Do Dragons And Dungeons Still Employ Actual Spells?

I can definitely appreciate this thought process. Personally, I’m not sure if I’d enjoy using it. A lot of 5e spells are already pretty feast-or-famine (i.e. save or suck spells), and adding another necessary dice roll exacerbates that. It already sucks when you botch an Inflict Wounds attack roll, or the enemy rolls really well to save against Polymorph or Disintegrate. And getting a critical Fireball or Hold Person would probably end a lot of fights instantly. Which is super cool for the caster and would admittedly be hype as hell, but feels like it would widen the gap between casters and martials even more. That being said, I can appreciate the idea that even if I botch my Raise Dead, it doesn’t waste my opportunity to cast Bigby’s Hand instead, since they no longer share a resource. It would also encourage the use of utility spells like Silent Image and such, since you don’t need to “save” the spell slots for combat.

I haven’t gotten into 5e yet, but for my 3.5 casters I prefer using the alternate spell points rule in which removes spell slots from sorcerers and other spontaneous spellcasters, and wizards, clerics, etc. Had to prepare a spell only once (using up a single spell slot) to cast it as many times as you want using your spell points.

My friend has been building his own custom RPG system for a while now, and at one point when it was still pretty similar to D&D (it’s diverged a lot since then) this was the solution we came up with to differentiate wizards and sorcerers. Wizards used spell slots, just like in D&D, but sorcerers used a system just like this one – they could cast any spell they wanted as much as they wanted, provided they made the check to cast it. There were a few main differences: 1) Even if you failed the check to cast the spell, the spell still went off. Losing your action entirely when you fail a spellcasting check sucks, especially when it’s expected that it’ll happen multiple times every day. You still suffer an arcane mishap if you fail the spell, though (usually self-damage, but sometimes it would randomly hit a different target, etc). 2) When you failed a spellcasting check, you lost the ability to cast spells of that level until you rested, not that particular spell. So failing to cast Fireball would lock you out of casting third-level spells entirely. You could still upcast them, though – so you would be able to cast Fireball at 4th level still if you wanted to (but then the check was harder, and you risked losing fourth level slots instead). 3) Because this was sorcerer-specific, instead of being part of all magic, sorcerers got several class features to mitigate the downsides. As they leveled, they got the ability to ritual-cast any spell, which guaranteed success (allowing them to still use utility spells out of combat without crippling their combat potential), as well as resistance to damage from arcane mishaps and improved chances to cast low-level spells without losing them.

I had a DM who didn’t follow the ‘spell casting limit’ per say. Whenever we were in an area, he would have a spell pool he would keep track up for the area, and all casters inside the area would drain the pool until it was at zero. Sometimes it was a slug fest, sometimes it was very sparse. He’d have ways to bring that pool up during the battle, but he also had it set up so that whenever a spell was cast and the pool was drained, the caster would lose health equal to the spell level that could only be recovered by resting (temporary max HP damage). His comment was that you were using your own energy to create the spell. He had some ways to prevent max HP damage (consuming the soul of your fallen enemy was a particularly spicy one). Mix in a wild magic style system, and it really made casting something like playing with the Warp.

This is similar to how Cypher System handles abilities and magic. You can eventually get to where you can use them as much as you want, but all abilities have a cost, and you have 3 pools to spend from; Might, Speed, & Intellect. Each ability pulls from a different pool and you can get better at spending from a particular pool as you go, but these pools are also your HP. If your speed hits 0, you can’t physically move from where you are, might would remove the bonus to damage on attacks and you can’t apply ‘effort’ to rolls (using from a pool to reduce the DC of a check) and intellect running out can mean you pass out, go into shock or become panicked. If all three pools hit 0, you’re dead, no questions asked. And your enemies may not always go for only a single pool, I love catching my friend’s big strong hunter off-guard with some ‘psychic’ damage straight at his INT pool when he gets cocky, and when they haven’t built up that pool much they really feel it. I really like seeing them gamble on one last powerful spell that could leave them at death’s door only to have it save the day. It feels a lot more dynamic and risky that way.

