Ideals.

[matt439miller]

Massive frowny face. Purely for reasons of hassle. Assume you'll need an equal number of spells for each school (or ideal combo) and cry a little bit inside. Someone pointed out that 5e dnd had to make 20 levels for 13 classes, so there was a near certainty they'd fucked up at least some of them. And playing mayhem, there were a serious number of just bad content--either too weak or two powerful. So the less content that needs produced, the better that content can be. Flip side is to just make the spells and let god sort it out. This is an rpg after all. Core bit is get flavorful content.

[jakesower]

Mayhem's bad content was mostly a matter of expediency. Plus the actual published game spurned the ideal system in favor of that godawful elemental system. I use L&C for inspiration, not Mayhem (even if the two are linked). The content I hate the most are the "+1 to Something" and improved "+2 to the Same Thing" abilities. Lazy dog shit.

D&D's method of squirreling everything into lists of class spells is pretty lazy too. "Spell banishes undead? Cleric gets it, wizard doesn't." That's pretty weak sauce, but then again D&D is a class based game, like it or hate it. Are the D&D/LotR races furries or not according to you? Can't recall.

The ideals were more of a departure from that. Combine ideals and boom, there was a bunch of spells waiting for you. It's anti-class in essence.

Your point in there being too many combinations of ideals is well taken. Bringing the 12 down to 10 for the MTG approach isn't a huge improvement, but it does help.

[matt439miller]

Sleep deprived Rob making dogshit to fill quotas. Final book has a fair bit of it, including some duplication of near identical abilities that stack.

[matt439miller]

I likewise hate the +1 and +2. Especially as it permits bonus stacking. It's easy, but not flavorful. 3.5e did that, and... eh. 5e having bonuses and advantage much better. Do like bonuses being static, things you write on sheet and advantage being conditions and or temporary. Here, equiv to avoid is adding a d10 to pool. But there will necessarily be things to do so, as well as 'treat a tulle as a triple,

[jakesower]

Adding 1d10 to a pool will likely be better than giving a +1 bonus. The reason is that it affects tuples, which are linked to Interesting Stuff. Have you had a look at the spell list I typed up?

Still, +1 is +1. It'd be nice to have something like an advantage mechanic where you can reroll any dice once or something.

[matt439miller]

Have looked at spell list. And I think we're better off removing things to the multi-step core mechanic than adding.