Can I +1 this? Where’s the Like button on this thing…
Guys, hyperbole like this doesn’t accomplish anything.
Burning Wheel does not and has never imitated reality. The probabilities in the game are designed so that they feel right at the table, not so they perfectly model the world. This is not a physics engine. Lots of other games attempt that path, and it’s tilting at windmills. None of you would be here unless you liked how Burning Wheel handled probabilities.
Now, I’ll admit that the Sorcery failure rules are atypical for Burning Wheel. They’re random and rather coldly punishing. They reflect a different time and a different sensibility in gaming. However, they also evoke a wild magic that asks a serious price. All of my favorite fantasy fiction involves magic of this type. Hence this type of Sorcery is the main magical system. If you don’t like this style, there are many other options in the Magic Burner for you to use. All playtested and vetted – as you would expect from BWHQ.
And this revised system has been playtested and vetted, too. First and foremost, we brought Sorcery in line with all other skills so that sorcerers can play the game like everyone else now. They can scrounge for dice, consider their chances for success and failure, spend artha and advance like everyone else. It’s a GREAT feeling – a relief, really – to watch sorcerer players care about dice rolls now.
Why did we keep the extreme limitations and prices on Sorcery? Because the risk is commensurate with the reward. Sorcerers have an enormous amount of power at their disposal. They merely need to husband their resources a bit more wisely now. So if you don’t like that, don’t use this system. But certainly don’t change it. You’d be giving a pass to a powerful, privileged group who needs no sympathy.
-Luke
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Here’s another thought: instead of looking at failed casting as The End for the party, look at it as a chance to throw in a new plot complication.
This came up in the BWR forums where I asked for feedback as to my interpretation of a failed casting. It wound up being Arcana, Destroy, Permanent, Natural Effect. A lot of people said they would have had the sorcerer die outright, and that’s certainly valid.
However, if you think the immediate consequences of a failed casting would be too final, just play it differently! Why would an inadvertently summoned daemon immediately attack the party? That’s stupid! How about running away and causing mischief, thus becoming the new antagonist for the party? That’s far more interesting. And that Arcana Destroy miscasting - which I interpreted as an antimagic field that randomly eats spells - has become the focus of a brand new adventure arc!
Wait, so you’re saying his odds would be better if he picked “be enslaved?” It sounds like your party has excellent reasons for doing stupid dangerous stuff.
The sorcerer in our party certainly has good reasons to risk death, since he won’t want to be enslaved by the Roden. However, I can’t help but think the rest of the party would have better chances if we didn’t have some guy causing a chaotic disaster every so often.
Pick something like Sarch’s Glare or Emperor’s Hand, and you’ve got a way to get Difficult and Challenging tests galore. The stat enhancing spells are useful for this too.
That really just doesn’t sound like a healthy idea. If you have a difficult test to raise a stat from 6 to 7, for example, and the punishment for failing is a random spell effect or a demon, there’s just no reason to even try.
Perhaps spells could be divided into different classes, some of which have much milder punishments for failure than others. For example, on a failure of a stat enhancing roll, the wizard is “burned out” for a day or so. Maybe a random spell effect occurs, but with less potent possibilities. But a 1% chance of summoning a greater demon when you fail at helping someone’s recovery roll, or at making someone temporarily stronger, or something along those lines…
[QUOTE]I couldn’t imagine any sane king being willing to stand in the same room as a man who has a 1/6 chance of causing some terrible calamity every time he tries to cast a useful spell.
Guys, hyperbole like this doesn’t accomplish anything. [/QUOTE]
That’s actually not hyperbole, is it? Maybe not 1/6, but 1/20 or so.
I guess there was no real concept of forking or helping Sorcery in the old system, so perhaps a circle of court wizards also trained in Surgery would make sense when it comes time to heal people, for example. This makes sense to me.
Geometry Training?
…
I think some of you are drastically underestimating the number of additional dice a sorcerer can bring to bear.
This makes a lot of sense to me, actually. If a wizard spends a bit of time learning Astrology and a few other skills relevant to the spells he wants to cast, then instead of the new rules nerfing Will dice, sorcery rolls have actually only been reduced a couple dice. This probably does work pretty well. It would just involve some rewriting / retraining of our existing wizard to make him able to cast the spells he knows without explosive failure being pretty common.
I guess my only other complaint at this point is that I don’t see how anyone could ever learn sorcery in the first place without a host of undead or demons taking numbers on their body & soul. Say you have a starting wizard with Perception and Will of 5 trying to learn a first spell with an OB of 1. The initial casting would be at OB of 6. Even with helping dice from a good teacher, that’s an almost guaranteed failure on the first couple castings. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that every time you “burn” a wizard character, you have to imagine at least one or two unwanted summonings or garbled transmissions in that wizard’s past.
