The limitations seem okay for avoiding high level D&D or Ars Magicka magic hi-jinks if that's what you're going for, but it does beg the question of how Hogwarts was built, or how the Sword of Griffondor was forged if magic can't create anything permanent. Is this an artform lost to modern mages, or just something that players have no access too, like arcane post-grad level studies?Prak wrote:Working on the magic for my Magic School game, I want to check to make sure the limitations I'm putting on magic do what I want, which is basically to make it so that wizards still need to interact with people and can't just fuck off to their tower made of succubi and cocaine-
Magic cannot create real permanent objects. It can change objects, and the closer the end object is to the starting object the longer it will remained changed (think Polymorph Any Object but sans permanent transformation), and it can be shaped into short-lived functional mimics of objects or creatures, thus allowing summoning and creating ropes as the visual effect of a spell that binds an enemy, but you can't magically create a pig, slaughter it, and then eat it, the shaped energy has no nutritional value. Changing the size of a real pig is possible, but it doesn't do you much good as a source of food, as the property-changing magic is short lived.
Magic can give you information, whether about the past (what happened here?), present (where are my keys?) or future (what will we encounter in this dungeon?). But the less readily available the knowledge, the harder this is.
Magic can influence people, since attitudes, memories, emotions, etc are qualities of a person.
The overall goal is to allow people to throw around combat spells, control the battlefield, and use utility magic, but not create their own demiplane, tower, hookers and blow and fuck off from worldly concerns entirely. Now... if they want to take over Hell in order to fuck off from the concerns of the mundane world, I'm cool with that, they have to actually play out a story about conquering, and then keeping Hell, but the story about "Genesis, Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion, Permanency, Planar Binding, Major Creation, fuck you world" is not one I'm interested in running or playing. Does the above set up work, or do I need to rethink things?
Also, how does resource management work? Are there spell slots? Recharge mechanics? Is magic at-will with efficacy determined by a roll of some sort?