Now that we all completely (?) understand the mechanics of spell-casting in Genesys, I'm wondering how people plan to implement it in their games. Will you define specific campaign spells, combining spell and add-ons (examples: firestrike=attack, fireball=attack+blast)? Will you simply make the entire casting system open to characters, such that as long as they invest in magic skills they can pick and choose what they want? Will spells be immediately available, purchased with XP, or purchased with cash?

I had already kicked mine off making separate spell trees in OggDude's app, so I will stick with that. I'll definitely pull from the book for things I haven't gotten into yet, particularly conjuration and augment.

7 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

I had already kicked mine off making separate spell trees in OggDude's app, so I will stick with that. I'll definitely pull from the book for things I haven't gotten into yet, particularly conjuration and augment.

So specific spells have an XP costs and prerequisite spells?

I think it really depends on the setting being run, and I'm not really sure there's a single answer for me.

Giving all PCs free access to what's in the book is by far the easiest solution, as it requires basically no preparation. The only cost would be skill ranks. The problem, to me, is it could lead to characters being very similar.

The GM creating individual spells from the options in the book is more involved, but lends itself to more diversity, and it looks like that's what the GenCon characters where built around. With this method, I feel some additional XP cost is necessary. A tier 1 ranked talent seems the simplest: add 1 spell to your repertoire per rank.

As a compromise between the two methods, you could certainly allow players to design their own spells. Choose a type of spell, give it a flavor, and choose X number of upgrades. Each character will only have access to that spell, and learning new spells or adding new upgrades to the spell would cost XP.

1 minute ago, Swordbreaker said:

As a compromise between the two methods, you could certainly allow players to design their own spells. Choose a type of spell, give it a flavor, and choose X number of upgrades. Each character will only have access to that spell, and learning new spells or adding new upgrades to the spell would cost XP.

I've been considering building a spell crafting system, with a ranked talent for each of the core book spells. Each time a character buys a talent, they could craft whatever combination of add-on's they wanted out of the book to make a new, specific spell. Maybe the base spell would be free.

After buying the talent, I'd still require a Knowledge roll of difficulty=talent tier and sufficient free time for the character to make the attempt, with no limit on the number of attempts.

11 minutes ago, TheSapient said:

So specific spells have an XP costs and prerequisite spells?

Specific spells do, and then they have a tree of options and upgrades with them that cost xp. Having said that though, I am rewarding tomes n scrolls and such that provide either the base spell or some upgrade to it. I intended for my items I hand out to do the same as well, which all of those do in some part in the book.

Rough outline as I'm still working on mine and plan to post it in the next couple of days.

The number of Disciplines a caster will now will be equal to their ranks in the equivalent skill, though everyone starts with attack. This limits a caster to at most five Disciplines total; so a character with 3 Ranks in Primal would have Attack, Heal, Augment, and Conjure. They could select a new Discipline the next time they gain a rank in Primal.

Because there are not enough Disciplines at the moment, I'm creating three more: Divination (Divine/Primal), Enchantment (Arcana/Primal), and Illusion (Arcana/Divine). I've almost finished writing up the tables, but Enchantment is giving me some issues.

I'm also going to add a few more Implements (Totems, Rods, Tomes, Instruments, "Weapons") and maybe a talent or two.

I might have the "Additional Effects" end up tied to XP, but I've not decided. If I do, they would be minor, 5 XP for a one difficulty effect, 10 XP for a two etc. I might have this tied to Knowledge or Spellcasting Ranks, as in you get a number of them free equal to your ranks in the skill, but have to buy the others. I'll be balancing that against the "melee" talents I'm creating though so....we'll see. My table/group is very tactical (we play a heavily, heavily homebrewed version of D&D 4e...that is actually sort of close to how Genesys works now) so we all want a bit more crunch.

9 minutes ago, Cyvaris said:

The number of Disciplines a caster will now will be equal to their ranks in the equivalent skill, though everyone starts with attack. This limits a caster to at most five Disciplines total; so a character with 3 Ranks in Primal would have Attack, Heal, Augment, and Conjure. They could select a new Discipline the next time they gain a rank in Primal.

Because there are not enough Disciplines at the moment, I'm creating three more: Divination (Divine/Primal), Enchantment (Arcana/Primal), and Illusion (Arcana/Divine). I've almost finished writing up the tables, but Enchantment is giving me some issues.

Tying Disciplines to Skill Rank is something I was pondering. I like it.

More Disciplines is rough. For example...

Is Divination Combat Divination, or Ritual Divination? Because if it needs to be performed as an Action, isn't the end goal something like Augment (e.g., increased defenses from knowing what's coming, or increased attack because you know where your enemy will be). If it's a Ritual, why can't it be a Skill Roll?

