Core D&D: part 6

With one of the central tenants of d&d being resource management, it makes sense that spellcasters would have a limited number of usages a day so as to balance their inhere utility. That said, there are superior alternatives to Vancian magic, even if flavor-wise you can get a lot of mileage out of the idea.

To start, we need to define what magic needs to be in order to be internally balanced within in the system as a whole: it needs to be resource intensive, if only indirectly, and it needs to be flexible, so any spells, etc, can be used out of context to deliver a creative result. Other considerations are for it to be supplemental to the other mechanics, so that it isnt seen as necessary to use to advance in power, but an interesting choice to make when you come to that crossroads.

An easy way to handle that is to eliminate all damage from spells, only keeping their effects. This doesnt need to be a hard and fast rule, of course; if you were to cast the hypothetical Fireball on someone, they could take burn damage incidentally, but the spirit of the change should be one of magic = utility.

To handle the resource aspect, we can supplement the loss of ability bonus/hitpoints on leveling when choosing a spell (an element? A shape? Im unsure how much to change from the old spell lists) with requiring a payment of hp to cast spells, with increasing hp costs dependent on power, duration, and size of effect. This makes magic a very costly, but flexible, resource, as well as creating the possibility that a mage can cast themself unconcious with too strenuous an effort.

If you wanted to give magic a much sharper edge, you could use reaction rolls when casting to see if any positive or negative quirks occur (critical pass/fail) or if your target gains some form of mutation (supercritical pass/fail); of course, those would make magic MUCH more of a crap shoot, as those effects, depending on which numbers you use they can happen a lot more often then you may be comfortable with.

Another use of the dismembership tables from earlier could come from casting yourself into unconciousness; if your hp falls below 0 from spell casting, you roll to see if you gain some form of injury or mutation to the ability that the spell affects.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg, as magic systems expanded to fill the space allowed. Down the line ill do some more thinking about alternatives or expansions to the idea here, but for now i think this works as a solid enough foundation.