Zero, My Hero
Aug. 22nd, 2005 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alfvaenIn my recent rereadings of 1st Edition AD&D books, I ran across an issue which I remember proved incredibly annoying back when I used to play: first-level magic-user spells. Or, to be more precise, the starting spells of a first-level magic-user.
The Player's Handbook had a table under Intelligence, which had "% Chance To Know Spell", "Max. Spells/Level", and "Min. Spells/Level". The procedure they described was this: you go through the list of first-level spells in any order you want, rolling percentile dice for each one. You stop if you get to your maximum number of spells; if you go through the whole list and don't get your minimum, then you start going through a second time until you get them. I seem to recall that you could try again to learn the spell every time you ran across it, or something.
The Dungeon Master's Guide, on the other hand, says that each first-level magic-user starts with a set of four, or possibly five, spells, that their master gives them, and the rest of them have to actually be found somewhere before they can be learned. It seems to imply there that the spells that you selected according to the Player's Handbook are not the spells that you know, they're the ones that you can know. If you get a bad roll on "Magic Missile", which as everyone knows is the indispensible first-level attack spell, then your character may never be able to learn it. If your luck is bad enough, you may end up with a wizard who can never learn any offensive spells whatsoever.
Frankly, neither method makes much sense to me. Except for exceptionally stupid magic-users, I don't see why any of them should find learning any particular spell to be insuperable. Maybe it takes nine or ten tries, but for it to ruled impossible right off the bat? On the other hand, it does make sense that a magic-user only be able to learn the spells that they actually run across. It describes, in the DMG, a very mercenary philosophy of spell exchange, given the fact that acquiring new ones is so difficult.
But then, the whole AD&D magic philosophy(at least as far as 1st Edition, and, IIRC, 2nd Edition, goes)was a little bit wonky. I have never run across any other single roleplaying system that used anything similar. I mean, you memorize a spell, and then you cast it, and you can't use it again until you memorize it again(unless, of course, you memorized it twice!). Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" novels are the only books I seem to recall that came close to this system. It makes low-level magic-users weak and inflexible--heaven forfend that you happened to memorize "Charm Person" and then wish you had "Hold Portal" instead when you're trapped in a small room by a horde of uncharmable zombies.
And it's not like there aren't alternatives. Dragonquest treated each spell as a separate skill that could be learned, which is not that unreasonable, and they cost a certain amount of Fatigue to cast. In Fantasy Hero, they're abilities which can be bought, and even improved over time by spending more skill points on them; they cost Endurance to cast. High Fantasy had "mana", which you acquired more of as you became more powerful, and exhausted as you cast; you still had to acquire spells from spell books, but there was no question of failing to do so. In other words, using magic was generally seen as something that drew off of the strength of the caster, bodily or otherwise, and that strength was renewable. Even in the computer game Wizardry, when you had spells divided into levels and you could only cast a certain number of each before resting, you could pick which spells you wanted at casting time.
I'd be curious to hear how other people dealt with the first-level magic-user spell issue. We just tended to start with third-level or higher characters, and gloss over the whole question of where their spells came from.
The Player's Handbook had a table under Intelligence, which had "% Chance To Know Spell", "Max. Spells/Level", and "Min. Spells/Level". The procedure they described was this: you go through the list of first-level spells in any order you want, rolling percentile dice for each one. You stop if you get to your maximum number of spells; if you go through the whole list and don't get your minimum, then you start going through a second time until you get them. I seem to recall that you could try again to learn the spell every time you ran across it, or something.
The Dungeon Master's Guide, on the other hand, says that each first-level magic-user starts with a set of four, or possibly five, spells, that their master gives them, and the rest of them have to actually be found somewhere before they can be learned. It seems to imply there that the spells that you selected according to the Player's Handbook are not the spells that you know, they're the ones that you can know. If you get a bad roll on "Magic Missile", which as everyone knows is the indispensible first-level attack spell, then your character may never be able to learn it. If your luck is bad enough, you may end up with a wizard who can never learn any offensive spells whatsoever.
Frankly, neither method makes much sense to me. Except for exceptionally stupid magic-users, I don't see why any of them should find learning any particular spell to be insuperable. Maybe it takes nine or ten tries, but for it to ruled impossible right off the bat? On the other hand, it does make sense that a magic-user only be able to learn the spells that they actually run across. It describes, in the DMG, a very mercenary philosophy of spell exchange, given the fact that acquiring new ones is so difficult.
But then, the whole AD&D magic philosophy(at least as far as 1st Edition, and, IIRC, 2nd Edition, goes)was a little bit wonky. I have never run across any other single roleplaying system that used anything similar. I mean, you memorize a spell, and then you cast it, and you can't use it again until you memorize it again(unless, of course, you memorized it twice!). Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" novels are the only books I seem to recall that came close to this system. It makes low-level magic-users weak and inflexible--heaven forfend that you happened to memorize "Charm Person" and then wish you had "Hold Portal" instead when you're trapped in a small room by a horde of uncharmable zombies.
And it's not like there aren't alternatives. Dragonquest treated each spell as a separate skill that could be learned, which is not that unreasonable, and they cost a certain amount of Fatigue to cast. In Fantasy Hero, they're abilities which can be bought, and even improved over time by spending more skill points on them; they cost Endurance to cast. High Fantasy had "mana", which you acquired more of as you became more powerful, and exhausted as you cast; you still had to acquire spells from spell books, but there was no question of failing to do so. In other words, using magic was generally seen as something that drew off of the strength of the caster, bodily or otherwise, and that strength was renewable. Even in the computer game Wizardry, when you had spells divided into levels and you could only cast a certain number of each before resting, you could pick which spells you wanted at casting time.
I'd be curious to hear how other people dealt with the first-level magic-user spell issue. We just tended to start with third-level or higher characters, and gloss over the whole question of where their spells came from.