EDITED to rephrase:

Tying Disciplines to skill ranks means that spell casting strength increases at the same rate as spell casting depth. You can cast one kind of spell poorly, two ok, three well, four very well, or five exceptionally.

I've had conversations about letting players pick 3-5 of the existing spell actions as spells they can cast, regardless of the skill. So Primal could cast Barrier and Dispel but they might not have chosen Conjure so they'll never be able to cast that.

The magic system is neat but it has a lot of flaws (looking at you, Heal) and I think that either the community will fix it up quickly or we'll just have to wait for the inevitable Runebound splat that includes all the stuff FFG withheld from the game post-playtest.

I had already converted Force Powers into Bending Forms for my Avatar: The Second Age conversion and in doing so, I genericized the rules to be more modular. Genesys really just streamlined a lot of those rules, and essentially went in the same direction I did (requiring the character suffer strain to use a power, regardless of whether it succeeds, for example). My Bending Forms were upgradeable like Force Powers and were set up as trees at first; users could change the difficulty or intensity of the bending form to change the way it behaved. Genesys did this as well with "Additional Effects"

I guess what I am saying is that I really didn't have to change too much . Except I got rid of trees and made it a bit more free-form like Genesys' layout.

Instead of benders having access to all of their forms at once, they have access to a couple of basic form actions (and maneuvers). Everything else must be acquired through experience. The "Additional Effects" are universal for each element, but each element has several effects unique to it. These tables are applicable to all of a bender's forms, but some forms have unique "Mastery" or "Finesse" upgrades. Finally, even though they have a base form (which is essentially just a magic skill check), the form can be upgraded with an Additional Effect (in Avatar its called Finesse) so that the user may employ that effect at any time for that form only . Benders can upgrade their forms up to five times, gaining one 'upgrade slot' per rank in the Bending Arts skill. Nearly all upgrades requires some amount of XP (5 - 20) depending on what the finesse does, and this is to reflect the training and learning that a bender needs to undergo in order to master their bending art.

1 hour ago, CitizenKeen said:

Is Divination Combat Divination, or Ritual Divination? Because if it needs to be performed as an Action, isn't the end goal something like Augment (e.g., increased defenses from knowing what's coming, or increased attack because you know where your enemy will be). If it's a Ritual, why can't it be a Skill Roll?

I used SW FaD's "Foresee" power as a skeleton , but also gave it a mechanical benefit; Easy difficulty Spell check that gives one boost die on the next non-combat skill check you make in the next hour. Additional effects then either grant more boost dice, let the boost dice apply to multiple skills/checks, or it applies in combat. You can also contact your deity/a spirit and ask it up to three questions and it answers to the best of its ability as a more Ritual/Skill Roll sort of power. Added a "Scrying" portion to it as well.

Ummm, well, I will allow the magic system as written in my campaign. I'm running sci-fi where quantum computing has become a nearly rote human trait (for savants). They use this paradoxical understanding of the make up of everything to manipulate it. So instead of seeing the world as white or black, they see both simultaneously, can effectively see the atoms exist in their duplicitous places and manipulate them. Hardly understood by even the scientist that created the first quantum computers, these people are often found and hired by governments to great effect.

With that said, yeah, they can use "magic" as written. So if someone had the conjure skill, they can run riot with it. I'm not going to charge extra experience where I don't need to. That doesn't mean I won't use a story point to let a conjurer portal in a transdimensional being that isn't controlled turn on the conjurer immediately...everything has a price.

If I wanted researching spells to play a roll, I would have each upgrade be separately researchable, which gives the flavor of magic being an "arcane" language you have to decode, you add a few words in the right order and it changes your flame strike into a fireball. But personally I would flavor it as "weaving threads of from the aether into a pattern", which means you have to be able to look into the aether to find and pull out threads of the appropriate type. Inserting stuff into the pattern to make a more complex pattern still gives the language Luke feel.

By the way research would be narrative, not cost xp.

Most probably I will approach the system as done on the characters at GenCon. Up to 2 or 3 spells moderately defined (base effect + additional effect + 1-2 Additional effects as options), and then go to some kind of research, or master seeking for more spells during play.

I was thinking on a tier 4 or 5 Talent that allows the character to make spells on the fly on a single "magical action",... and a in-game requirement to have 3 or more spells of that "area".

I'm also toying with additional actions, such Foresee, and Mind link,... and additional magic skills,... as Psychic magic (hence Mindlink action). Buy I have to think a lot about it....

I'm considering a natural built-in progression for certain settings. Say a player starts with a magic action and 1 additional effect. After they earn x amount of xp, they unlock either another effect for that action or another magic action, with no need to spend xp on it.