I’ve been making progress on the Alpha release for Hundred Dungeons, and the biggest part of that process at the moment is revising and formatting spell options! So I thought it would be worth posting some thoughts of mine and see what you have to say.
One of the significant challenges of expressing spells as text in a game is that they land right on the fault line of reference material and creative inspiration. A spell ideally both gets your imagination spinning on how your character behaves or appears, and it’s easy to find, scan, and apply in the session. Bonus points if it’s intuitive to remember and doesn’t take up a huge space on the page. That’s a tall order, and we’re not even talking about balance and curating spell lists for the health of the game!
REVISITING D&D SPELLS
As Hundred Dungeons was taking shape, I always assumed I’d be keeping the fifth edition spells more or less intact. They’ve always struck me as one of the strongest areas of the design of the game, and that work was informed by lots of active feedback from the longtime D&D players, both before and after playtest packets were released. I remember participating in a survey that asked me to choose which spells I thought were most iconic to the game. My picks were pretty darn close to the final list.
I enjoy that legacy of the game. Hundred Dungeons certainly does away with some of the sacrosanct aspects of the game (ability scores vs. modifiers being a prime example), but it can afford to because I don’t have to adhere to or serve the legacy of Dungeons & Dragons. I can focus on feel and ease, two cornerstones of my design process.
So with spells, I was starting with the Basic Rules spell lists. Not just for licensing and copyright reasons. I think those lists are, first, curated very well for the feel of iconic D&D. Secondly, though, they have the enormous virtue of being relatively balanced across the pillars! The Player’s Handbook and later supplements have added a ton of spells to the game, and the majority of them are combat-focused. But as I’ve gone through the Basic Rules spells, I’ve come to believe that most of the spells are perfectly useful out of combat, and many are useless in combat (which is a great thing!).
Since balancing the pillars of play is one of my top design goals, the Basic Rules spells work very well.
SPELL FORMAT
Where do the fifth edition spells fall short for me? Mostly in their usability at the table. That’s partly a function of how the mechanics of spells interact with a character sheet (they don’t fit, never will), and partly a result of the prose-focused style of fifth edition. Generally, I like the game to be more read-y and less math-y, but with spells you end up with areas of effect, targets, and many other restrictions of the spells getting buried in a wall of prose.
Spells are hard to quickly reference. I’ve had a good number of times when a player misread a spell, and I said, “Look at the second sentence,” and they read only the part of the sentence that doesn’t contain the answer to their question. Reading the full description to get key mechanical info isn’t going to work for what I want.
Instead, we’re going to break out Range, Area, and Target at the top of the description so it’s nice and clear. Sometimes spell mechancis don’t fit neatly into all three categories, so we’ll take a tip from D&D Beyond and give ourselves permission to list Range/Area or Area/Target or even Range/Area/Target (like in spells that only target “Self”).
The Hundred Dungeons spell header for plant growth looks like this:
Level 3 transmutation
Casting Time: Action (or 8 hours)
Range: 150 feet
Area: 1-mile-radius sphere (line of sight)
Target: Nonmagical plants
Duration: 8 hours
I find this really nice and refreshing. You immediately know this is a spell that takes an action, but likely has a second effect if you spend extra time. It can affect an area of 1-mile radius (I was feeling generous) as long as that area is within 150 feet of you. It targets nonmagical plants in the spell’s area of effect, and it lasts 8 hours. To my eyes, this is much easier to scan and digest without digging into the actual spell text block.
Another difference you’ll notice in example on this page is that the spells specifically reference the class. Yes, for now the plan is to list spells not in an alphabetical master list, but list them by class and level (repeating spells where necessary). It’s just so much easier to reference. We’ll see if this concept survives.
Players full-on ignore spell components. This is a mistake I’m guilty of as well. It’s easy to do. Spell components are often uninteresting, unimpactful, or (in the case of spellcasting foci) easily obviated. Every time I’m at a table with someone who describes their use of spell components and what the spell looks like, I enjoy it.
When I GM, I make an effort to make casting spells part of the aesthetic of the game. Rather than tell players it’s all up to them (and have them ignore it entirely), Hundred Dungeons is going to prescribe specific material, somatic, and verbal components necessary for each spell. And they’ll sometimes differ from class to class, even when casting the same spell. A bard’s magic looks very different from a cleric’s or wizard’s, even if they share some functionality.
For example, the components listed for the spell Greater Invisibility are as follows:
Components
Materials: Veil or shroud
Form: Pass the veil over the target
Pledge: “Go unseen by mortal eyes,” spoken in Sylvan
This is a relatively straightforward picture of how the spell works. Can it be done while the spellcaster is restrained? Probably not, but that depends on how they’re restrained and by what part of the body. Manacles probably wouldn’t prevent this example, but a giant snake wrapped around the torso and arms? I bet it would.