I genuinely love the idea but it feels unfair for a table. If you arent a magic user, you arent at risk using your abilities, unless you have a particularly cruel DM when it comes to NAT 1s. It seems unfair to have magic users be in the crosshairs of unpredicatable outcomes constantly, while non magic users dont have to. It feels like ultimately magic users are being punished for doing what they are supposed to. Is it fun and narratively interesting? Sure but after a time you’ll probably get frustrated players.

After moving away from 5e, I started developing my own system, and one of my biggest problems with 5e was Spell Slots, which was one of the first things I removed and reworked. What I did was give players a list of Known Spells, much like 5e, but instead of giving them leveled slots that restrict the number of times they can cast a number of spells at each level, I gave them Mana Points to spend. Every Spell Level (from 1 through 10) describes how many Mana Points must be spent to cast them, and spells can be Upcast based on each individual spell’s description, as some spells cost more to Upcast than others, and each spell has a limit to how many times it can be upcast as well. The number of Mana Points a player has is USUALLY equal to their Charisma Modifier (for non-Class Spellcasting purposes), but taking the Spellcasting Perk from a Caster Class changes your Magicka Pool to equal your Primary Spellcasting Ability Score (Wizards get Mana Points equal to their Intelligence Score, for example). No spells cost 0 Mana Points, so spellcasting is not infinite, and after reaching level 5 in any Spellcasting Class, Casters also gain the ability to expend a Hit Die to recover spent Mana Points.

I started using spell points for my big homebrew world, and it fixed so much about the setting. It let me easily incorporate potions that recover magic, have magic items grow with users more organically, and create a system of risk where pulling more magic than you are normally capable and losing control of it causes an arcane explosion focused on the caster

I’ve used a similar variant for Spell Scrolls. I allow anyone to cast from any scroll, but they must use a Skill Check. 10 + Spell Level. The skill used depends on the nature of the scroll. Wizard Spells Arcane Cleric Religion, Bard Performance, Sorcerer Persuasion, Warlock Deception. If the check fails, the scroll is consumed and the spell doesn’t work. I also allow Arcane to replace Detect Magic and Identify. Makes the skill a bit more useful and stops the 10 minute Ritual cast. I’ve wondered about a system like this after playing Shadowrun. Where casters have to “make a save” (Drain) based on the spells force. I also like that in Shadowrun, if you know a spell, you know a spell. You can always cast a weaker spell, e.g. smaller or weaker Fire Ball and make the drain easier. Up casting makes the spell drain harder to resist, but gives a bigger bang. If you cast beyond your ability, you might just end up blowing yourself up. The better spell caster you are, the easier you can resist drain. But it is always there. Material components and magical items (Spell focui) make casting easier.

I just started using spell points in my 5e game, but with the charts from Strar Wars 5e (SW5e). Base 5e uses a bunch of funky math whereas SW5e is very simple; each class has spell points equal to # x their level + their casting modifier. Wizards have 4 times their level, so a 2nd level Wizard with a +3 bonus has 4 x 2 + 3 spell points. From there, casting a spell beyond a cantrip costs the spell level + 1, so 1st level is 2 points, 2nd level is 3 points, and so on. The last tweak I added is that you can reduce your current and total hit points by any number of points to regain the same number of spell points (up to your maximum), but can only regain those hit points on a long rest. And, in the opposite direction, you can expend any number of spell points to gain an equal number of temporary hit points.

