Plus and minus

The metamagic I like. Of course, that breaks the whole 4-and-20, 2-10, 2-6 symmetry thing I had going. The reason for symmetry is that it encourages balance in the design. Otherwise you end up with a grab bag of spells like 1&2E. It's more clear what certain Schools can and cannot do: there were similar amounts of overlap and unique domains for each school.

What about metamagic as a whole new School of magic, for 10 pts, available to anyone who has some magic ability? 3E does metamagic in a novel but unworkable way: it's done as feats, allowing you to cast spells at a higher circle for changes in their effects. I like not having to cast a spell to change other spells; I like just being able to do it. But casting as a higher circle
(in most cases, 2-4 circles higher) seems too harsh.

Or, expand Spellcraft as a skill and allow for metamagical tweaks depending on penalty taken to the spellcraft roll?

Given how weak mages are right now, it seems harsh to have to use up a spell slot and a combat round to cast a spell to change another spell.

...

Casting time seems like encumberance, in that it's an element of realism that, if enforced, makes the game slower and less fun. Everything I've seen and tried so far makes spellcasters, mages especially, just across the board worse than mundanes. With the exception of horology, which might just be totally broken, I'm not sure yet. It's cool, really cool, but seems outrageously powerful. Time Lords never did quite work in D&D.

...

Re: rolling stats. Again, what one guy likes is sort of irrelevant here. There's already an option to roll, let him roll. I liked the system you had before, it required some thought as to where to spend the points. Mins of 5 feel like hand holding. One thing I liked was that if I stuck a stat with a 1 or 2, it gave me something to do with my 3-5 extra abilitiy points that I had to spend, that I couldn't buy any other abilities with.

Here's a compromise: start all stats at 2, with 50 points. That way, racial modifiers can drop things down to 1.

Statistically speaking, rolling dice gives you better stats anyway, so you dice throwers should just be happy.

Also, it's silly to cap abilities at 20. It's good to cap them there for starting characters, but a titan is much stronger than some fighter guy I made at 1st level. If we're serious about making a general system, it should pander to the epic as well as the mundane. Upcap stats.

Re: named spells. I like it in individual campaigns, but I think it's sort of retarded to enforce in a system. Fine for magic, fine to encourage Dice Masters to tack on a few names to a few spells, but... what if I wanna play a viking campaign? Or cavemen? Or steampunk? Who the fuck is Nael, and why is he famous for Glitter: The Spell? The whole Mordenkainen/Bigby/Otto thing smacked of gamer strokedom, that Gygax could get away with because he was showing off his brand new invention. Why do some spells have names and others not? There's been an evolution away from this, not towards it. Are we going to sit around and say 'what's a cool mage name guys?!' to tack as a prefix? How about Brian? Brian's Magic Missile. Brian's Power Word: Kill. Auntie Flow's Down Home Polymorph Other? Garrison Bones' Wall of Bones (tm)? Mr. Chong's Crazy Good Bonus Spell? Systemically, these are all equally valid; there's no a priori reason that every named spell has to have a cool guy name.

Any system can't help but create specific worlds- adding metamagic, artifice, and horology are good examples. But those are subtle and suggestive. With Nael's Glitter, well now you have to have a guy named Nael in your game.

Named spells also strongly enforce the how of mage magic: the cliche of masters teaching apprentices, spellbooks, writing stuff down, the academic Hermetic tradition. But there are other, more interesting ways of doing it. For example, in 3E, it makes sense that a wizard would study and learn Tenser's Floating Disk. But a sorcerer? Who just automatically learns, or remembers, or is gifted with spells sans research? Why is his version also 'Tenser's'?

It's 3:1 okay, but why do you guys like named spells anyway? Do you agree that named Priest and Ritual spells make less sense than named Hermetic spells? Named Hedge spells make the most sense to me, given my view of the possible kinds of magic systems that support Hedge magic. If you're naming spells, at least have some consistency and some in-system explanation.

(While I'm in bitch mode: it's sort of silly to keep numbering the versions of the system while it's still incomplete. We're more like on alpha version 1.3 than version 3.4, but that just comes from the computer program world. Do as you will.)

I'll email example PCs like on the weekend when I have more time.