There's an easy way to allow for more freeform magical effects. Just say that any magical art can be used as an unskilled check, provided that you can use magic at all.
This means that if an Inferno mage wanted to cast a trivial healing spell, he'd roll KNO + 1d10 and try to equal or exceed a 10. Of course, he'd botch it 10% of the time, so this wouldn't be nearly as good as having, say, Healing Magic at +1, which would roll KNO+1+2d10 and would only botch 1% of the time.
He could also use his stored mana to give himself a boost up to his Drive rating. Between that and taking extra time, a decent mage ought to be able to cast any trivial spell effect with only a 10% chance of failure. Get a total of 9+1d10 and rolling a 1 will downgrade your result from "success" to "failure" instead of "failure" to "botch".
Another option, instead of allowing all mages to do this, would be to have an additional Edge that you could buy that allows you to make unskilled magic checks. With it, you can also learn new arts without requiring a book/tutor.
Posted by Kiz at January 30, 2005 12:04 PMCommentsPost a comment