I had a low magic system where humanoids were just not powerful enough to cast traditional spells (although many supernatural creatures were), and every spell was essentially a ritual. I stole the Diabolist and Summoner spells from the original Paladium RPG. So essentially, to cast a spell, you had to take time to draw wards or an elaborate circle. There were also certain mixtures of herbs and plants you could burn to create fumes as well, or things like medicine bags/hex bags that could be created and carried around after “charging them” when you create them. Then I stole the PPE system from Rifts, where each “spell” had a “mana cost”. There were spell components that you could sacrifice that had certain “mana values” to power your spell (like dragon bones or pixie dust). Alternatively, there were also ley lines that crisscrossed the planet of varying power (some were more powerful than others) If you were near one, it would give off some energy that you could use to power “spells”. These lines waxed and waned in power, and at certain times they would be more powerful than at other times (like at midnight there would be a x2 multiplier, or a x10 multiplier at certain yearly events like vernal equinox). Where lines crossed they would be particularly powerful and be able to fuel even the most powerful spells (like resurrection and wish-type spells). The downside is that these large places of power also caused creatures to sometimes spill in from the spirit world when they were at their most powerful which sometimes had to be dealt with.

this is such an interesting idea! it reminds me of my favorite part of the monster of the geek system that when you roll to cast magic, you can fail and the GM takes a hard move- it forces you to think about whether or not the risk is worth the potential reward- exactly what i find so intriguing about this d20 test element to casting!

By that logic a ninth level spell has a base 10% chance to succeed? Heck a fifth has a 70% chance to fail? Even with the highest bonus they would be 35% and 55% chances to succeed respectively. Why would anyone risk the higher level magics? I suppose since most players never reach such levels the point is moot but still those levels seem to be outside all but the most optimized builds reach. Unless the campaign is set in a low magic setting. I can see such limitations if the world is not so dependent on magic since it will effectively limit the possibility of success at casting magic.

Had a dm try something similar. He was the only one in the group who would dm so we had to go along with it but all the players unanimously decided none of us eould do characters that had the ability to cast any spells at all since we were against it. After a few sessions our table just decided to permanently remove magic as a player option entirely. Magic is solely the province of a select few magic beasts almost all evil or villains. Been a lot of fun the past few years

I’ve had this concept as well, but it was back in 3.5, so the DC was 15+spell level. In 5th edition, I use spell points instead of slots.rather than lose the spell each time it’s cast, you can cast as long as you have spell points. The version they have in the DMG is fine, but what I do is have people have points equal to their con modifier plus spellcasting ability score modifier at first level, plus their spellcasting ability score modifier every level. Instead of using the DMG costs for spells, I simply have the cost be the spell’s level. You could easily use the spell roll as mentioned in the article along with spell points, it gives players power to play with, but also makes it so that the caster has to decide if casting a big spell is worth it, since casting big spells costs more points than minor spells.

Semi-related idea I had: You roll to generate spell slots when you cast. So when you go to cast lets say Fireball you roll to see what level of spell slot you cast it with. If the result is lower than the spell level if fizzles out and the casting fails. If it’s higher than you can actually cast then it goes to the highest you can cast. Some spells have a cap that is lower, 5th level max or so.

I am definitely intrigued and interested by this version of magic casting. There has always been something missing from Vancian casting systems, and your system seems to have a better flavor than RAW. I have a home-brew campaign I’ve been working on and I think I’m going to integrate this into the campaign.

This is excellent. Definitely adding this to the “homebrew I want to use in that campaign I want to run… someday” pile. In regards to caster power, I appreciate cantrips not scaling, removing one way in which they compete with martials, though not at low levels, which is fine. I have a few questions, though, and a couple of tweaks I’d suggest. My questions: 1) What damage type did you envision for the potential damage dealt after rolling a 1? I suppose you could just have it be undefined damage, but I think it would be cool and add an interesting angle if it did the same type of damage as the spell would normally do, if the spell has a damage type. This would give characters resistant to that damage type more incentive to pick those spells, and we always need more reasons for players to vary their spell choices. (I’m again saddened that no character is by nature vulnerable to damage types, as this would have added another angle, both in character concept and in making hard choices during gameplay.) This does leave the question of what damage types to use if the spell has multiple, or none. 2) When you wrote “double the area” as one of the choices after rolling a 20, did you mean “double the number used to determine the area”? Since doubling the radius of a circle ups the area by considerably more than double, but having to calculate the exact shape of an area after it is doubled would be a pain in the arse. 3) How would you handle ritual spells, since with there being no spell slot to lose the advantage of casting a spell as a ritual becomes naught?

