Peter Knutsen has described a set of spellcasting options for his Sagatafl system. Characters can omit some elements normally required for casting, like gestures and chanting. Doing so imposes penalties, but you can buy skill levels to offset the penalties. Peter worries that players will always buy the penalties down to their minimum levels. How does a gamesmaster avoid having every serious spellcaster in the game world maxing out these binary skills? First, consider whether variety is really appropriate here. If the skills are generally useful and have few drawbacks, there's little reason for a character to have less than the full suite, if he can afford the investment (in points, training time, practice, whatever). Eventually, all sufficiently talented or diligent casters will learn them. The simplest "fix" is to adjust your expectations to match. For the sake of argument, I'll assume that you have a solid reason (if only personal taste) for enforcing variety. I'd recommend any of three major approaches, all of which increase the opportunity cost for the options. If the opportunity cost is high enough, players will only purchase the options if they foresee a clear need. However, the use of a "slush fund" point system makes it harder to set a fair price. If you say that characters can use points to purchase the fact that they have previously gone on a quest, then requiring a quest is pointless. If the skill point budgets are generous, making skills expensive does not solve the problem. In short, some options are too valuable at any price. While small budgets may restrict the character, eventually you can afford to soak the cost. My three suggestions avoid this problem by making the options expensive at any level. SCALING First, you can scale the cost to the budget, either directly or indirectly. The direct approach sets the price at a fixed /fraction/ of total points (including earned experience), instead of a fixed number of points. This makes sense, balance-wise, for abilities that multiply the character's power or flexibility. From the character's point of view, the ongoing cost represents the need to keep his skills sharp. However, players may resent this "XP tax," so I'd recommend indirect scaling instead. Hero uses this approach for gestures and incantations: They reduce the cost of every spell that uses them (by about 1/3). This approach has another advantage: You can choose the options for just some of your spells. For example, you might want to buy them for your getaway spells, so that you can escape when bound and gagged, even if you don't want the options for general use. SECONDARY BUDGETS Next, you can use a secondary accounting system. For example, you could give characters a "time budget" analogous to the regular point budget. This would let you use the quest idea above: If quests use up a big chunk of the point budget, then you'll only find the full suite of options in characters who are both powerful and long-lived. This differentiates talented youths and old masters: The former may be powerful, but only the experienced spellcasters have learned all the tricks. Of course, you'll need a system to support the extra budget (including a way to earn "time points"). The Fuzion and HERO Systems recommend something similar, called the "Rule of X." Each major ability area has its own limit (X), based on actual ability scores rather than points. For example, you might set a campaign limit on "speed plus best defense bonus plus armor rating." This lets players customize characters while maintaining an overall effectiveness standard: You might focus on speed or dodging, or you might choose a balanced defense, but you can't just dump points in to maximize all three. An appropriate "Rule of X" for Sagatafl might be "spell power + spell selection + casting skills can't exceed X." That way, players must choose between the three regardless of point totals. Both of these examples create stricter trade-offs for buying these skills, so that you can't get them all without giving up something else you care about. DIFFERENT BUT NOT BETTER It may be sufficient to design the casting options so that they offer no net benefit to the character, effectiveness-wise. The player pays for flexibility, not power. You've already got a bit of this element -- even with the penalty-reducing skills, there's still a small penalty. However, you may want to add some concrete costs for unconventional casting: extra time, higher fatigue/mana cost, something like that. The general idea is to make the option unattractive except in specific situations. If the option isn't /generally/ useful, players are less likely to spend points "just in case." They'll only buy the option if they foresee specific uses that they care about. D&D's metamagic system works like this. It also lets characters eliminate gestures and incantations, but doing so makes the spell costlier. In general, a metamagicked spell costs a little more to cast than an equivalent spell with the metamagic effect "built in." That is, a spell metamagicked to 4th level is a little less powerful than ordinary 4th-level spells. When you spend a feat for a metamagic option, you're getting more flexibility but no more power. Many D&D players feel that the opportunity cost is too high; metamagic feats are rare in many groups, and very few players load up on them. Character selection is inherently a meta-game activity, so talking to the players (regarding which characters they should select) is eminently sensible. Also, the players may need some guidance when it comes to opportunity costs -- many players in my experience simply don't think about what they're giving up when they dump a bunch of points into some "must have" power. Likewise, they may not understand which options are well-suited for which characters, which can lead to taking all of them "just in case." No amount of mechanics or price tweaking will help if the players don't understand the trade-offs. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 13 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2005 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com