The Lost Craft of Spell Research

[Deleted]

Does anyone here use the OD&D Spell Research rules ? 

I ask because down the years I've hardly heard about their use**. Do you research spells, or find them on scrolls, learn them from other MUs, or does your DM just grant them on level up ? Have you house-ruled the process ?

As DM I've always seen them as a neat money-sink.

Are there any retro-clones that have sound/fun spell research rules ?

**Aside from the Stoke Irregulars, in whose game I encountered Tragic Pizzle

[bravewolf]

I like the spell research rules in Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Magic-users can also create potions and scrolls at any level.

@geordieracer, I forgot to mention that the website for Lamentations has a free, no-art PDF of the game rules. This would allow you to check out the spell research rules for free.

[tetramorph]

Yes, I’ve got my own house rules for it in my campaign.

I learned about it and how folks run it from folks here!

Fight on!

[bravewolf]

I've only had one player show an interest in spell research when using the Lamentations rules...none with my OD&D-Arduin campaign so far.

The issue with the one player is that he never finished the spell description, which is too bad - we would have had a unique spell in the campaign.

In my OD&D-Arduin campaign, I give a freebie spell to M-U's upon leveling, and also like tetramorph, figure the costs of that are subsumed in the PC's monthly upkeep costs.

[delta]

This is one of those rules that tends to be off the radar of many players because of where it gets placed in the book. E.g.: in OD&D last page of Vol-1, in AD&D in the DMG, etc. (Also in OD&D the focus is on expanding the spell list, since in original publication it assumed all existing spells were known by each PC.) Thus it's outside the mental scope of most magic-user players, concentrating on the core spells-per-day mechanic. That may be hard to alter unless the DM really highlights the option (e.g., append to equipment list or something).

[Deleted]

I don't think it has anything to do with placement. The rules for "Finger of Death" are ALSO on the last page of Volume 1, but EVERYBODY knew that.

What I saw was that things switched from

"My Rock to Mud spell didn't melt the wizard's tower? WTF?"

"Yeah, how about that?"

to

"My Rock to Mud spell didn't melt the wizard's tower? CHEATER!!"

It is now considered "unfair" in most circles for the referee to have secrets from the players, complete with some players insisting that the ref show them their notes after the adventure.

To quote Sam Vimes, "Arseholes to the lot of them, says I."

[tetramorph]

@geordieracer , you deserve a better answer from me.

IMC a starting lvl1 MU has all the lvl1 utility spells: detect magic, protection from evil, read magic & languages. (I know, I know, I am far too generous.) I roll a d4 for his starting (cool) spell from among: sleep, light, charm and hold portal. If he has an Intelligence bonus or two the player may choose one or two other spell(s) as well.

From there the MU game is: stay alive, level up, find scrolls, get treasure, research more spells. Steal spells from enemy MUs. Etc.

Every time a MU acquires a new level of spells he gets a spell book for that level and I allow the player to choose one "freebie." I assume that upkeep costs (which I put at 10%, not 1%, and I uphold this fastidiously) and time between sessions has allowed for the research of that spell.

Beyond this ALL OTHER MAGIC USER SPELLS are the result of either a.) burning a scroll into his spell book or b.) research.

Finding a potion halves research time and cost. From lvl8 even magical objects may be used by an MU to halve research costs and times.

Finding another MU's spell books also halves time and cost for research. The spell books are crib-notes, peculiar to each MU, so they help but they don't act like scrolls do so they still have to research. If they found a book named "On the Magical Properties of the Element of Fire," then I would halve things for such spells as fireball, wall of fire, etc.

My players (who play MUs) are absolutely ravenous for scrolls. Like, if they weren't so lawful, there would definitely be duals over them.

Also, I make research costs different for "Known Spells," that is to say, those on the lists in M&M, as opposed to ones that they invent for themselves, or find ideas for from obscure scrolls (the supplements, AD&D, etc.). Known Spells are much less expensive.

But, because my players are used to this set up, they are used to knowing that research is a thing and thus they know they could make up spells. As of now, there has been a lot of talk about spells that would be cool, but no one has yet been willing to shell out the gp and time to do it!

