I like vancian magic. It makes wizardry weird and arcane, requires strategic thinking and preparation. Your vast cosmic power comes with weird rules and restrictions that don’t make any sense because it’s magic. Pathfinder did a lot of stuff to take the edges off of it with cantrips and what not and I think that was a good choice.

I think most people prefer magic points. Spell slots are just kind of a thing that D&D happened to have. If D&D wasn’t such a cultural force in defining what an RPG even is, spell slots would be a weird quirky thing that one RPG has and everyone is like “huh that’s kind of interesting” and think of D&D as “that one with the weird spell slots.”

Not that spell slots are meritless. They’re weird and people want magic to be weird, they give you a reason to use low-level spells, and they somewhat encourage using spells flexibly (but they also encourage over-relying on the most flexible possible spells; just memorize five copies of Polymorph). But yeah, MP is the most default resource mechanic you can get.

Broke: spell slots

Also broke: mana

Bespoke: magic is free and flexible but also extraordinarily dangerous to the caster and everyone around them

I like mana/mp systems. For long thing, it bends easier to mechanics around reducing or increasing spell costs for different effects. I also prefer the idea of similarly tiered spells costing different amounts of magical energy.

Agreed. Spell slots are a weird holdover from early D&D, and they have a lot of negative knock-on effects.

For instance, a system where characters have abilities (like magic spells or superman martial feats) that can be powered by a resource pool (like mana or willpower or whatever) would be a lot easier to fix the martial/caster asymmetry problems that continue to plague D&D.

On the other hand, there’s something interesting that some OSR games like Knave and Cairn do where all spells are magic items (like a magic tome) that uses up an inventory slot. Rather than having magic as a class ability, plays have to chose to use their inventory on either weapons/armor, magic spells, or other useful tools/gadgets that leads to character specialization.

Honestly both are flawed though spell slots are the more flawed one. (Prepared) spell slots have some merits but are used wrong: they should be more an abstraction of material accessories than the bread and butter of a caster that’s expected to use their abilities frequently. Pathfinder 2e does spell slots right with its shit like daily free alchemical preparations, daily free talismans, etc even though it also does it wrong by doing it the D&D way too.

The issue with magic points is more a matter of implementation imo. It works better to have a flexible and interactive resource like that, though I think its most common implementation is bit too “pay X magic money for spell, you get Y magic money per rest (and maybe can drink magic money juice to refill it)” when it should be either a sort of short term limiter (you can do X amount per scene) or a sort of flexible tank that gets drained erratically when casting based on the strength of what’s being done (so small things can be outright free, while big things can burn you out for the time being, basically). Shadowrun’s approach of just treating magic as something that’s actively hurting you and which needs to be endured is also good.

There’s also something to be said for the way some systems merge magic and preternatural mundane effects into just different flavors of action, making them more narrative choices than strict mechanical ones. Sort of like how ICON handles its narrative play, where an action is ambiguously magical or mundane and how exactly it’s done depends on how the character narratively works (one example being traversing an obstacle, which could be a matter of a character successfully teleporting across it or some feet of agility, with both explanations being the same effect and the same roll).

Spell slots suck, prepared spells suck even harder.

Pokemon: Why not both?

I think spell slots are really neat when you take advantage of them like 3.5/Pathfinder did. Each slot was prepared separately, could be left unprepared and then prepared out of combat to adapt to the day, and had lots of metamagic options to make use of different level slots.

But by the time of 5e, slots don’t seem to have any purpose beyond lowering caster flexibility. When we were playing we ruled spontaneous casters could use spell points instead of slots to give them an edge up on the prepared ones.

3.0/3.5/Pathfinder also used Power Points for its psionics instead of slots, and that worked very well. Shame 5e doesn’t have psionics.

The most glaring downside to magic points is that unless there’s further limitations it means “cast the biggest stuff and have nothing left for anything else” which has metagame consequences such as the rest/recharge economy getting even wackier and the fact that encounters would have to be balanced against front loaded maxed out spell attacks.

I’ve found “drain” based systems work better there, especially ones where lesser spells can be cast almost indefinitely.

I haven’t been able to enjoy the magic in BG3 because I just don’t find it’s magic systems fun. Other people like it and that’s great, but I’d rather just have MP or action points per turn.

Spell slots for life. It combines great versatility over the long run with focused choices over the short term: A mage can be a blaster one day and a self-buffed fighter the next, particularly in 2e. In various Final Fantasy games, in contrast, every mage class is usually the same (and so you only get one of each, usually). In my current Baldur’s Gate 2 playthrough, on the other hand, my Fighter/Mage is buffing themself to become a better fighter while my Cleric/Mage is using her Cleric spells for buffing and her Mage spells for damage-dealing, and I could switch that up at any point. I’ve never seen that kind of build variety in a game with magic points.

I’m pretty easy going about spell slots in ttrpgs because of the social and improv aspects of the game, not having the right spell for a situation or being out of certains slots can be fun for story telling and for team work. Knowing that I can work stuff out in creative ways with other players and the gm softens the annoyance of it.

In crpgs however, I kinda hate them because there’s so much more combat. I end up just hoarding spells and not doing anything interesting or I blast them willy nilly because resting is readily available at the press of a button and neither option is good in my book.

Honestly my favorite is the way GURPS handles it by default, where each spell such as “Create Air” or “Control Air” or “Locate Object” is a skill. You know the spell, you can cast the spell whenever and however you want, and there’s no hard restrictions on who gets magic unless your GM says so. To balance this freedom, each spell is expensive points-wise and is hyper-specific, and usually you have to have the Magery advantage to do magic (although this can be hand-waved)

That being said, it is not thematic or fun at all, and the writers knew it. So they released a splat a few years later that gave some rules for more magic-feeling casting, which still does not (by default) use spell slots or mana points.

And that’s even ignoring how you can model stricter spellcasting systems as Advantages, with each spell being a specific advantage, effectively being a kind of superpower in practice

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