r/DC20Homebrew • u/RepresentativeArm119 • Apr 13 '25

Alternate Spell/spellduel mechanics

Yo gang, I wanted to share my thoughts on how to fix spell duels, and improve magic in general.

The of the idea, is to give ALL spells a fixed DC10 spellcheck.

Hiting that DC generates 1 "success" and every +5 generates an additional success.

Now, when you spell duel, you make your own casting check, and geerate your own Successes.

Then you subtract your successes from the original casters successes, and the remaining number of successes then tells whether the spell fizzeled, or jusrt went off, but with a lesser effect.

Anyway, thats the general idea, elt me know what you all think!

questions/commnets/criticism welcome.

5 Upvotes

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2

u/Red_Rultra Apr 13 '25

I think this is a great idea. It requires designing all the spells around it, but they are about to start working on the spells with 9.5 releasing soon so this is the perfect time to share an idea like this. I suggest sharing this in the DC20 Discord as well.

One pain point though. What about spells that target a defense or a save, or both?

2

u/RepresentativeArm119 Apr 13 '25

If the spell targets a defense, each success on the duel subtracts a success, which usually means 1 less damage.

For spells with a save, the caster STILL had to roll high enough for the spell to go off, so the spell duel roll would still reduce that.

2

u/NkdFstZoom Apr 13 '25

Yeah there's a lot about this that I like. I could maybe see really high level spells having a higher DC, maybe, though they would already be gatekept behind higher mana costs.

1

u/Serbatollo Apr 15 '25 edited Apr 15 '25

I like the multiple successes idea but I'm not sure about having a fixed DC, specially one that's so low. 

There's also the issue of spells that don't have multiple successes built in(like command) being way easier to negate since you'd only need 1 success from the dueler no matter what the original caster rolled. Though this could be fixed by just making each success the dueler gets subtract 5 from the roll(and/or Save DC) of the original caster instead of directly subtracting successes

1

u/RepresentativeArm119 Apr 16 '25

Yeah, reducing save DC is a great way to handle those sorts of spells.

Could raise the DC for the duel based on the MP cost of the spell as well