So there is no “right or wrong way of playing D&D”… but why don’t you just play completely different system that actually reflects the way you want it to work? Dungeon World is very light system without a spell slots and with consequences of failed spellcasting roll. It’s even more streamlined than 5e and is much easier to “balance out” these types of “hacks”. Heck, it’s even more moldable than D&D will ever be.

I really like the idea of removing spell slots, as they’ve always felt unfitting for most fantasy worlds. However, I think keeping track of each spell and if you have it available or not is going to lead to a lot of book keeping, which is something I’d like to stay away from. Therefore, I’ve come up with an idea; what if you had a mana die instead? It would start at a d4, and whenever you reached a level in a spellcasting class that raised your proficiency bonus, it would increase by one; so at 5th level it would be a d6, and 9th level a d8, and so on, up to a maximum of d12. When you cast a spell, you would roll your mana die, and if you roll higher than your mana die, the spell fails unless you invoke blood magic, and in addition your mana die would drop one size. So for example, a 9th level caster would have a d8; if they wanted to cast a 3rd level spell, they would roll it, and on a 4 or higher they would cast it without spending resources. On a 1-3 they would need to use their blood magic or be unable to cast it, and regardless of their choice, their mana die would drop to a d6. They could still try to cast 3rd or even 4th level spells, but the chance of failure and dropping to a d4 would be much higher, causing a risk vs reward effect. I’d love to hear thoughts about the idea.

This is how it also works in Dungeon World! For wizards, when they cast an arcane spell, they always need to make a roll, and there’s no spell slots involved. There’s 3 tiers of success: 1) success, 2) success at a cost, 3) failure. Even in failure, it doesn’t mean that the spell isn’t cast necessarily, but there’s consequences. The Wizard might have to forget the spell for the day, take a minus, or the spell might go awry and cause problems itself. For success at a cost, there’s the chance that the spell is forgoten, or not forgoten but a there’s a -1 to future spellcasting rolls, etc.

Thanks for the vid! I’m about to run a wands and wizards home brew (Harry Potter style) and it didn’t make sense that they can only fire off a spell once till they rest in that world. I was planning on using a scaling value for the spells based on how long they have known the spell and this helps a lot.

I’m in the process of making my own TTRPG, and actually use a similar system to this. I like having classes of spell, with lower level spells being on larger die for more chances at success, while Higher Tier Magic requires certain attained perks and/or rolling well on small die, with some of the most powerful being on as small as a d6 or d4, with one spell being strong enough it basically needs a critical success on a d4 to properly succeed, with a critical failure potentially killing the caster if they don’t have enough health. I feel like this method allows for some balance by having powerful spells still be risky for higher level characters but much less risky than for low level characters.

The “roll to cast” feels very similar to what I remember from the older editions, though I’m not sure where the rules started and ended. But iirc: -The character’s spellcasting ability score had to equal 10 + the spell’s level -Concentrating (in the event of damage) on and saving against a spell was weighed on a DC of 10 (or 8) + the spell’s level + the caster’s asb + any relevant bonuses – any relevant penalties -arcane casters in armor suffered Arcane Casting Failure which was a % chance to fail the cast regardless of the other rolls.

Halfling’s lucky feature kinda breaks this system when you consider at a certain point with your proficiency bonus plus ability modifier (6 + 5 for a +11 if going by 5e), you cannot fail at casting 1st-3rd level spells unless you roll a nat 1. And, when your plus to succeed that DC is that high, you only need to roll an 8+ to cast a 9th level spell, so you wouldn’t have to get that lucky to be casting multiple 9th level spells per combat, which is crazy since in 5e you only get 1 of them until you long rest.