Here is one I hope my MU, Fomalhaut the Obtuse (fight on!), can do (my buddy refs a sub-campaign):

Beacon
The MU casts this spell on any object and remains aware of the location of this object until the spell is cast on another object. The closer the object the greater the knowledge of distance. Thus, miles away would be estimated in 10s, then 100s, even 1000s of miles. MU knows distance perfectly from, say, the next room.

This would be great for tracking a bad guy. Give them a special "gift," and then know where he is all the time -- like "find my friends" in medieval fantasy land! It would also be useful for keeping track of party members in a situation where the party might be forced to split, etc. BTW: what level do you guys think this would be? Locate object is a level two. Isn't this a kind of "reverse" of that spell? Or should I make it higher, just on principle?

I got ALL of these ideas from folks smarter than me here on this forum. But I can't find the thread so I can't give credit. So, sorry! If one of you reads this, do say, "hey, that was my idea"!

Let me know if you have any questions.

Fight on!

[tetramorph]

Oh, also:

Read magic is really necessary.

When a MU finds a scroll, he can only recognize spells he knows.

He can tell if it is a level he knows or if it is higher, but, if higher, not what level the spell is.

So he has to read magic to discern the nature of the spell. Any other reading casts the spell immediately.

If a MU finds a spell at a level higher than he can know, he can cast it, or he can hold on to it until he is high enough in level, has that level spell book, and then he can burn the spell in.

That happened with Fomalhaut. He found a Part Water spell and held on to the scroll until he could burn it into his spell book. It was a long wait, but worth it!

Read magic is necessary for discerning the command word of any magic item. It can also help discern the name of a magic sword. Pronouncing the name as he draws it gives a bonus to a FM's struggle with the sword and can mitigate some (½ damage) of the cross alignment damage, if any.

All this research costs a lot. MUs find themselves far poorer than FMs and even CLs. But, usually, the party is quite willing to aid in research costs so that their MU(s) have a lot of good spells to choose from.

Also, from what I understand, in BTPBD MUs can build towers for research in the wilds, or, they could serve as a Lord's court magician, or, in towns, they can join guilds. Lords demand fealty scot. But they also help defray the cost of research as it benefits them. The Lord may demand that the court magician run an "errand." The guilds exact membership dues but massively defray the cost of research as research is shared. They also demand that they run "errands" for the guild. But all such errands allow for built-in awesome adventure hooks. So I am thinking of ways to build things like this into my campaign.

Fight on!

[bravewolf]

Has anybody here tried allowing scroll creation at any level? How did that fly in an OD&D campaign?

[Finarvyn]

One thing that I've tried is to say that spells in Men & Magic are commonly known, but if a person wants to pick a spell from Greyhawk they have to research the thing first. And if they find a spell from another source (Arduin, AD&D, whatever) I make it even more costly and hard to do in order to keep the game focused on the LBB as much as possible. Some of my players were into obscure spells because it would give them an advantage, or because they just liked certain spells (Magic Missile, for one), and would take the time to do research anyway.

Jul 13, 2018 23:25:36 GMT -6 bravewolf said:

Has anybody here tried allowing scroll creation at any level? How did that fly in an OD&D campaign?

I avoid allowing characters to create any type of magical item (swords, rings, or even scrolls) as much as possible. When they insist, I try to keep the cost high so that they don't want to do it very often. My rationale is simply that the ability to create an item really changes the game balance of the campaign and I don't like that.

I think that 3E and maybe 4E allowed for item creation, but it cost XP. That's an interesting concept as a character could actually lose levels if they create too much magic. Adventurer's League for 5E allows for creation of certain potions (and maybe some scrolls) at the cost of "down time" and this is an interesting hidden cost which my group didn't value as a resource at first but later found it was pretty valuable to waste on making potions. (Actually, in AL a healing potion has a "down time" cost in days plus a materials cost which happens to exactly equal the price of a healing potion on the free market, so you might as well save the "down time" and just buy the things instead. )

I'm not sure what is the "best" way to do it.

[tetramorph]

bravewolf , in short, yes. My house rules still roughly correspond to what I present in my Perilous Realms supplement.

