Design Diaries: Sage
Beatrice, beastling sage. Art by Raphael Ferreira Braga
Most of the Infinite Re:Imagine team has spent a lot of time working on d20 TTRPG systems like D&D and Pathfinder. If you’re familiar with either of those systems, you might also be familiar with the term “Vancian casting”, which refers to the level-tiered, slot-based spell mechanics popularized by Dungeons & Dragons and inspired by the fiction of Jack Vance.
Vancian spell mechanics can be, in the modern gaming era, a polarizing topic. Some people like them a lot, some people don’t like them at all. I once heard a designer whose skills I greatly respect refer to them as “not great but better than every alternative I’ve seen in a TTRPG so far.” For our part, after discussing the kind of game we wanted the Infinite Re:Imagine TTRPG to be, we came to the decision that we’d probably be changing the way that magic and effect durations worked entirely compared to most other d20 TTRPGs, and that meant that a Vancian-type system likely just wasn’t going to be a good fit for our game.
The Infinite Re:Imagine TTRPG is set in the world of the Dream, and in a dream, time is relative and only relevant insofar as it impacts the narrative of the game. You won’t find mechanics with durations measured in minutes or hours in Infinite Re:Imagine; instead durations are measured in rounds or segments, and if something would have previously had a duration where you expect it to last an entire session (like D&D classic mage armor which had a duration of 24 hours in several editions) its duration is simply “until the end of this delve.” This foundation was the start of assessing how we were going to set up our most magical class.
Like Pathfinder Second Edition, Infinite Re:Imagine also uses a three-action system where each character gets three actions and one reaction on each of their turns. Big flashy abilities and effects where you combine several actions into one move (like a “Flying Elbow” attack where you run, leap into the air, and attack an enemy with your elbow) can combine two or three actions into a single move. That means that when crafting the sage, we also had the option of giving them cool magical effects they could perform that were limited not by how often in an hour or day they could be done, but by how many of the sage’s actions it took to perform them.
As we playtested within these parameters, we had one final piece of the puzzle we wanted to address: does a sage feel like it’s only accessible to some players, or is it something that anyone can feel comfortable playing? Wizards in many other d20 TTRPGs tend to have very high optimization ceilings with an endless array of variables to account for that can make them difficult for some players to grok, and we really didn’t want that here. If someone wanted to be magical and do magical things like throwing fireballs and creating fields of grasping plants, we didn’t want that to also mean that they had to have more system mastery than the other players. A design idea we’ve bandied about many times is the idea that every character, regardless of class or role, should feel like it uses the same “controller” as every other class (we’ve also referred to this as “four-button design”, a concept we’ve used as a litmus test without fully embracing; more on that in a future design blog!)
The end result of combining these elements was the sage, our first class with the tactician role and a wielder of magic who uses their understanding of Aspects and the Dream to do cool stuff all the time. No cantrips, no limited slots, just awesome magical effects with modular elements that allow the sage to feel like a potent character who is always doing big, magical things every turn of play. They don’t spike way above the performance of other classes like the dreamknight or sniper in the way that d20 wizards often spike above fighters or rogues, but they don’t ever run out of magic or end up using lower-powered cantrips to supplement their turns, either. Instead, they use multi-action spellforms and special feats that let them channel magic through orbs and wands, alongside unique Aspect overlays of their choosing that they use to change their attacks’ energy type, debuffs, or other parameters.
For example, the sage has a spellform called Meteor Fall where they drop a burst of astral energy in a burst that can explode and hit multiple creatures. By default, this deals astral damage (a kind of default energy type for magical effects made by manipulating the Dream.) If the sage uses their Channel Aspect action to draw on the power of the Flame, Meteor Fall does fire damage instead and can light affected enemies on fire. If the sage instead channels the Mountain, affected creatures have to use their Physical Defense (PDEF) instead of their Magical Defense (MDEF) and a critical failure on a save against Meteor Fall can leave the enemy vulnerable to follow-up attacks that deal bludgeoning damage.
The sage’s per segment and per delve effects exist mostly within the bonus boons they get from the Aspects they choose to specialize in, but Aspects and boons are something we’ll be talking more about in another blog!
The sage is, ultimately, a class that specializes in doing moderate damage to enemies in a few pre-defined areas, with overlays from Aspects that can take add a huge array of permutations to each individual effect. Once you’ve built your sage, you don’t have a significantly larger load of things to juggle than any other character, but you do retain a huge amount of customization and versatility. Hopefully you come to enjoy it as much as we do!