Note: I do not approve of the cheese I’m about to put forth: 
Right! So get a bunch of Wises and skills and FoRK 'em in: Sorcery Wise, Combat-Casting Wise, Fire Breath Wise, etc. Be creative with those Wises! Add in Astrology and a few others, plus a magic item, and in no time you’ll be casting ridiculous combat spells with massives piles of dice just like the good 'ol days. And out of combat with Carefully? Whee! Extra super huge piles of dice! 
End note: so I’d just like to say that I like Sorcery now. It feels right to me. And if I ever saw Wises and such being abused like that in a game I’d headdesk. 
Important friendly note: I’m not trying to pick on you AngledLuffa. 
Turn that last example around. A good wizard won’t help him, but he’ll help that wizard. The PC is the apprentice in this case.
Scenario A - Fledgling wizard has B2 skill and has an Ob3 spell to cast. His teacher Helps and adds 2D. 4D to get 3 successes is difficult. Maybe he can cast Patiently and Carefully for more dice to make it easier. With all that dice, it’s now only a Routine test for the new wizard.
Scenario B - Fledging wizard has B2 skill Helps his teacher cast an Ob3 spell. The teacher rolls 5D plus the 1D from the PC, plus Patiently and Carefully. That’s a lot of dice to hit that Ob 3. The new wizard enjoys getting a Challenging test with practically no risk of miscasting.
Or, Instruction from a better wizard, which works even if there is no skill to be spoken of for the student.
Say the Student has the Will and Perception of 5 mentioned above, finding a wise old sorcerous teacher, Will of 6.
Ob 1 for routine test +3 for it being a sorcerous skill, Ob 4
Then time: 10 - 5 (Students will) + 10 - 6 (Teacher’s will) +4 (Ob) = 13 days
So even if the teacher fails the Ob 4 Instruction test, you still get to log almost 2 weeks of practice time, with no chance of demon summoning or the classroom exploding
Or they do all the theoretical stuff that sorcery allows without actually casting. Just like a person who has sorcery skill and no gifted trait. Sorcery is technically useful for things besides just casting a spell. A lot easier way for the apprentice to get those tests then risky spell casting.
Get some downtime and log practice?
If you have a difficult test to raise a stat from 6 to 7, for example, and the punishment for failing is a random spell effect or a demon, there’s just no reason to even try.
So, the consequences of failure for Difficult and Challenging tests actually have ramifications now?
I’ll just point out that failing, say, an Ob 6 Health test means the difference between life and death - there’s no 1% chance there. Failing a Faith test can have you stripped of your powers. Failing a crucial Climbing check can have you plummet to your death. Fail a Circles test and you find an enemy, and often a powerful one. Failing ANY test can - and often does - have painful and far-reaching consequences. That’s the whole point of the game. And Burning Wheel goads you into trying despite those failures, because failure doesn’t mean it’s all over.
In fact, the fact that failing a Sorcery test means that nothing happens 67% of the time is letting you off relatively easy. The vast majority of the time, whenever you fail other tests, something happens.
You seem to be saying that the consequences for failed sorcery must be disastrous. This is far from the only possible outcome. Just because a daemon shows up doesn’t mean it’s over! Things just got complicated!
But if you really don’t want to fail that crucial test, do what everyone else does and spend artha. My sorcerers tended to accumulate artha because they simply never needed to spend it. That, to me, is a very strong indication of a broken skill - if you never need to spend artha on an ability, then it’s obvious that that ability is not being challenged.
I can’t say for sure whether or not the new sorcery is broken, but I do know that the old way certainly was. The group’s most powerful sorcerer actually started getting bored because rolling to cast a spell was a useless endeavor - success was almost always guaranteed! So I’m inclined to give this a shot and see how it shakes out.
So, the consequences of failure for Difficult and Challenging tests actually have ramifications now?
I’m just saying that the consequences are way out of proportion to some of the actions taken. Yes, other skills put you in situations where failure could mean death. Sometimes a failed skill check just means you fail to buy the horse you wanted or eat a poorly cooked meal, though. With Sorcery, now, every attempt at using Sorcery means failure could mean death. Even in a life or death situation a non-Gifted character would not want to turn to a Gifted character for help, since it would turn the life or death situation into a life or death or even more death situation.
The other side of that is the question of how a character with the Gifted trait could even exist. The first few spells learned would almost definitely have a garbled transmission or an unwanted summoning. Every Gifted character created would have to have some explanation in his backstory for why he didn’t sell his soul or die at the age of 10.
Or you could read the responses people wrote about how to get the tests to learn sorcery without the risk of garbled transmission or unwanted summoning.
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If there’s no consequence to a situation in play, your GM should use the Say Yes rule.
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You know why your character survived up until the moment you started playing him? Because he’s unique.
2a) On the other hand, a character who starts with a relationship with a demon whom he summoned during his untrained years is AWESOME.
