Sessions and Spells

One aspect I want to borrow from board games is the idea of a discrete session. You gather together with a group of adventurers and enter a dungeon with a concrete goal, and you stay there until you achieve it. The primary strategy of the game will be to spend your resources wisely throughout the dungeon. For example, maybe you only get to cast your Fireball spell once; do you spend it on the room full of goblins or do you save it for the big boss at the end of the dungeon?

Of course, this only works if you don’t have many ways to recoup your spells. Perhaps an old-fashioned spell component system could do the trick. You start the day with enough materials to cast each of your spells once or twice, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. Unless you find some laying about the dungeon, or spend some gold to stock up on extra—instead of that healing potion. The decisions get even more interesting if some of your spells share the same components. Maybe you have enough components for two fireballs, or one fireball and two frost rays. Sure, you can throw out that first fireball pretty casually, but you might want to think carefully about your next spell. The next spell you cast might depend on whether you run across an enemy with a vulnerability to fire or ice, or if you can hit more enemies with the fireball’s area effect. Of course, all of this presupposes that your spells have different effects, so that you have strategic reasons to choose one over the other rather than just computing which combination of spells adds up to the most damage.

These sorts of decisions are what I’m hoping will justify the “dynamic” in Dynamic Delver. Players should have ample opportunity to adjust their strategy to compensate for the situations they find themselves in.

2 thoughts on “Sessions and Spells

  1. Johann says:

    I think that 4th Edition D&D has a fairly good solution to this… with its at will and daily powers.

    A wizard could have a lightly damaging spell (like a magic missile), an incapacitating spell (like a single target sleep), and a single target protection spell (like an armor spell) that could be used at will, and then a few uses of a larger number of “more impressive” spells, able to pick and choose from among them, but limited to the number they can use in a session… So a wizard might have a fireball spell, a lightning bolt spell, a incapacitate whole room spell, and a protect a number of allies spell… but only be able to use two per session.

    You could also offer “power stones” that refresh the number of big spells a wizard is able to use.

  2. With the dice mechanic I want to use, Dynamic Delver will need to handle this carefully. It would suck to roll a blank on a power you can only use once. There definitely needs to be some sort of recharge mechanic. Or perhaps a secondary resource like mana.

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