What that means is that MU lvl corresponds to spell lvl knowable and to spell # memorizable. So, a lvl2 MU gets a lvl 2 spell book with 1 spell in it. He can memorize one lvl 1 and one lvl 2 spell, or two lvl ones, but not two lvl 2s. And this pattern continues to lvl 7 where they go back and get an additional lvl 1 "slot" (I hate that word, but it works).

MUs can make scrolls and potions of any spell one lvl lower than their current maximum lvl. So a lvl2 MU can make lvl 1 scrolls and potions. Interpolated from the rules, there can be no more than 7 spells per scroll. And they can't carry more than 3 scrolls before they are encumbered. They may want to bring in less, as they may want to carry out any found scrolls.

So, yes, technically, a lvl2 could have 21 spells on scrolls with him. But this is not likely, as the time and cost of making scrolls severely mitigates this kind of maxing.

But a good strategy for my MUs is to carry around one "utility" scroll with as many low-level utility spells as they can, so that they can memorize spells they may need "on the fly."

From lvl 8 MUs can start making magic items other than scrolls and potions. But lvl 8, as super-heroic, is pretty much my informal "level cap" (and this is so for all humans characters in my campaign). At this point they are supposed to retire to their towers and start sending their apprentices off on errands. They can still earn experience, but their adventuring goes way down in volume.

(And I do allow XP for revenue from baronies. I offer this as incentive to settle down and get out of adventuring. But even in a maxed out barony [8 villages, 400 pop each = 3200 pop total = 32K gp revenue = 32K XP per year] it would take years for revenue alone to grant a new level to lvl8+ characters.)

[gemini476]

Jul 14, 2018 4:28:47 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Jul 13, 2018 23:25:36 GMT -6 bravewolf said:

Has anybody here tried allowing scroll creation at any level? How did that fly in an OD&D campaign?

I avoid allowing characters to create any type of magical item (swords, rings, or even scrolls) as much as possible. When they insist, I try to keep the cost high so that they don't want to do it very often. My rationale is simply that the ability to create an item really changes the game balance of the campaign and I don't like that.

I think that 3E and maybe 4E allowed for item creation, but it cost XP. That's an interesting concept as a character could actually lose levels if they create too much magic. Adventurer's League for 5E allows for creation of certain potions (and maybe some scrolls) at the cost of "down time" and this is an interesting hidden cost which my group didn't value as a resource at first but later found it was pretty valuable to waste on making potions. (Actually, in AL a healing potion has a "down time" cost in days plus a materials cost which happens to exactly equal the price of a healing potion on the free market, so you might as well save the "down time" and just buy the things instead. )

I'm not sure what is the "best" way to do it.

Unfortunately neither of those editions did it particularly well.

4E's system was a more formal integration of the whole assumed wealth by level system 3E had going, where you use your hard-earned cash to create magic items IIRC fairly quickly. It's not particularly interesting, just a way to take that +2 Great Axe and turn it into a +2 Longsword because that's what the Fighter is good with.

3E's crafting was a bit strange, like a lot of the system: it kept the long crafting times on the high end that O/AD&D had (1 day/1000gp, high-end stuff can cost 100K), but the popular style of play became so fast-paced that you'd be hard-pressed to see a Wizard actually have a hundred days of downtime.

XP costs are 1/25th of the price, but cannot make you lose a level (so no low-level characters crafting expensive items) - that 100K item costs 4,000XP, which isn't much even with the lower XP amounts of 3E.

Here's where the issues start popping up on the lower end. A scroll of a 1st-level spell costs 25gp, and thus if you want to craft one yourself (Wizards start with Scribe Scroll) that's 12.5gp and 1xp. That's a pittance, and means that low-level characters effectively have many more spells/day than they were intended to have.

To make things worse, they added a catch-up mechanic to help low-level characters catch up with higher-level ones in a system without OD&D-esque geometric XP progressions. This means that if the Wizard tries to stay one level behind the party by crafting items, they actually get more experience to craft with than they otherwise would!

It's a mess, really, and that's without getting into the custom magic item creation guidelines. Those need the DM oversight to a degree where you start to wonder why they were in there in the first place.

One thing I do find interesting with the OD&D spell research and magic item creation is that it assumes a resource that is much more scarce than it is in other editions: time. Without the modern practice of "time-skips", having a Magic-User spend two weeks researching a second-level spell means that you might have to play a different character next week. (This also means that, if applied strictly, AD&D's training times mean that you need to swap to a "B-team" while waiting for the "A-team" to level up.)

