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...Considerations of Spell Design in Torg Eternity

 Torg Eternity is Ulisses Spiele's reboot and simplification of Torg: Roleplaying the Possibility Wars from West End Games' original design. In the original, the magical world called Aysle had as part of its sourcebook a spell design system which applied a formula to how to design spells from their components.

To say that player reaction was mixed about this system would be a gross understatement. It was one of the most polarizing aspects I have ever seen in a game: players either loved and embraced it or they hated it with the fury of a thousand suns, with very few in-between reactions. Those who hated it (the majority of players were in this camp) did so because it was overly detailed, cumbersome, and too swingy to be reliable. But then again those who loved it did so for the exact same reasons. And since I as a gamemaster always had one player (and sometimes as many as three players at once) who loved the system and were trying to abuse it, I had to learn it better than they ever could.

So now here we are at the reboot, and to no one's real surprise, the spell design system is gone. Not only is it gone, the initial spell designs were intentionally made with no attempt to put them into a systemized format. Although the basic skill requirement was meant to be consistent in most cases, determining things like the range of a spell, its overall effects (including bonus effects for better casting), the base difficulty of a spell, and so on were all done ad hoc based on the "rule of cool". And for the sake of simplicity, that's a reasonable place to start.

But now we have done the "Year One" cosm books for all the invading cosms, and are moving on to Year Two, where the High Lords are no longer as tolerant of one another and the cosms are beginning to interfere not just with Core Earth's plans, but each others as well. The good thing about building spells ad hoc is that you can tailor the design to the world as it currently exists. The bad part about it is that you must take everything else into account with each spell design. This has the unfortunate drawback where each spell consumes not just design space for itself, but takes extra nibbles into the overall design pool as every future design must work with the current one in mind. 

Nonetheless, I am determined to figure something out. My first goal is to design a base system for "on the fly " The goal is to have a limited set of spells that are usable in round play where each component is build into one of the four steps of a Dramatic Skill Resolution. From there, a universal system based off the considerations outlined can be created for more advanced designs. When complete, the goal is to have a system that makes all the current spell designs possible, with those that got extra benefits from the “rule of cool” possible but rare or costly in some other form. But to do that, I need to study the vast array of what is already designed to learn the baseline. Please be patient; this may take a while.

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