I've figured out what I want out of magic, that rpgs don't model.  It's those one-time, supreme efforts that, for whatever reason, don't get reproduced.  Think Gandalf summoning the white horses/river flood in LotR.  Or the magician in The Face in the Frost tearing down a bridge to stop pursuit, but he barely knows how to do it and loses his Tarot deck in the process.

I would call this a great work, but I see that has an established meaning, so I'll call it a supreme effort.  It's a part of magic in fiction and myth, but it's hard to pull off in an rpg.  Players -understandably!- think if they can do something once, they should be able to do it again.  That's certainly the case in DnD; once you research a spell or magic item creation method you have the formula.  And I'm looking for the opposite, that you may get any particular impressive feat only once in your career (though you might have several such over time).

Is there a game that does this already, that I'm not aware of?  Free-form, or word- or element-based, magic systems look like a partial start, but still suffer from the problem of doing something once establishing a precedent.

Or failing that, how would you do this from scratch?  I don't want something purely free form or magic tea party, I'd like some rules or guidelines on what you can or can't do, it's just by it's nature it should exceed the power and scope of daily spells.  I think I'd impose a chance of failure, a chance of blowback, or both, to keep it from being a gimme play.  I'm hung up on the guidelines for what you can do in particular though.

Eldritch Ass Kicking is your friend.
http://www.pigames.net/store/default.php?cPath=120

It's fast, free form and tremendously fun. You are all mad wizards...and your last war blew up the world. Now you fly about in the ethers, cruising the broken chunks of the world having cool adventures and casting spells left and right.

I have only run it as a convention one-shot, but I use the rule of unique magic.
AKA, you can never cast the same spell twice.

Thanks, Spinachcat!

I left something big out; one use of this would be over and above normal daily spells. In particular I'm thinking of shoehorning it into D&D, over and above Vancian spellcasting, but I wanted to cast a wider net for solutions rather than start out thinking in D&D terms.  But never casting the same spell twice is good if I look past D&D.

You can actually do this in Ars Magica. You have "techniques" and "forms", like "creo" and "ignem" mean create and fire; put them together and you make fire; a fire to light a pipe would be low level, and one to be a fireball toasting people in a room would be higher level, starting a volcano up would be very very high level. That's called "spontaneous magic". If you do it often enough you turn it into a spell, and then you're much less likely to fail.

You can boost your abilities by throwing lots of vis into it - magical essence which you get from magical places and monsters, like a red dragon's tongue could have ignem vis. It's risky and might blow you up or something, though.

So you can do this massive spontaneous spell and chuck lots of vis into it and do all sorts of crazy shit, but because it's risky and uses up precious and rare vis, you won't do it often.

It seems to me that Dungeon Crawl Classics is at least part of the way there. I've had crazy results from really good or bad casting rolls that I've never seen again.
The thing is, once you get to higher level it becomes easier to hit the heights of the random spell charts... so, ideally, I'd want some random sub-charts within those to expand on the weirdness. Some spells have that, some don't.

I've been kicking around some ideas about magic items that might tie into this. Think about in terms of say a magic wand that has charges:
The more a particular person uses the wand, the more powerful effects it can manifest for that wielder, until the final charge is used -- the zenith power -- a unique powerful effect. Then the item is destroyed, and cannot be used again.

Any magic item could funtion in this way. If the item doesn't have charges, it may simply be diminished in some way after using it's zenith power.

The exact nature of the zenith power could probably be determined in play, though it should fit the theme of the magic item.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1026310You can actually do this in Ars Magica. You have "techniques" and "forms", like "creo" and "ignem" mean create and fire; put them together and you make fire; a fire to light a pipe would be low level, and one to be a fireball toasting people in a room would be higher level, starting a volcano up would be very very high level. That's called "spontaneous magic".

That sounds like what I'm after.  I'll take a look.

Edit:  holy Gygax, five editions!  Which one do I want?

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1026310If you do it often enough you turn it into a spell, and then you're much less likely to fail.

Except this part is the exact opposite of what I want, at least for the volcano level.  How much would it break the system to reverse that?

Quote from: Thondor;1026314I've been kicking around some ideas about magic items that might tie into this. Think about in terms of say a magic wand that has charges:
The more a particular person uses the wand, the more powerful effects it can manifest for that wielder, until the final charge is used -- the zenith power -- a unique powerful effect. Then the item is destroyed, and cannot be used again.

I may combine this with using a die roll for charges instead of tracking individual charges on wands.  Be a nice consolation prize if they roll that 1 in x chance early.  Thanks!

Quote from: Dave R;1026315I may combine this with using a die roll for charges instead of tracking individual charges on wands.  Be a nice consolation prize if they roll that 1 in x chance early.  Thanks!

I like the idea of a visual waning of some sort to give a hint: dark lines growing thicker on a gem, etc. But you don't know how much exactly the next casting will use up.

Quote from: Dave R;1026315Edit:  holy Gygax, five editions!  Which one do I want?

The magic part is not substantially different from one to the other, so just choose whichever is cheapest.

QuoteExcept this part is the exact opposite of what I want, at least for the volcano level.  How much would it break the system to reverse that?

