So I’m playing a game in which one player is playing a witch. The concept is pretty much the fairy tale witch. She’s especially keen on transforming people into pigs, frogs, etc. We’re using Art Magic as our magic system, however, which means very high Obs. Today we got in a fight with a pirate. I’m a fifteen year old kid with two lifepaths, and I bought her an exchange by engaging the pirate and getting my ass kicked. She got the spell off in the second exchange as the pirate chased her around and tried to turn the pirate into a frog (Ob 8!), failed, and ended up barely alive with three months of recovery time and a couple points of permanently reduced stat ahead of her.
So we talked about it and decided that rather than the D&D approach to spellcasting (I wave my hands at you and say something and you turn into a frog, bam!) we could go with a longer, more difficult, story-generating approach where the witch goes off with her cauldron and a bunch of weird stuff and casts her spell Macbeth-style. That way she could set herself up with loads of advantage dice by acquiring the right things.
To that end, I’ve sketched up some witchy bonuses. I really like this stuff because it adds so much to the fiction. Now witches will have houses full of jars of salamander eyes and baskets of live snakes, and they’ll creep up on you with magic apples to eat.
These rules do give witches loads of extra power, though, I realize. With a +2D enchanted cauldron, the blood of her subject, sacrificing an appropriate live animal, in a place of power, at midnight on an equinox, and delivering the spell via an item of food or drink that her subject must eat, a witch could get +11 advantage dice on top of her 5D sorcery and 2D magic school and +1 for astrology. 19 open dice! Yikes! And if the animal sacrifice had a birth defect, she could roll 21 dice! Still, that’s a pretty awesome scene, so I’m okay with that. And the tax if she fails an Ob 10+ spell will kill her dead, so she still can’t do it lightly.