Blood magic helps with that a lot and I generally like the Blood magic (and/or Magenergy) systems. That said, Dračí doupě (literally Dragon’s Lair, the Czech TTRPG from 90’s heavily influenced by DnD) used both “Roll to cast” and Magenergy system at once and once people learned that, the Roll to cast was generally the first to get booted. That said, the chance to cast a spell successfully was pretty horrendous and combined with another limiting factor of magenergy made casters – especially lower-level casters – more often than not nothing but dead weight with 0 successfully cast spells that day.

I think what would be nice for dnd is a multi-part solution. This is just a brief description, so I’m sure there are holes in it. But a few changes as follows could really change the average adventuring day and how DMs approach what they throw at their players day to day. To start, I think cantrips use and viability should be extended to include more spell like functions. This would allow casters to not feel forced to force a party rest when they are tapped because of longer dungeon crawls or a particular busy day. I think u have to hard limit cantrips then to core magic users most likely. I’m not 100% sure how this would work or what it would look like, but if some of your prepared spells had simplified effects and could be cast as easier “inherent” cantrips it would allow casters to feel somewhat useful even when tapped out. Then I think for the more pure martial classes, they need access to their “battle master” type tactics across the board. These should just be made instead for the martial classes, giving them much needed versatility out of the gate and leaving their feat choices more open then to choose more flavor options to build the type of fighter or barbarian they envision instead of choosing what you feel is most meta for the class. The martial classes pretty much do the best most consistent damage across the board, and just gives them room to feel like they can build towards something more then just raw damage output. Its a pretty big overhaul to the whole system and I’m sure there would be lots of bugs to work out, but I’d love to take the time to try and work out the details and try out a system with these ideas implemented.

TL:DR – I don’t like this idea. I think it has some problems… but keep working at it, there is something interesting here. If I were mid-campaign and the DM decided to make this kind of risky spellcasting a rule, I’m not sure I’d stay in the campaign unless this risky casting were optional. I would not join a game that already had this rule. When I play D&D, or Pathfinder, I view casting (Wizard spellcasting especially) as being kind of like magical engineering. That is, you do a thousand calculations and adjustments with the intent of making A Spell That Just Works. Spell backfires or failures would be kind of like a car battery that explodes, or a fan that spins so fast it rips itself apart: it’s a sign that you didn’t do your work properly. (This same thinking can be applied to Bardic casting, but more focused on musical or artistic composition.) This thinking immediately suggests that custom spells could be developed which have some unexpected results. Just as you can overclock a CPU to go faster, but risk it becoming unstable and Blue Screening, you can overclock your Fireball, but risk it dropping at your feet. Or you could go full Mad Scientist and push your magic to its limits, making a very powerful but extremely unstable spell. For a certain kind of player that’s very appealing, so you are indeed hitting on Something Of Interest. When it comes to Divine casting, since your magic is coming directly or semi-directly from your deity, whom presumably would prefer if you could continue to serve them, and whom presumably knows SOMETHING about what the hell they’re doing, this kind of risky spellcasting becomes harder to justify, unless you have a Chaotic deity I guess.

my personal favorite magic system in a ttrpg right now is the on in Genesys. It’s generic so it’s made for hacking up however you want to fit your setting, and it has inherent risks for each spell due to the narrative dice mechanics. You build a spell based on the effects you want, each one altering the difficulty of the roll; think, a simplified version of Mage the Ascension. This difficulty can be altered in your favor via a focus specialized for the type of spell you’re casting or talents that make signature spells easier to cast. Even if the spell succeeds, there is potential for negative repercussions, some as gentle as taking minor damage or a penalty on casting until the end of their next turn, or as catastrophic as the destruction of a magic item or losing the ability to cast any magic until the end of the encounter. Magic is fairly potent, so even when you take one of the minor penalties it’s worth the risk. The risks and rewards increase in tandem with more powerful magic. There’s no spell slots, the amount of magic you cast relies solely on how much strain your character can take, and if you overreach you’re incapacitated.

