Ye Olde Inn

In the 2021, the druid, bard, and warlock each have one spell that can be regained when a certain condition is met -- the druid regains Shapeshift whenever fully healed; the bard gets his spell back after seeing another hero roll 2 white shields; and the warlock gets hers after killing a monster. I think this is a great mechanic, and I'd love to add it to the classic elemental spells. Does anyone have any ideas for a balanced condition that could be attached to a spell to make it regainable?

My only idea so far is to let Fire of Wrath be regained when a monster you can see rolls three skulls when rolling attack dice.

-FW

I tried a system based on mind points

Every time you cast a spell, you could pay with a mind point instead if discarding the card. If you tried that, you had to roll a d6, if that was higher than your current mind points, keeping the spell would fail, casting it, too.

Then I exaggerated and said they you could spend additional mind points to subtract points from the dice roll. The idea was to have a push-your-luck thing that would lead to spend all the mind points, fast.

I restricted it to no healings and no spells with lose-your-turn mechanism like sleep and tempest, because those are very strong in the Heroquest context.

You could spend a turn doing nothing to get one MP back. That worked only because I used EWP cards so that the heroes would not just wait outside the door until the Wizard was full.

Stack all that and it was pretty complicated! Then I started to gather experience through testing and found that only fireball was cast repeatedly. So I increased that specific spell's keeping cost to 2 Mind Points.

Also the card texts were getting pretty long so I started to replace repeated sentence parts by symbols.

No one understood.

Now I have come back to use-and-discard. But the Wizard gets more spells over time, to let him keep up with the others. There are 9 spells in each group, you draw 3 at random. Each group has it's stars and it's blanks.

You can buy:
- a new group for 300 gold, though you can still just take 3
- a spell more for a group costs 100 gold. Then you draw, for that group, one spell more each time you choose that group.
- you can specialize in a spell. That means you don't need to draw it at random anymore, you can take it at your leisure. This costs 50 gold per spell.

That works, also the Wizard can spend some gold.

I also like Anderas' method. And it recalls to my mind an old post of mine on this topic: Yet Another Magic Rework.
But we should consider my system was for basic UK game, where a Sleep or a Tempest spells are ,in my opinion, not so strong (I would prefer to try to kill a monster with a Ball of Flame instead of making him sleep, where he can try to wake p every time he is attacked; the same with Tempest, because he can still defend if attacked).

lestodante wrote:...My magic system was allowing the wizard to upgrade and to own more spell sets and assigning him some "mana" points. Each spell will consume some mana so he can chose from a very high range of spells but twith a limited use so the game will not result unbalanced. So, Mind Points allow to know more magic, Mana Points allow to use them!
Here is the list of the standard spells and considering their effects I attribuited a MANA value to each of them:

Pass through Rock 1
Heal Body 3
Rock Skin 2
Water of Healing 3
Sleep 1
Veil of Mist 1
Courage 2
Fire of Wrath 2
Ball of Flame 2
Genie 3 (or 1 if used to reveal a room)
Tempest 1
Swift Wind 1

The stronger is the spell, the more mana it will consume.
Mana can obviously being recovered during the quest by using special potions or artifacts.
Please note that each sets of spells has a total value of 5 or 6 mana points. So the Wizard will start with 18 MANA POINTS, so he have enough mana to use all of his spells. If he will increase his Mind Points, he will get 6 more mana points for each new MP acquired.
All the new spells (including the ones from WOM, Spells of Darkness, Detection and Protection) will be subject to the same scheme and each set shoul not exceed a value of 6 MANA.
I was also considering the idea to NOT discard the spells after used, so the wizard can use the same spell more times in the same quest, but applying a penalty: when used a second time, the spell will use more mana than usually (still working on this... it can be a double amount or even dice roll to determine the amount)