galehar wrote:I don't think describing spell failure instead of success would change anything. Also, most spell failure are harmless, so it wouldn't describe the risk of a bad miscast effect. And even if you're never going to want cast anything below 50%, it's still useful to have some detail to know how much you still need to train before being able to learn a spell.
Ok, I see how having a scale below 50% is useful. However, both intuitively and experimentally, a player should know that higher-level spells have worse miscast effects. Doing big magic badly is gonna hurt. At least to me, Summon Greater Demon seems like a more dangerous spell to do badly than Summon Imp. Ditto for Phase Shift and Blink (I'm no longer a new player, though, so my opinion what is intuitive to a new player may be rubbish).
After thinking about it, it wasn't the miscast chance that I liked. You were right, that's no better than chance of success. It finally dawned on me that what I really liked about absoluteego's proposal was the terminology; describing the
magnitude of the chance, instead of the final effect of the chance (as the current nomenclature does). "Good" is subjective, depending on the context that it is in. "Large" much more objective, and much less dependent on context. As long as I, the player, know that high-level spells correlate with dangerous miscasts, then I can make an informed decision about a spell with an 'average' or 'very large' chance of success (or miscast). Besides all that, you're already using this nomenclature for piety costs, why not use it for spell/ability success?
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
TSE