Researching Spell Research, part 2

Young Gandalf, hard at work.

The issue of independent spell research is one of the stickier wickets of most D&D/Pathfinder games. This is because it’s an area where, more so than with most areas of the game, the mechanics and the in-game rationals for how magic works need to be tightly intertwined. Instead, both the mechanics and the flavor text are almost totally absent in this area. That means we’ll need to use a combination of deductive reasoning to try to develop a framework…

Sit a Spell

In the previous article, we mentioned that there was no real in-game reason why a character couldn’t research a version of a spell that wasn’t on their spell list (e.g. a wizard researching an arcane version of entropic shield). Let’s go over that a little more here.

The basic premise here is that most of the spell lists in D&D have fairly major thematic elements to them, which can be recognized from an in-game standpoint. Now, if these resulted in strict divisions between the spell lists, there’d be reasonable grounds for saying that there was an in-game reason why these different types of magic were only able to accomplish certain things and not others.

However, that’s not the case. There’s significant overlap between most of the spell lists, both in terms of individual spells being on multiple lists and in terms of overall theme. Both the cleric and sorcerer/wizard spell lists, for example, have several divination spells on them (e.g. scrying); given that, is there really a reason why the cleric couldn’t research their own version of detect scrying? It’s clearly not a departure from the theme of clerical magic, so why not?

As noted previously, if there is a departure in theme from one spell list to another (e.g. healing magic not being arcane spellcasting…notwithstanding bards) then this is an argument that there’s an in-game reason for the difficulty of another kind of spellcaster using that kind of magic, such as how in the previous article we discussed the inherent complexity of healing spells and how they’d have a higher level on arcane spell lists.

Of course, now you get into the details of how spell research actually needs to be conducted.

Formulaic Thaumaturgy

The question of how spell research is performed is an area where greater mechanical emphasis is needed, rather than flavor text. In-game explanations are very good for why and how things work the way they do, but insofar as an actual process goes you’ll need to figure out how you want the game rules to guide the attempt.

In this case, the rules for spell research need to speak to several different needs. The first is that there needs to be to be not-insignificant disincentives to conducting this sort of research at all.

That sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s very necessary. The end result of successful spell research is that your spellcaster will have a new spell in hand, waiting to be used (though for spontaneous spellcasters, they’ll need to wait until they have an open Spells Known slot they can fill it with – that’s the problem with learning your spells intuitively, rather than as an act of procedure; knowing something instinctively means that learning it intellectually isn’t sufficient). Because of this, game balance will be severely affected if the character can perform the process quickly, cheaply, and without any sort of risk, as your character will in very short order acquire an arsenal of spells.

Given that, at least one or more of those three issues – money, time, and risk – need to be set at sufficiently high levels as to make spell research something that isn’t undertaken lightly.

Cost would presumably scale with the level of the spell being researched, but this is a difficult bar to set. Most characters tend to start out relatively poor, but quickly amass considerable sums as they level up. Even considering that most of their treasure gets tied up in their gear, they potentially have hundreds of thousands worth of gold pieces by the time they’re approaching the end of their career, so a cost of a few hundred GP per spell level, which once seemed like a massive cost, is now little more than a pittance.

Time is another issue that’s difficult to assess in terms of how much it restricts the research process. If your game is one that sets a very quick in-character pace, saying that spell research takes (for example) one week per spell level can be a daunting barrier. On the other hand, if there are plentiful opportunities for down-time, then this is no real barrier at all, as the player can easily say that his character devotes months to nothing but research, and suffers not at all for it.

Finally, there’s risk. As with cost and time, the nature of this is highly variable depending on the character making the attempt. Risk, here, can be measured in two terms – the difficulty in accomplishing the task (e.g. how high the skill DC is) and the results of failure (e.g. does he lose some of his time and money? All of the time and money? Or does a failed check result in a massive explosion that deals terrible damage to everyone within a two-block radius?).

There is, ultimately, no single right framework for any of these, as they depend on how quick, costly, and dangerous you want spell research to be in your game. I’d personally recommend erring on the side of setting these limiting factors high, as this would push independent spell research to later levels of the game, limiting the amount of time they’d have to make an impact on your campaign. All of these are guidelines, however, allowing you to tweak them as you like.

Divine Directives

There’s a particular issue that tends to come up when researching divine spells is brought into play. Oftentimes, someone will ask “why does my character need to perform all of these experiments to create a new divine spell when the spell is being granted by my character’s deity? Can’t he just pray for it and his god will make it happen?”

On its face, this is a reasonable question. One would presume that a god that’s already granting many diverse spells could just snap its fingers and make something new if it wanted to, and that’s that. So why are you being made to do all of the legwork?

As it turns out, there’s a pretty good reason why.

Recall the quote we had in part one about how, insofar as healing spells went, there was a lot of complexity to those spells that was being handled on the divine end so that your character could cast them as low-level spells? It’s basically that all over again.

Creating a spell, even a low-level one, is a complicated process. Much like building an engine, you have to make sure that all of the parts are properly connected and working correctly. Designing one from scratch, assembling the components, and performing testing are a fairly complicated process, whether you’re a humble mortal or a powerful celestial (or infernal) being. Ultimately, somebody has to do that work…and you’re the one asking for something to be made.

That’s why divine spellcasters have to do their own spell research. Their deity is basically setting up a paradigm where they tell their worshipers “Look, if you want a brand new spell, I’ll grant it to you. But YOU have to figure out the ins-and-outs of this thing. I’ll fill the order you place only if you can give me a working set of blueprints.”

That hardly seems unreasonable. Though I’m sure that if a cleric wants to complain about it overly much, there’s a divine complaint department set in one of the less comfortable regions of the afterlife.