Okay so on to Magic.......

We are a tertiary guild when it comes to magic but don't get stuck on that right now. Let me give you my thoughts on how magic works into our guild.

Being a Ranger is a very diversified profession, we can be good at anything we want however, for us to really excel we need to be the proverbial Jack of all Trades and master of none. Rangers can train as much or as little in magic skills as they want (in fact you can train as much or as little in any skill set you want, if you don't care about advancing) After you get the first 5 ranks normally no one hears it from Kalika anymore. Currently there is no plan to change that. Again my mantra comes to mind; "Reward the hard work, don't make it easier just for the sake of being easier," there are some of you that have a great deal of magic ranks for your level and some who don't. If you chose to work magic with your time and have earned those ranks you should be rewarded.

Here comes the tricky part, if you didn't train magic ranks does this mean you should be penalized? No, you shouldn't but, neither should you expect to have a spell work for you the same way as a Ranger that has 400 ranks in Primary Magic. Spells in our guild, and others, are "throttled" meaning that all spells are not available to all Rangers at the start. We have prerequisites and level requirements. I know that many of you have issues with this practice and I guess I do to. The popular, "Why do I need Compost to get other spells debate" comes to mind. As a GM I can understand the reasoning behind this but with limited spell slots it makes things difficult the farther you advance. This was by design and may be something we will have to continue to live with. If you folks can come up with some suggestions on how to better issue spells I would be very happy to entertain them.

Back to throttling, the alternative is to make spells level based and/or to reduce the amount of spell slots you get. This would be a very rough tradeoff and I would be hesitant to make it so. Your spells are designed to compliment your abilities and to enhance your survival skills not to replace your survival skills. This is where the Tertiary factor comes into play, with the amount of spells slots and the power of the spell. You will never have a spell that can slay a Dragon, GM Hyram and Team Magic would never let me get away with it. You may have a spell that in a cavern you can cause rocks and boulders to fall from the ceiling or cause a rock slide on a mountain that might cause damage to the Dragon but directly killing it, never.

I think I am rambling here.

Some of you will debate that we are not magic users we are survivalist. I would say we are not great magic users cause we spend so much time learning survival. There is a difference.

Spell List.

There will be some changes with the current spells list on the DR web site. I have gotten permission to move a spell off the list and into a beseech. Not telling you what one yet. ;-) There are 2 spells currently in development by Tarragon and as a part of my magic training I will be developing one. The 2 by Tarragon are on the list, the one by me may not be. Tarragon and I will be bouncing ideas around on new spells and what the list will be like in a few weeks. DON'T expect a huge change.

Along with the throttling of spells you will begin to see spells that have distinct requirements to cast, specific features and narrow uses. The trade off being is that they will be very good at what they are designed to do. I like PLS and would like to design more like it in that vein. You see I am very Anti-City and have very little compassion for complaints about spells not working in the Trader Guild. Hope you get my point.

I know that some spells are buggy, we are looking at them. The HB flaw I believe to be more of a design oversight then a bug but we will take a look at it. I am also considering going back and reworking existing spells to do more then the original design. That project is a lot easier said than done because of the series of checks that need to happen in releasing a spell through other guilds, design teams, and SGMs. However, some stuff suggested and what I have come up just seem to make sense. We shall see.

My goal is to have more spells than current open spell slots of the highest Rangers in 18 months. Sorry but you folks are going to have to wait.

I am sure that there are a few things I did not cover here so I will stay active on this discussion. If you can remember please keep this thread in Responses to Guild Guru Announcements.

Thanks,

Jent