Quick and dirty vs slow and sure
I would like there to be a strong distinction between actions of the moment and long term actions. Basically fast casting and ritual casting should be different mechanically. Quick and dirty magic requires a sense of immediacy. It needs to be almost reactionary. Slow and Sure magic should feel more like planning a heist. There should be a lot of build up. The more you plan and build up the spell the bigger the effect you can attain and the bigger the risks attached to it. Slow magic should feel like a fight scene or a political debate(preferably both).
Fast magic should be frantic and have some bleed over. I am thinking of not allowing any aspects to be created by fast magic. You would use slow magic to build advantages ahead of time and then use them during the scene with fast magic. I do not like this idea too much, as it changes quite a few of the fundementals of the game. Creating advantages is a big part of the game play. Segregating that out is problematic.
I had another idea for skill use as well. Fast casting has bleed over. When you are casting on the fly you have to choose between doing a controlled burst and only doing one stress, or doing all the stress you normally would but taking a point of stress yourself. Perhaps instead of that it changes the world around them somehow. I would like to damage the world somehow, but I am a bit off at the moment and cannot come up with a way to do it. Maybe they gain a boost on you when you fast cast or something.
Slow casting would need to be done over the course of several rolls and scenes. Basically you would need to collect ingredients, do the ritual, and then complete the action. I think the effects would be allowed to be much larger and more powerful/diverse. I do not know how to model this as it would represent ritual magic, item creation, and long term social engineering. I know that I would like the players to be in more control of how this goes. Slow casting is not reactionary, it is proactive. Maybe I could put a template of actions down and the players choose what each part means for that slow casting action.
This post is mostly just me trying to externally sort out my thoughts on how the players interact with the world around them. I think I may be just as confused now as I was at the beginning. Well, maybe not as confused as all that. I can now see the shape of things. I know roughly what I want. Any thoughts on what action I could take? Any thoughts would be very appreciated.
This is where, I think, the Paradigm comes into play.
ReplyDeleteYou get a Paradox-analog stress counter, and altering or tapping into a node to work blatant magic triggers a Discord backlash. It does x+successes damage, possibly rolling against the skill you used to trigger the effect. (Use the lowest skill if it required more than one.) The more damage it does, the more it gets to manipulate you in return, up to and including erasing you altogether.
Now you've also got a Paradigm skill, which is what allows you to work with/tinker with the nodes. You can use that to "hack" the Node in advance, using your paradigm to come up with the best way to interact with it. If the node is friendly to your paradigm, add +1 or +2, if it's opposed to it, -1 or -2. (0 being the default). Use your Paradigm skill (which in a mundane sense reflects your status within the group of Magi who also have a similar outlook to you) to spend time trying to create advantages to assist your efforts, either in increasing your effectiveness, or in mitigating the backlash. You can't do this if you're doing a quick and dirty spell.
Also, I think you might want to have Magi connected to Nodes that support their paradigm, which allows them to do magic in the first place. This makes for drama, as antagonists will try to find these nodes and cut the Magi off from them before moving in for the kill/brainwashing. Just some thoughts.