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A spell list I will actually use
Maliszewski’s always on about how shorter is better, and Jason of Dungeon Dozen writes masterpieces of concision -
well, I just found my ideal spell list. Example entry: Sunburst: Blinds all within 10 ft., deals 3d6 damage.
That is all I want, ever. Unless you have something SO COOL I WILL DIE to tell me (like, eg, LotFP’s Summoning spell), that text up there is unimprovable as a tool I can use during a game. It’s enough for me to be able to make rulings from it and I want to be able to make those rulings rather than be held to some dumb interminable legal document, dammit.
Paladin/Ranger (Ranger? Ew.)
If/when I get DCCRPG I may do the same thing with those spells.
(Does this count as a house rule?)
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AKA richardthinks
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SO GOOD.
Excellent. That kind of concision really makes you clarify the purpose of the thing you are describing. It’s what I strive for if not always achieve.
Who wrote those, though? Not the Jason you mentioned was it?
nope, someone called “DCC” whose company has folded, so I imagine that site’s no longer being maintained.
“Sunburst: Blinds all within 10 ft., deals 3d6 damage.”
Man, that’s too wordy for me.
=)
Seriously, one of the things I’ve been working on was compressing/abstracting spell details even more, across all spells in the spell list, so that I wouldn’t even have to look up what damage a specific spell did, or its range. All spells of a given type have a 60 foot range, double for 5th level, double again for 6th level. Stuff like that. So all you need is the name of the spell, and maybe a summary of what it look like, in case it’s not obvious and you forget.
You’re certainly right about that example, which could simply have been called “flash grenade” (save or be blinded, + wizard’s level damage).
I’d really like to reduce it all to the spell names, but I can see why that’s not always possible.
Now you’re making me think about ranges though: in practice I use 3: touch, limited line of sight (pistol) or limited area (grenade). Astral projection etc can change your line of sight (for some stuff), traps you leave behind are like proxies of the wizard. For durations I like to use tokens that get taken away one a round, or if it’s longer than a self-destruct countdown clock then I tend to go with Ars Magica “until dawn,” “until full moon” etc.
I bet you’ve already written about this: are there important ranges/durations/other factors I’m forgetting?
Well, what I did (am still doing) is looking for patterns in the durations, ranges, damage, and other factors in the LBBs and abstracting from there to find types of spells that seem to have the same rules. In several cases, if two spells seemed to be the same type and their ranges or durations were close enough, I changed ‘em to match.
This is what I came up with:
http://9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/2010/12/clone-project-revised-spell-statistics.html
I’m still mulling over how to simplify this further. Like: could I just say 1d6+2+ caster level duration, minimum duration for combat spells, a change to a stable natural state is permanent until changed again, and some effects (illusion, conjuration) can be maintained with concentration?