#they had one of the light magic users disguise themself as the relative of one of the NPCs

[caileggedly]

this aligns so beautifully with that magic system i made for fun a while back. where is it hangon

OKAY I FOUND IT

did this for shits and giggles inspired by dnd for something i did with my friends.

i had them pick an element they wanted to learn and they had to stick with 1 elemt with higher proficiency or multiple with lower levels of proficiency.

the type of magic you have an affinity for / can cast depends on a 'karma' check ingame. there's events and the actions they choose to take in those events add/subtract from their karma score in the lore it's based on your vibes. literally i made a vibes based magic system if you have negative vibes, like youre angry or tired, then it's easier to cast dark magic, and if your vibes are good and happy its easier to cast light magic. like you can still cast both but the success rate is affected 0 karma has no effect which is arguably the best but this is SUPER hard to maintain. success rates for every cast is 50/50. yes i made the neutral success rate depend on a coin toss

for non neutral karma, you roll two dice

the success rate is 5 above for light magic, and 7 below for dark magic. you choose what variant you want to cast before rolling and you cant change it depending on the result hehe

your karma adds or subtracts from the result. if you cast light magic and roll a 4 but your karma score is +1, your result is 5, so your cast is successful. viceversa with dark magic, if you roll a seven but your score is like. -3. then you cast successfully

the amount of damage / effect duration depends on your result too. if you roll a 12+ on light magic it's obv gonna be stronger than rolling a 5. my friend was a terrible person ingame and had a karma of NEGATIVE THIRTEEN. HE BURNT DON AND ENTIRE FUCKING RESIDENTIAL BLOCK!!!

so his incantations had massive dmg + debuffs to both him and his enemies lol

also i let them pick what to do. the stuff on the tables act more as guides. one of the party members decided she wanted to explode some guy's eyeballs using dark variant water magic and i let her. her karma score went so low that she was sitting on less that 50% hp most of the time because of the repercussions HAHAHAHAHA

anywayz. we had a party of like 8-9 people and it was somehow evenly split between dark and light variant users. i had them fight someone way out of their league for shits and giggles and my good friend who is a massive gambling addict with a nearly neutral karma score decided that she wasn't going to die in this encounter and have to start over in a different area like everyone else did. so far she'd kept herself between both the variants of life magic but she decided she wanted to feed her gambling addiction and kept rolling for control checks [that got INCREASINGLY difficult] the entire encounter i wanted all of them to die for lore reasons. she didn't gaf. only 4 of them died ☹

You’re the healer of the group. The rest of the party has always treated you like you’re made of glass. You were content to stay out of their way and let them do their thing. Until they all got downed leaving you the only one standing. That’s when you show them how deadly healing magic can be.