What I see as a benefit for this component format is that it puts the fiction first. What are you actually doing with your hands and voice? If we can’t determine that, how can we determine if it’s possible under the given circumstances? How can we determine if the spellcasting is obvious to onlookers, or if they recognize the components and thus identify the spell?
In our effort to create consistency, we throw the fiction into the background in favor of universal rules.
You’ll notice that in the example of bestow curse below, a flexible, non-combat option has been highlighted first, followed by the more “dicey” options for a curse, like weak (disadvantaged) attack rolls. I know I’d rather bestow a curse that matches curses in history and folklore, and I’m hoping Hundred Dungeons players agree.
Spells are overwritten. This may just be me, but I find the spell descriptions wordy. They use formal language that trips on itself and isn’t always intuitive. It’s like a particular dialect you have to get used to reading. Take this selection from the description of guards and wards, one of the most complicated spells:
You create a ward that protects up to 2,500 square feet of floor space (an area 50 feet square, or one hundred 5-foot squares or twenty-five 10-foot squares). The warded area can be up to 20 feet tall, and shaped as you desire. You can ward several stories of a stronghold by dividing the area among them, as long as you can walk into each contiguous area while you are casting the spell.
…
Guards and wards creates the following effects within the warded area.
Corridors. Fog fills all the warded corridors, making them heavily obscured. In addition, at each intersection or branching passage offering a choice of direction, there is a 50 percent chance that a creature other than you will believe it is going in the opposite direction from the one it chooses.
Doors. All doors in the warded area are magically locked, as if sealed by an arcane lock spell. In addition, you can cover up to ten doors with an illusion (equivalent to the illusory object function of the minor illusion spell) to make them appear as plain sections of wall.
Stairs. Webs fill all stairs in the warded area from top to bottom, as the web spell. These strands regrow in 10 minutes if they are burned or torn away while guards and wards lasts.
That’s incredible hard to reference or apply at the table. Even to read and digest for a player who hasn’t been a spellcaster before.
Here’s how it’s been streamlined for Hundred Dungeons. We started with reorganizing the effects by spell instead of by where they exist. That’ll help the player quickly see what other effects they need to read and learn. But you’ll also notice the language is more direct and easier to read quickly.
You create a ward that protects the target area with obscurement, locks, and other magical defenses for the spell’s duration.
The area you target can be shaped in any orientation you choose, but must consist of 25 contiguous 10-foot squares of floor space. You can divide the area among separate levels of a structure, as long as you can walk continuously along them while casting the spell.
…
Guards and wards creates effects mimicking the following spells within the warded area:
Arcane Lock affects all doors in the warded area
Fog Cloud effects fills all warded corridors
Silent Image illusions make up to 10 doors appear as plain sections of wall
Web effects fill all stairs in the warded area from top to bottom; the strands regrow in 10 minutes if they are burned or torn away while guards and wards lasts
Additionally, at each intersection or branching passage, there is a 50 percent chance that a creature other than you will believe it is going in the opposite direction from the one it chooses.
Another spot where language has been made more direct is upcasting spells. First of all, we actually call it “upcasting,” rather than couching it in insinuating language at not giving it a name. In the full rules, upcasting is described this way:
Some spells list effects they gain if cast at higher level than normal. To upcast, choose an unexpended spell you know of the desired level and expend it to cast the lower level spell. When that spell takes effect, apply the adjustments for the higher level at which it was cast.
Spells that can be upcast have an entry at the bottom, as in fifth edition. These are simple and direct. I always felt the language used in fifth edition’s upcasting instructions was circuitous.
Some rule revisions in Hundred Dungeons need accommodation. The last batch of changes that the spells have received have to do with places where the core rules no longer sync up with the spells’ intended use. Most prominent here is the difference in length of one round. Hundred Dungeons Combat rounds are 20 seconds, meaning one minute is 3 rounds rather than 10 rounds.
For spells that are meant to last a full combat encounter, this puts us in an awkward place. A single minute will take up most of a quick combat, but it will likely time out in a more evenly matched fight. Ten minutes is safer if we want the effect to be prolonged (as is the case with greater invisibility and banishment). So some spells have been extended to 10 minutes, some adjusted in other small ways to make up for the fact that they’ll time out (like removing the chance to end the effect early).
In the example of enhance ability below, you’ll notice that instead of advantage, my revised version is just adding to the ability score directly. Fifth edition avoids that because there are too many derived stats, it would makes the overly complex to apply in play. In Hundred Dungeons, we don’t need to worry, because the derived stats are pretty few and simple.
EXAMPLES
So with these principles in mind, let’s take a look at some example spells from the Hundred Dungeons Alpha! Please drop a comment or reach out to me with any feedback.
This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Hundred Dungeons is created and written by Graham Ward © 2023
Permission granted to copy for personal use only.