BWG Pg 499, Sorcery Is a Skill:
BWG Pg 520, Learning Sorcerous Skills:
There are no rules that force a gifted character to use untrained sorcery. See BWG pg 47 Practise and BWG pg 50, 51 Learning from Another. In addition see BWG pg 46 Helpers Learn. It has been mentioned a few times in this thread that a beginner sorcery (e.g. the apprentice) is able to help a more advanced sorcery and thus get difficult and challenging tests without putting themselves at risk.
Characters can clearly learn sorcery without casting spells. They can even learn sorcery while unable to cast at all! Claims to the contrary are not supported by the text.
All this typing and Peregrine and Luke have beaten me to the punch
It is, however, an artha mine. Also fun as hell. So long as your party is okay with it
Alternately: Because if he hadn’t, you would have re-burned until you got a character who was alive at the start of the game.
Seriously, though. The odds of a lethal summoning or Transmission are nowhere near one in six. First, you might succeed in your test. Let’s say you have a 50% chance of that (it’ll usually be higher, but we’re talking about the dangerous cases here). Then, you have only a 1/3 chance of any failure effect. So we’re already at one in six there! And your failure effect could be totally minor! It could be an appearance of the sanctified dead, here to thank you for burying them respectfully. It could be that your river of fire instead becomes a river of buttercup flowers.
The odds on the wheel of magic are hard to guess at, because the starting points vary (though actually Destroy-impetus spells are safer than their neighbors, since they can only shift away from Destroy). They also vary a lot depending on the fiction and your GM. This is your big chance to take the spell intent into account: a Garbled Transmission on White Fire should do wreak mayhem. Create/Water/Caster (not sure that’s possible from White Fire’s facets, but y’know) coming from that should absolutely drown or carry away the sorcerer. But if you tried to cast a spell to make friends with birds, Create/Water/Caster should make you wet, or cause a stormcloud to follow you around, or something.
I’m really not sure where you’re getting the idea that the Wheel of Magic is meant to be the Wheel of How-You-Die. That’s not in the rules at all. In fact, the example specifically points out that for Create/Fire/Personal Origin, “there’s no need to harm him with it.” So the only thing in the rules is that given a potentially harmful spell effect, the example interpretation isn’t harmful. Destroy/Caster effects will do what it says on the box, but Create, Control, Destroy, and Tax effects with other areas of effect shouldn’t be automatically applied to the caster. It’s a bit like suggesting that Circles is extremely risky because every time you fail, the Enmity Clause requires that highly-trained ninjas appear to kill you in your sleep. That’s certainly something that can happen, just like Destroy/Caster, but in both cases you’re mistaking the exception for the rule. (In fact, it’s a bit similar: casting White Fire and circling up the master of a hostile ninja clan are dangerous actions, but the same failure while magically silencing a squeaky hinge or searching for the master of a hostile bakery would not bring the same consequences.)
Summonings certainly are dangerous, but not as bad as all that. Sure, the Deities, Major Corporeal, and even regular Corporeal spirits are all serious bad news. You have a 10/36 chance of getting one of those results.
So then if you’re casting a spell that shouldn’t obviously have lethal consequences,* you have a 1/6 chance of something going wrong (rather than a success or a no-result failure). From that point, you have roughly another 1/6 chance of something horrible happening (Loki or Beelzebub shows up, Wheel of Magic turns up Fire/Destroy/Hours/Caster, etc). You have 5/6 chance of something weird or minorly bad happening (angry shouting ghost, Transmute/Earth/Sustained/Single Target, skelington warrior).
Overall, the odds of lethal badness, per risky important casting, are something like 1/36. If the casting is important but not risky, the odds go even lower (since you’re less likely to fail). If the casting is not important, whether it’s risky or not, Say Yes.
*By which I mean “if your GM is going to lean towards weirdness and away from death when interpreting the Wheel of Magic.”
I agree–but that’s assuming that the wizard is learning sorcery the hard way, by going out and trying to cast spells in a situation where the consequences matter. His first test under any circumstance will be from instruction. If he has a master, I would imagine he opens it through a combination of practice, instruction, and Helping.
If you’re trying to tap this raw, primal force untrained (which is what a Beginner’s Luck Sorcery check is, whether you have a master or not), I think you should be courting disaster. To draw an example from one of Luke’s favorites, look what happens to Ged the first time he ignores his master and tries sorcery on his own: he summons a destructive shadow he has to face.
This is awesome. Having apprentice sorcerers learn the trade by basically being their master’s guinea pig for years on end before ever learning their first spell is exactly what I would imagine an apprentice sorcerer’s life to be like. The fact that this is totally backed up by the rules is pure win. Finally, a magic system that actually feels somewhat realistic!
I thought you weren’t even allowed to try Sorcerous skills with Beginner’s Luck anyway. You have to find a teacher.
Matt