literally, the ability to use magic to manipulate the forces of the world in their base forms but not to give yourself +20 strength and crush all the enemy soldiers.

In-setting there are places in the world where arcane energy is very weak and places where it is very strong.  As this energy is necessary for magic these places would certainly affect casting.  Perhaps peasant charms and things that ward off magic would be a fun bit of fluff and a way for common people to deter magicians, assuming I can give an explanation for how the items work to deflect magic without magic.

As far as risk of casting, I've decided that failing a spell simply means the spell does not work but you still suffer the same amount of overflow, add this to the fact that you're standing there like an idiot while the bad guys charge and I think there's enough penalty in place.  A warrior can swing an axe a hundred times so bringing too many dangers and limitations would deter people from playing magicians, I saw this all the time in World of Darkness, if Mages were a playable option people typically shied away from them for Werewolves or Vampires because of the risks of paradox and the dangers of magic misfiring.  However some of the more powerful spells are incredibly difficult to cast so people won't be throwing them around constantly either.

Is this similar to the thoughts you had?  What do you think?

Thanks again.

I like your ideas.

Perhaps Conjurers could risk the possibility of accidently bringing uncontrollable interdimensional beasties into the world?
Perhaps Transmuters could risk the possibility of transforming themselves into something else, either temporarily or even permanently.