I like the Metagaming Wizard (pre-GURPS) spell casting. Spells utilized strength – the idea is that you can only cast based on your strength before you are too tired to case. As to success, you rolled under your IQ score for success (it was a 3d6 game). It provides a chance of failure, and a more flexible magic system, while limiting how powerful casters can be.

hi ! i really love this idea; i use D&D Beyond for my games & i am trying to figure out a way to implement this in a way that would be easier for my players to use – if you have any experience, do you know of ways to do that? also, been loving your articles recently, & i’m definitely gonna implement your long rest rules in my game 🙂 excited to see what else you have in store for this website ! <3

I know its sort of off topic but what I thought you meant about getting rid of spell slots was going to be something similar I did for my game: I’ve seen the Spell points variant rule in the DMG and I don’t like it. Using a secondary table to count an arbitrary list of points is silly. Instead I just added the created a “Mana pool” made out of a classes sum total of spell slots. lvl 1 = 1, lvl 2 =2 & so on. So it would look like a 5th level caster has something like 30 Mana points & then you just subtract the points by the spell level. It makes it sooo much easier & it provides your players with the flexibilty of casting more spells at a low scale or conversely, less spells at an explosive scale. Surely someone has tried this before right?

I reworked the entire D&D spell casting classes all the way back with 2.0 and even stopped buying their shit rulebooks after 3.0, went back to 2.5 and have not looked back. A DM must be free from the confines of someone else’s rules once he has…mastered…how to run a campaign. Anyway. None of this “Must re-learn” spells after casting and being limited to how many times you can cast it garbage. The magic user already has enough limitations on them by TIME to cast that also requires full concentration, hand movement/reagents and the like that prevents them from just quickly casting fireball after fireball and wiping out a battlefield themselves.

If you want magic to be deadly here’s what you do: Use hit die as spell slots + your casting ability Modifier + proficiency bonus. Where each hit die has the capability of only a single level 1 spell slot and adding one more increases your spells level. However, you can cast beyond that and the character loses hit points equal to the roll of hit die used for the spell. Therefore you can push beyond the limits but at a terrible price.

Interersting, I was working on a system of blood magic so I clicked when this appeared on my page. My Idea of a blood magic system was a bit different: You shoot a dice to know the dmg you’ll take and there is no spell slots. and the higher the spell level, the bigger dice you throw. Lvl1: D4 Lvl2: D6 Lvl3: D8 Lvl4: D10 etc etc etc. But I was going to offer it as a deal they can make with a character, that will get in return this health. And that they can refuse if they don’t appreciate it

Sounds like something worth trying in a one-shot, but I don’t think it would remain fun for very long. The balance of the casting DC would need to walk on a razor’s edge between making casters even more powerful than they already are or making them so inconsistent that casters aren’t any fun. This could be a really fun homebrew for Wild Magic Sorcerer though, since that subclass already attracts people who want to create mayhem and chaos.

I like how magic works in Call of Cthulhu. Magic is hard to learn and doing so takes weeks. And when you do cast it, you’re probably going to o be making at least two rolls to see if it works, and then you’re going to have to sacrifice some of your health and even some points of your attributes in most cases because you only have a limited about of Magic Points. But when that spell goes off and it’s successful, it’s amazing. In D&D, you can summon a demon that sticks around for like a minute and deals like ~20 damage per round. In Call of Cthulhu, guy summon a Dimensional Shambler and tell it to get rid of a guy and it takes him to a place so alien that the concept of “coming back” simply doesn’t exist.

“I want magic to be dangerous, behave inconsistently, and have significant impact when it’s used.” So it’s cool that you found a hack to make this work for you in 5e, but…why not just use another rpg system? Because I guarantee there are several that hit at least two of these categories, and probably more than one that hits all three

I’ve actually been considering something similar to this to try and balance casters out a bit. The casting ability of wizards is so far beyond every other caster in terms of spells known, sheer size of their spell list, and casts per day with spell slots that it can make everything else feel underwhelming at times. Particularly with warlocks, the spell slot system hurts the most. At best, with two short rests, you get 12 casts of 5th level slots, of which can be lower level spells that may not have any upcasting feature, and 1 each of 6th through 9th level spells, which you don’t even get options in. You only ever know one 6th through 9th level spell at a time. Warlocks are so cool thematically but they can really feel like the Monk of casters at times because of the spell slot system.

