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Post by hamurai on Oct 8, 2017 17:44:54 GMT -6
I love DCC's magic system, but sometimes the Mercurial Magic rolls can make spells entirely unusable. For example an Invisibility spell with the side effect of a light shining around your head. Pretty much a broken spell. Wouldn't be too bad if spells weren't really limited.
When I was GM I allowed a re-roll on a similar occasion (broken spell) and once I allowed the wizard to go on a quest and complete a ritual to change the Mercurial Magic effect on one spell (because it was really making the spell suck). Sure, part of the fun is the weird aspect of magic in DCC, but for me, player fun trumps here.
So my question is, how do/would you house rule to prevent such a situation?
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Post by Finarvyn on Oct 9, 2017 5:28:06 GMT -6
My house rule was to ditch Mercurial Magic. I love 98% of the DCC RPG, but that rule falls in the 2%.  My problem with the rule is that magic is already complex enough -- one chart per spell -- that making a spell unique for an individual is just one extra layer of detail to give me fits. |
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Post by hamurai on Oct 9, 2017 11:02:32 GMT -6
 Agreed, magic rules are enormous in DCC and the spell effect charts take up the biggest part of the book. We always had the rule "If you want to play a wizard, you have to know your stuff. The DM won't help you." - that scared many players away from magic classes. I always liked it; as I own the PDF I printed the spells I needed and glued them in my character book. Feels even more like a grimoire then.  I can certainly understand why you'd ditch Mercurial Magic but we tried it once and decided we liked it better with those rules. It adds a lot to the weirdness of the game (unless it breaks a spell, that's beyond weird in my book). Here's a memory explaining why I like the weirdness of Mercurial Magic: I still fondly remember a wizard (Xergal of the Dung Plains) I played, he had a Horned Slug Guardian Familiar named Vandy with a "sexy" personality. When casting his Magic Shield spell he would blink in and out of his plane of existence and would be even harder to hit. Downside was, there was a 1% chance that he'd not come back after blinking out - and one day during battle, he cast Magic Shield and was gone! Just didn't reappear. Our judge rolled on some tables and ruled that instead of my wizard something else phased into our world and I got to play an extradimensional "tourist" for some time. It joined the group and being from a high-tech dimension, could "science-magically" understand and speak all languages. The group went through some effort to find out if my character was still alive. In the end, after a small campaign of its own, we managed to recreate the situation when my character got lost (wasn't that easy to get the Man-Bats in the right spot to fight again), the "tourist" activated some contraption and "woooosssh" - my character returned from his weird journey into some strange dimension (and the tourist got home, we guess)! Vandy the sexy slug was happy, and I got to invent and tell a completely over-the-top story about what had happened to my character. We loved that! |
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Post by Finarvyn on Oct 11, 2017 3:44:14 GMT -6
I printed the spells I needed and glued them in my character book. Feels even more like a grimoire then. I always intended to do this someday, but never got around to it. Nice story about magic use, by the way. Maybe I'll try Mercurial rules next time I run DCC. |
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Post by hamurai on Oct 11, 2017 7:34:10 GMT -6
You should really try it! Some of the effects are very inspirational and say a lot about the way magic works and about the world(s) of the game. That said, some might be inappropriate for some settings and some might break a spell.
We've now decided to roll for the Mercurial Effects but if an effect would effectively make a spell unusable, a player may "drop" the spell to open the spell slot again for another spell. That way, one spell might not be workable for a character, but he can still get other spells which might. And there might even be a way to change the fate and the mercurial effect if the player really wants to have a spell. And that would be a quest in itself, of course.
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Agreed, magic rules are enormous in DCC and the spell effect charts take up the biggest part of the book. We always had the rule "If you want to play a wizard, you have to know your stuff. The DM won't help you." - that scared many players away from magic classes.