If nothing else, I could see players balking at the idea of having to wait months until their magical armor is enchanted!

The prices in gold pieces are actually fairly low, relatively speaking: 250GP for a Potion of Healing is a steal, but only getting one per week (and thus probably one per session, in a weekly game) is the real limiter.

Well, assuming that you play with the Vol.3 "1 real-life week is 1 in-game week" rules, anyhow, which is probably more relevant for one of those multi-group campaigns than the modern "four players and one DM" style of play.

[derv]

Jul 14, 2018 10:28:35 GMT -6 gemini476 said:

One thing I do find interesting with the OD&D spell research and magic item creation is that it assumes a resource that is much more scarce than it is in other editions: time. Without the modern practice of "time-skips", having a Magic-User spend two weeks researching a second-level spell means that you might have to play a different character next week. (This also means that, if applied strictly, AD&D's training times mean that you need to swap to a "B-team" while waiting for the "A-team" to level up.)

If nothing else, I could see players balking at the idea of having to wait months until their magical armor is enchanted!

The prices in gold pieces are actually fairly low, relatively speaking: 250GP for a Potion of Healing is a steal, but only getting one per week (and thus probably one per session, in a weekly game) is the real limiter.

Well, assuming that you play with the Vol.3 "1 real-life week is 1 in-game week" rules, anyhow, which is probably more relevant for one of those multi-group campaigns than the modern "four players and one DM" style of play.

What is a "time-skip"?

To me, the idea is a resource sink. Consider additional costs during this time also.

[gemini476]

Jul 14, 2018 10:53:55 GMT -6 derv said:

Jul 14, 2018 10:28:35 GMT -6 gemini476 said:

One thing I do find interesting with the OD&D spell research and magic item creation is that it assumes a resource that is much more scarce than it is in other editions: time. Without the modern practice of "time-skips", having a Magic-User spend two weeks researching a second-level spell means that you might have to play a different character next week. (This also means that, if applied strictly, AD&D's training times mean that you need to swap to a "B-team" while waiting for the "A-team" to level up.)

If nothing else, I could see players balking at the idea of having to wait months until their magical armor is enchanted!

The prices in gold pieces are actually fairly low, relatively speaking: 250GP for a Potion of Healing is a steal, but only getting one per week (and thus probably one per session, in a weekly game) is the real limiter.

Well, assuming that you play with the Vol.3 "1 real-life week is 1 in-game week" rules, anyhow, which is probably more relevant for one of those multi-group campaigns than the modern "four players and one DM" style of play.

What is a "time-skip"?

To me, the idea is a resource sink. Consider additional costs during this time also.

The time-skip originates from television, I think, but the simple explanation is that you just skip over a bunch of time. In the original Transformers cartoon in the '80s, there's a human character that is a child; come the movie, they skip forward in time several years and the character is now grown up.

In tabletop RPGs the concept is very similar. You declare that your Wizard is going to spend a year crafting a Ring of X-Ray Vision, and the DM just says "one year later..." and it's over. (Presumably including some exposition on other things that happened during that year, and with the permission of other players.)

This is obviously much more viable in the small modern groups of half-a-dozen consistent players than it would have been in the old-school Blackmoor campaign, but the latter scenario is what the rules were written for.

Gygax did not rail on about how STRICT TIME RECORDS MUST BE KEPT and how to coordinate multiple groups of players acting in different in-game times because that was something that showed up in his small group of four or so players playing alongside each other in a consistent adventuring party, he did so because it was entirely possible for each of the twenty players OD&D suggests one DM can handle to play sessions independent of each other and thus, say, have one player advance forward weeks in time through wilderness adventure.

In a modern campaign, you might pick up a session exactly where the last ended, or months later if thematically appropriate for the adventure at hand. The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, meanwhile, gives the simple suggestion that "1 Week of actual time = 1 week of game time", explicitly because "as the campaign goes into full swing it is probable that there will be various groups going every which way and all at different time periods".

That's probably the single biggest difference in playstyle between the original groups and modern ones, I think.