Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Magic in DQ

Having played Dragonquest over the years I am often prone to think that the designers envisioned everyone having some magic ability and attempting spell casting. Unlike D & D, when one entered a magical college they were able to choose a number of spells from that college limited only by their magical aptitude.  Beginning adepts started off with a variety of general knowledge spells that were often helpful. Special knowledge spells often aided combat or helped in more profound ways. One’s MA not only determined the number of spells one could memorize, it also effected the casting percentage and cost to learn a given spell. As I kick around the idea of magic in a new campaign I am tempted to abolish colleges and go with a more generalized practitioner of magics. In my current campaign there are 24 different colleges which are all exclusive. It’s one of the things I like about DQ, but also one of the limitations of going with a focused practitioner of magic. I am thinking of breaking down the colleges into various groups of magic from which an adept can choose spells. Right now I am thinking of five general practitioners:  Elementalist - Psychic - Magician - Necromancer – Sorcerer. Hopefully with those titles the basic focus is self explanatory, the one real difference would be sorcerers who could learn any type of spell but are more limited in the number of spells they can learn.

8 comments:

  1. A post about DQ magic with no references to Blizzards or Dipped Cones? WTF, Padre? :)

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  2. At least you didn't mention the ritual magic needed to make a peanut buster parfait. :-)

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  3. New to the party -- DragonQuest, eh?

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  4. Yeah, the old SPI Dragonquest, not to be confused with a video game of a similar name.

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  5. I seem to remember playing this once, a long time ago. I can't find a copy online, but refresh my memory -- was this the one with possible infection rules from small cuts?

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  6. You can download the whole file here:
    http://www.dragonquestfrontiers.com/files/DQ2BantamComplete.pdf

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  7. I do recall being completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of different magic schools to choose from in DQ. I like the concept of having "basic" schools to start with. Maybe once you've got a few ranks in half a dozen basic spells, that gives you the ability to learn specialized school spells? Assuming you've found a teacher, of course.

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  8. I always like the idea of magical colleges and the division of magic into talent, general, special and ritual magic. I thought it was a good fourfold division of spells. For the most part the colleges all made sense as much as anything can in a fantasy world

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