Disciplined Magic

I’ve been thinking about my approach to magic and I think there is one more element I need to add to the mix to really be able to pull it off. I don’t care for skill systems much. I find them just as restrictive as classes. It seems more natural to say someone has an aptitude for something and give them bonuses for a check against an attribute or a baseline success rather than artificially levy a skill construct with percentile scores that is restricted by class. However, I do think it makes sense that someone who has a background in say demonology, might be better at summoning these malevolent entities than say Jikara the Buxom who just happens to be leafing through the Tome of Three Hundred Secrets of the Occluded Soul and is trying to summon Gbrank Ywoldar the Crushing Fist of the Dread Mist.

So instead of creating a whole skill set to support things like fishing, horsemanship, bowling, hair styling, etc, I’m thinking about using disciplines. A discipline would be a sort of “super skill set” that would be tiered and provide bonuses to achieve a desired result in a certain area. For instance, going back to Jikara, say that she studies under Flandrel the Red and learns some demon lore (like how to create a summoning circle, what types of candles to use and their placement, etc – the basics of summoning). Prior to her studies, assuming she was able to read the text of the Tome of the Three Hundred Secrets of the Occluded Soul, she would have a 10% chance of summoning a demon using the text (as would anyone else that is unskilled but could read the text). Further, I’d say that she has a 10% chance of controlling or compelling Gbrank. Most likely, assuming she was able to summon the entity, Gbrank would be rather upset, go into a rage and hurl obscenities at her and then things would get progressively worse for Jikara from there. Now, if Jikara is inducted to the first order of the mysteries of the shrouded society (Demonology Discipline Rank 1), she can now increase her base chances of success by 15% (for an aggregate total of 25%). Now, I’ve been tossing around the idea of how best to work disciplines in. Essentially, anyone can learn a discipline, but there needs to be some cost associated to reflect an investment of time and energy (and possibly monetary investment as well). I’m thinking that these could be purchased through Experience Point investment as long as the resultant loss of experience would not cause the character to lose a level. If it would, then the discipline may not be purchased until such time as it does not cause the experience point total to fall below the minimum for that level. For instance, Jikira is a 3rd level fighter. She has an experience point total of let’s say 6500 experience points. I’d say that a level one Demonology discipline would cost an investment of 1500 Experience Points to attain; which would thereby reduce her total to 5000 Experience points. Since she needs a minimum of 4065 experience points (following Labyrinth Lord progression) to attain level three, she is OK. However, if she had 5000 experience and wished to purchase the discipline, it would result in her falling below the experience minimums for the level and thus not be allowed at this time.

I’ll have to refine the idea a bit more to determine discipline cost/effects, when a discipline can be purchased (i.e. how many can I buy per level), etc. I think this will free me of having to create a whole skill system and still allow for the modeling of progression in certain areas of magical aptitude. More to follow…