Musings on Glog’s Spellcasting Dice System (and a small homebrew)

 I might be a bit late in my joining the Glogosphere (and it is all due to RELIC: A game of Small Gods & Lost Wonders) but I really want to talk about its spellcasting system and the tremendously interesting mechanics behind it.

I will not go into great length describing it since the original can be found in this post by Arnold Kemp. The gist of it is simple.
Instead of having spell slots from which they cast spells wizards have a specific number of memorized spells and a number of d6’s (refreshed after a night of rest) used to model their spellcasting power.
When they cast spells they roll as many d6’s they want, up to all their d6’s available and add the result together. The spell’s effect are based both on the number of dice as well as the sum. The usual annotation for these numbers is [dice] and [sum].
The most interesting caveat here is that dice that roll 4,5 or 6 are lost whilst 1’s 2’s and 3’s return to the dice pool. If you roll doubles or triples you get mishaps and dooms respectively (Which is awesome because it reminds me of Warhammer Fantasy RPG 2^nd edition which is a fucking masterpiece of a game).
There are more rules and aspects on spellcasting and I encourage you to read the posts linked above.

Now, to the stuff I find interesting. First, I love how some dice are removed but some are not and you cannot know how costly a spell will be until you actually roll dem bones. Low results are less impressive but you can cast again in the future. This is cool because it reduces player’s disappointment and also models the unpredictable, chaotic, nature of magic.

It’s 2010, after a four year long hiatus from RPGs (the only ones I knew of were D&D 3.5 and Vampire – which I never dug since I have never been much of an edgelord) I discover that there are other RPGs. One of the firsts I discovered were the warhammer 40k games from Fantasy Flight Games. I think it was Rogue Trader or Deathwatched that introduces the mechanic for fettered and unfettered “spellcasting” (actually psionic stuff but the idea is the same). The mechanics were simple, if you don’t commit all your power meaning you roll half your psi dice you have a smaller chance of manifesting the power but there is no chance of mishaps (and warhammer 40k mishaps are famously terrible shit). I love the idea of push your luck mechanics when magic is involved so a Glogification of the aforementioned concept seems like an interesting mental exercise.

Push your luck GLOG spellcasting.

- Spellcasters have a fixed number of spellcasting dice.
- When they cast a spell they can chose to use either d4’s, d6’s or d8’s, representing careful, regular and reckless spellcasting respectively.
- As always any dice of 4+ is lost for the day.
- Only doubles and triples of 4’s, 5’s and 6’s count for mishaps/dooms etc.
- For the purpose of mishaps and dooms any number above a 6 is treated like a 6.

Not to toot my own horn (I ain’t even horny) but I think this is a cool set of rules and a nice demonstration of GLOG’s hackability. But we ain’t gonna stop yet. My next article is going to be about how the expanded magic dice rules we designed above can be used to model beliefs, ideals and interpersonal bonds.

fin