D20 Magic

There have been a lot of really thoughtful takes on magic lately, centering on significant ritualistic interactions (or even/especially transactions) with powerful beings—and I had just even gestured towards this being an angle for a tabletop Pokémon adaptation. Sorry to say that this one isn’t going to be particularly thoughtful. I realized that besides being sucky when my players run out of inspiration and can’t do magic anymore—for which my special game mommy inspiration has worked well—it feels weird for inspiration to work differently for magic than for the typical case.

Magic is just fundamentally a tool, right? Tools make impossible tasks possible, and tasks already possible more so. I already have a rule that using an arcana (item which stands in for some D&D spell or school) as a normal weapon, basically like a cantrip, costs the user no inspiration; and rolling 20+ already gives a free enhancement (like casting at range or targeting all enemies in one area of effect). Instead of spending inspiration to enhance the spell’s effects, then, why not just have the D20 roll determine how many enhancements you can add onto the magical attack? So now, magical attacks are just like normal attacks, because magic is just one possible tool. Roll [10–19] for a normal effect, or [20+] to pick an enhancement of your choice.

This also makes it much easier to adjudicate magic use outside of combat. I don’t usually pick difficulty numbers for D20 checks. Rather, I use this same old framework for grading D20 rolls, usually looking at the tens place (like I do for combat) or splitting into fifths if I really need the extra granularity (and I hardly do). Tasks which are already within the realm of possibility without magic might give them advantage if they use an arcana, the same as if they use a tool, and tasks which are near impossible without magic impose disadvantage if the user doesn’t have an arcana. I'm sure you could convert typical D&D spells to have D20 target numbers along similar lines. I just wouldn't want to.

One more change fleshes this out: you may spend inspiration to add +5 to a D20 check rather than re-rolling it, sorta like in FATE. This means spending inspiration is still useful even if you already roll high but not enough to hit 20+ (and thus, too high to justify rolling again when you’re more likely to re-roll below). This allows mages to be useful for a whole session, especially as they level up and increase their abilities, but also allows inspiration to continue to be useful (and increasingly powerful when a 30+ result becomes possible). This also implements my view of game design that a loss of resources should be a player decision rather than an imposed fail-state. I recently convinced Lino for Opera Eterna to allow players to spend item durability to overturn failed dice, instead of them necessarily resulting in lowered durability. I would have really liked to do something similar in mine, but it’s too much of a pain to track item durability, so I’m just applying that general philosophy to inspiration instead. Feels good!