The "technique" and "form" things are each levelled, they add together to give the effect. Vis adds to this, +5 for each point (and finding a few points of vis might be a whole adventure). The tech+form required is in proportion to the area of effect, that's why I said lighting a pipe is low level, and starting a volcano is high level. Now, in order to turn it into a spell, your tech+form must be greater than the effect. You can boost them temporarily with vis, but it's just temporary. So unless the mage has absurd levels of skill, they won't be able to turn the spontaneous effect into a spell.

And vis is also used to make magic items, and you study vis to up your technique or form, eg studing creo vis to improve creo skill, studying ignem vis to improve ignem skill, and so on. In practice, very few players make their character into a one-trick pony, so they just won't be high enough in ability to be able to make a Volcano spell.

Depending on the edition of AM, usually you roll to make the spontaneous magic or the spell happen, and if you fall short, you take fatigue levels in proportion to make the magic happen - and if you run out of fatigue levels, you take wound levels instead. Make a volcano then fall over dead, if you really want to.

Sounds like the Ritual move in Dungeon World.

The Wizard can create any effect they want but, it has limitations liks a specific place, specific time, have at least one dangerous and / or expensive ingredient and other things like that.

I think you need to describe how this works shorn of game rules. For example the white horses/river flood in LotR was summoned by Elrond and is implied he can do it on command as one the defenses of Imladris/Rivendell. He was aware of the approach of the party and caused it to happen.

One way to limit magic of this type to make it exact a great cost. For example suppose you declare that all spells in D&D will cause the caster 4 times its spell level in hit point damage. If that too low for the feel you want, how about 10x level in damage. You can do it but there a cost that effectively limits it use to situation where it that important for it to happen.

Quote from: estar;1026748I think you need to describe how this works shorn of game rules. For example the white horses/river flood in LotR was summoned by Elrond and is implied he can do it on command as one the defenses of Imladris/Rivendell. He was aware of the approach of the party and caused it to happen.

One way to limit magic of this type to make it exact a great cost. For example suppose you declare that all spells in D&D will cause the caster 4 times its spell level in hit point damage. If that too low for the feel you want, how about 10x level in damage. You can do it but there a cost that effectively limits it use to situation where it that important for it to happen.

What is the caster willing to sacrifice:
Some hitpoints?
A spell slot?
A finger?
A point of constitution?
A year of their life?
A piece of their soul?

Quote from: Dave R;1026315Edit:  holy Gygax, five editions [of Ars Magica]!  Which one do I want?

I believe you can download the 4th edition from the Atlas Games site for free.
Otherwise, I would go with 5th. It's pretty tight.

Quote from: Dave R;1026288I've figured out what I want out of magic, that rpgs don't model.  It's those one-time, supreme efforts that, for whatever reason, don't get reproduced.  Think Gandalf summoning the white horses/river flood in LotR.  Or the magician in The Face in the Frost tearing down a bridge to stop pursuit, but he barely knows how to do it and loses his Tarot deck in the process.

I would call this a great work, but I see that has an established meaning, so I'll call it a supreme effort.  It's a part of magic in fiction and myth, but it's hard to pull off in an rpg.  Players -understandably!- think if they can do something once, they should be able to do it again.  That's certainly the case in DnD; once you research a spell or magic item creation method you have the formula.  And I'm looking for the opposite, that you may get any particular impressive feat only once in your career (though you might have several such over time).

Is there a game that does this already, that I'm not aware of?  Free-form, or word- or element-based, magic systems look like a partial start, but still suffer from the problem of doing something once establishing a precedent.

Or failing that, how would you do this from scratch?  I don't want something purely free form or magic tea party, I'd like some rules or guidelines on what you can or can't do, it's just by it's nature it should exceed the power and scope of daily spells.  I think I'd impose a chance of failure, a chance of blowback, or both, to keep it from being a gimme play.  I'm hung up on the guidelines for what you can do in particular though.

If you were looking at using some sort of d20 kind of system, then there is always the magic system for Talislanta d20.

http://peedeepages.com/talislanta/pdf/4e_d20/final/optimized/talislanta_d20_edition.pdf

http://talislanta.com/?page_id=5#d20

It is free and legal to download from the author's site.

The sytem works a lilttle like the afformentioned Ars Magica (which is probably the best magic system going IMHO) but is already to go (with a lttle work)

It could even inspire you to create your own list of DC.

A roll of d20 plus a simple plus 1 for every level of the caster plus their primary casting attribute bonus would give you a range of between 2 and 33 or thereabouts for the first ten levels of play.

That kind of spread would give you a standard DC set of 5 (cantrips) through 35 (high level spells). As a rough guide you could run it as DC equals (DnD spell level plus one) x 5. That woud make cantrips castable with a simple 5 or above and a 9th level spell at a staggering DC of 50.

This would mean that spontaneous spells higher than 6th level are out of the question.

Reducing the DC could be gained from ritualisng or formulating the spell which would lower the DC by up to 50% but the spell would take hours to cast and would be limited to certain times, places or circumstances.

I think epic spells from 3E are some way towards what you are looking for and whacking on a hefty xp cost certainly limits their use.

I go more rules free, however, and generally tie them to a magic item. To create that one off effect you have to find/create a specific item to do it.