Wow, Look
at all the cobwebs up in this joint! It’s been more than a while since I last
posted. I make no apologies for that. Gaming is low on my list of priorities
lately. I miss it and I have had ideas in the pipe for things I would love to
do but unfortunate time is at a premium these days.
I have been
playing my fair share of Magic: The Gathering though. I won a tournament this past
summer and the new Battle for Zendikar set is pretty rad. Which leads me into
an idea about how magic is handled in RPG’s.
What we
tend to see in Rpgs are Vancian/spell slots, spell points or a skill check
system. I seem to recall Shadowrun having a system that let you set how
powerful you wanted the spell to be and then see if you were able to control
that much power without hurting yourself. I always thought that was pretty
slick, but overly complicated in execution.
The idea I
had this morning was this; in a game of magic you are limited by how many
spells you can cast based on how much mana you have at anyone time. Typical
Magic decks try to maximize each turn by casting your highest cost card as soon
as the mana is available each turn. For example, on turn one you play a land
and cast a one mana cost spell. Turn two, you play a land and cast a two mana
cost spell. And so on until the game is over. This is an ideal situation but the
point is that you are restricted each turn by being able to play only one land.
On turn one you are relatively weak but as the game progresses you can cast
massive spells as your resources to power grow.
This got me
thinking about the Escalation Die from the 13th Age RPG. What if
every round a magic
This could
be applied to combat in general. Special combat moves could be given a point
cost and more powerful combat tricks open up as the battle progresses. Thus the
combat can escalate quickly. In fact, this might be a great way to fix the
combat token system that was introduced with Mike Mearls’s Iron Heroes RRG.
Anyway,
just a thought I had. Until the next time we meet, happy gaming people!
