Re: Savage Worlds
Has anyone found a thread here or on the official forums discussing extending durations for spells in SWAdE?
All durations are geared for combat use as written, and even rituals are more risk than reward as presented. I'm working with a Fantasy Setting akin to D&D, but the short durations are turning off my players (who use a lot of utilitarian type magic- ShapeShift for travel/stealth and similar).
I don't really want to have to write up all new/specifically defined spells that have different durations, but instead am looking for a model players can use when building/casting spells.
I've toyed with a few ideas, but they still seem prohibitive. The test case was a new player who essentially was a thief but has AB:Magic with Boost/Lower Trait, Invisibility, and Shapechange. I thought the concept sounded awesome, but he became disenchanted with it because of the spells incredibly short durations. (D6 Spellcasting, no extra Power Points or Power Feats)
We looked at penalties to cast + extra powerpoints (-1/+1) to boost duration from rounds>minutes>10 minutes>hours>12 hours>days, but it didn't help. There was also a variation for casting outside of duress which halved the penalty and lowered the cost by 1 (or halved the extra cost), but that still had to high penalties to succeed most of the time.
I'm toying with the idea of requiring a focus for all spellcasters where spells cast 'onto' the focus use 'slots' to bump up duration following the increments above. The spell would be cast as if no extension were being used, but each "slot" committed would bump up the unit of time measure to the next category. The focus has 2 slots + 1/ rank of maker (character) + 1/2 Spellcasting Attribute (or 1/2 skill). Characters have only 1 focus that the caster makes with a spellcasting roll (automatic) with success adding 1 additional slot or a raise adding 2. Multiple spells could be boosted, provided total slots in focus weren't exceeded and no duration would be longer than 24 hours. Power Points spent either won't recover while spell is active, or recover at 1_hour rate until half spent casting are recovered.
I didn't really want to 'force' players to have a focus, but not finding many options for extending spell durations out there.
Granted, we could hand wave durations, but the aforementioned SW neophyte is much like myself and wants to be able to count on certain things when planning actions.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Links?
(The group also has a veteran SW player (and GM) playing a full-fledged mage with d8 or d10 casting, extra power points, Extra Powers x2, and Rapid Recovery; so we're seeing the full impact of modifications.)
This message was last edited by the player at 10:29, Wed 11 Sept 2019.