WISHFUL CASTING - a simple MOSAIC Strict spellcasting system
A downloadable game
Do you ever feel the burnout of immersing yourself in articulated, complex, detailed and fully explained magic systems? do you ever feel like magic should be more...magical, more about wonder and surprise and less about a scholarly understanding of how it works? well then, we are on the same wavelenght!
I made this simple system for ttrpgs specifically for spellcasting and its consequences for those who want to feel in game the weight of abandoning themselves to the faith of magic, in trying to use powers and forces beyond us in our favor while humbly recognizing our ignorance of how they work.
it's a system which uses 2d12 and 2 rolls to funcion, and it's based around guessing what the result will be before you roll and adapting the consequences based upon how close you were with your guess.
THIS SYSTEM IS NOT DESIGNED FOR ANY GAME (hence why MOSAIC Strict)
I want to be clear about this so to not cause problems; i made it out of the blue just to satisfy my need of expressing this concept and feeling while not puring too much time on it, and so it isn't tested nor designed to be attached to any game in particular. Specifically i feel this system will not be that much compatible with simulative and detail heavy rulesets, like dnd or pathfinder; i definitely imagined it in a more talkative and interpretative context, where there are not specific ranges/number of targets and a list of predetermined spells.
With that said, feel free to use it as you wish. Attribution is not necessary but appreciated!
Download
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Development log
- changed the cover and the wording the spellcasting table26 days ago
- Updated rules and cover65 days ago
- Corrected some errors and added some new thingsOct 11, 2023
Comments
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I made this to help players, by the way!
Colour coded now:
Oh nice ado and thanks for the credits :D
I have been going over this in my head for using fudge dice instead of a 12. Not settled yet but i came to this:
You have a pool of dice. Every + is a hit. Every - is a result in the exhaust magic table? Divide the pool among Effect and Intensity. Cancel a - by spending a +. Then convert the table to what happens with a number of hits or a combination of + and - and so on.
You're welcome!
uuh...sorry if i am a bit slow, but just to be sure of what you're suggesting here:
this is a visualization of both ends of possibile guess results, only that now if you guessed above the result you gain + and if below you gain -? and then you spend + and - in the EM table instead of rolling if you guessed 7+ figures away or use them to cancel each other?
if i got it right...not gonna lie, maybe it's more articulated then what i wanted to do here uhuh. at the same time i like the idea of exhaust magic being just excess magic, not necessarily negative as i put it, and you can spend either negative or positive excess magic for different effects on a different table.
again, this is definetely something that threatens to spiral into a way more complicated system, but....i like the idea of it!
....if i got it right, uhuh. if not, please have patience. if you have other ideas we can also change platform of discussion if you want.
Sorry for the long delay to reply!
long story short is that every plus is a good lil thing and every minus is a problem.
That is the gist of it, I guess.
don't worry, thanks for trying to explain it uhuh.
ok, now i got it more; most of my confusion came from the fact that i did not remember what fudge dices were, only now i thought of checking that uhuh.
now, this feels like a pretty tight and functional system, also quite fun in the way you can and have to manage your dice results.
It also....feels like a pretty different system compared to what i wanted to do.
what i mean is, without the guess mechanic it kinda of loses the vibe i was going for with this.
sure, i haven't properly tested it, so i don't know if it's actually fun, but still.
i guess you could say that rolling a pool of dice also stays within the leap of faith idea, but i liked that you had to take the extra step in guessing it first.
still, thanks for putting your idea out here, it's always interesting. this one, unless you can convince me otherwise, i don't think i'm gonna implement it in like your other suggestion. if other players like your variation though, they are free to read it here and change it, of course!
There can be a guess element still, think about it:
Roll any number of dice, I don't care how many... the more dice you roll, the more "bargaining" you have but also, the more umpredictable it gets. If you roll 5 dice, it's more likely you'll get a manageable number of - to clear out, but it is also more likely the spell won't realize its full potential, but the swing for a larger dice number (7, 8, 9 and more) is wild.
mmh...ok, this i like. so this makes it more of a bet with a "high risk, high reward" kind of system. you have agency over your casting in the sense that you can decide how much "power" to allocate to it, while increasing the risk of blowing in your face.
this is good, but still aesthetically goes in another direction compared to what i wanted to convey here. the guess action in mine does not have any advantage or disadvantage, no matter how you do it, and in that way you are completely blind to fate and luck. one might consider it pointless for that, but to me the fact that you have to take active part in abandoning yourself to luck has meaning.
in your system the image is that of someone who treats magic more like a pressure valve, which isn't bad i want to reiterate, just different; i'm thinking about a game with these two different kind of approach to magic as a differentiation in class, uhuh, i think that would really be cool.
on that note, if in the future i wanted to make a full fledged game and returned to these ideas plus yours, can i use it with credit?
This is very good!
I would add a rule: you can decrease a die result to kncrease the other. That way you have a little bit of agency on the result of the die.
What is the use license for this?
Also, you might want to publish this as a piece of MOSAIC Strict since it's small and system agnostic.
Hey, thanks! Glad you like it!
Your suggestion is indeed pretty cool, I might genuinely add it (I'll credit you if that's the case), I just need to think wether it fits as a base rule or as an additional one as suggestion for effect for equip, abilities, ecc, to keep the overall atmosphere of this system.
for the license, I indicated in the info in this page creative Commons 1.0, the free for all one uhuh.
I searched this mosaic strict you suggested and it's indeed a really interesting way of categorizing this things, but what would it mean to publish it as a piece of it? Just adding it in the description to let people know what it is?