Comments on: From Diablo 3 to D&D: Socketed Items

By: PW_Shea

PW_Shea — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 16:05:16 +0000

The 3.x Iron Kingdoms pnp RPG that Privateer Press used to publish has a similar socketing mechanic that might be worth checking out if you start needing more in-depth mechanics. IIRC, it’s covered in both the Character Guide and the Liber Mechanika.

By: Morgan Boehringer

Morgan Boehringer — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 05:48:56 +0000

Would you believe a mix of hand-waving and DM’s fiat? Luckily there was often only a druid DMPC and a low-level Paladin or Ranger (they got Druid spells as well as Magic-User back in the blissfully wacky day!) in the crew, so it wasn’t much of an issue… I did have a protean idea of cleric’s petitioning their church instead of their gods for rights to cast, which would have made for a great thematic reason to diminish divine casting – divine bureaucracy!… Druid’s would likely have had an easier time under this system, but Druid Circle’s could be just as controlling…
I know it’s completely unfair to all concerned, but hey, that’s life. I have no problem with an unfair/non-level playing field as a player, and implement one when necessary for theme or flavor as a GM.
Your article has me envisaging dredging up that old campaign with some new players…:)

By: Jerry LeNeave

Jerry LeNeave — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:41:32 +0000

@Morgan Thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed it, I’m about to kick off a big inner-city campaign next week and I’m going to toss the idea of these out there and mention that there’s a specialty shop somewhere in the city that may deal in these things. Leave it as a scarcity/wonder idea and see if the players gravitate towards it. We’ll see how it turns out.

I really like your idea of spell crystals in a low magic game, it’s always nice to have a really thematic explanation to things instead of just “this is a low magic game, magic is low because I said so”. So if I may ask, how did you handle divine spells in this scenario?

By: Morgan Boehringer

Morgan Boehringer — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:06:51 +0000

Nice one again Jerry. I’m enjoying this series of articles quite a bit – it’s nice to see the borrowing going in the other direction – from PC-Games to P’n'P…

While not the same as this system, I had a vaguely similar system in place for a low-magic (yep, he said low-magic, uh-oh, there goes the neighborhood) campaign that used “spell-crystals” as the power source for casting arcane spells.
Spell-crystals could not be fashioned (except by extremely knowledgable and powerful individuals) and were most often mined at great cost or found in hoards held by dragons and other great beasties. Different colored crystals correlated to different types of magic, and facets gave the relative power level the spell-crystal could impart, the spell-crystal burning out upon casting the spell… (This was waaaay before Sorcerers and explicit schools of magic existed….we’re talking 1E)
It made for very judicious hoarding and storing, stealing and seeking of spell-crystals and created a nice flavor reason why magic was rare generally.

Divine magic was an altogether more complicated affair, and not as successful. Damn holy-types….