While I’d never want to go back to crunch 3E Shadowrun, the magic rules (and delicious fluff) had this vibe of Magic is strange and scary and dangerous. Casting spells meant rolling to reduce the damage, the psychological and physical trauma from being a conduit for magic. Casting at your normal levels meant rolling against stun damage. Headaches, tiredness, dizzyness, nausea, and eventually unconsciousness. Trying to draw more power (casting a spell above your Magic stat) meant rolling physical. Hemmhorage from the ears, nose and mouth, burns, ruptured organs, and maybe even death. It made magic feel intense and fit the cyberpunk setting, that you were very dangerous but very fragile and power came at the edge of a precipice into a death spiral. Of course that got slightly neutered by the community figuring out a rules hack using pain/damage reducing Bioware to make upcasting to take physical damage safer and more powerful but that’s another thing.

So this is a bit as the wild magic of the sorcerer 🙂 And actually this is very similar to how I made my first sorcerer – I had a d20 check and had things happen – if it was below 8 the spell fails, if its above 12 it succeeds, in-between is some fun but harmless effect. Some fails turned into me taking damage… because I wanted to live dangerously 😀 And all spells were self made, some based on 5e, some on EverQuest and all looked awesome 😀

I enjoy the initial concept of this home ruling but I feel there are perhaps a few other RAW points that may have been looked over. 1 – With the spell level being equal to caster level this means that core casters cap out at lvl 9 and give world ending magic to characters that are not even half way through their potential. In addition half casters would also drastically acquire spell power very early. 2 – You covered warlocks in your FAQ but may have glossed over the many conflicts this class would have in this system. Consider that warlocks have a forced spell level, so each spell no matter what has an overtly high casting check (in comparison to their counter parts). Admittedly this may cause a balance by the spell slot limitation being removed but an unlucky warlock essentially becomes powerless by losing spell access to an already rather low spell pool while a lucky warlock becomes game breakingly over powered. (On a counter ruling of simply not have a forced level and casting at initial level, it takes away a large part of the intrigue of playing a warlock mechabically). Furthermore how would you handle evocation spells which give non spell slot use spells? Do these remain RAW? 3 – The clarifications/modifications to Arcane Recovery and Font of Magic seem uneeded and rather strict. Why not just retain their initial costs and allow recovery of lost spells of appropriate levels in place of spell slots? 4 – On the more facetious and not picking side, you covered spell attacks and saving throws against spell casting successes.

Zweihander uses an interesting spell-casting system. Basically ALL spells 🪄 therein require some material component that must be individually acquired; no “spell casting focus” of “spell component pouch 👝” on one’s person will account for that. Either you have a certain item in your pocket or you don’t. Also, spells 🪄 require a skill test (specifically using a skill called Invocation) in order to cast it. Now, in Zweihander, all rolls are made with the percentile dice (1D100, roll < or = to your stat/modified stat). Certain values rolled achieves different results. Rolling either 01, a "double" (11, 22, 33, etc) that’s also < your stat, or rolling your stat value (i.e., if you’ve got Willpower of 35 and Invocation+20, and assuming no other modifications, you need to roll a 55 or less) scores a Critical Success and boosts your spell. Just rolling under your skill+stat is a regular success and achieves the normal outcome. Getting higher than your stat is of course a failure and nothing happens. However, rolling either 00 or a double that’s also > your stat results in a Critical Failure and causes some kind of backlash effect, either your own spell targets yourself or you may suffer some other deleterious effect (bleeding, temporary disabling of an ability for the rest of the day, etc).