Level Up (A5E) Wild Magic Wish List

I'm considering making an A5e Wild Magic Table worthy of the name. (The existing one in T&T is only 1d10.) I have a few ideas for how to improve on the O5e version that comes with the Wild Magic Sorcerer, but I want to get the community's input.

Basic ideas:

1. Nested Randomness. You don't always polymorph into a sheep, and your skin doesn't always turn blue. The primary wild magic table redirects you to smaller tables that increase the range of possibilities.
2. Scalability. Wild magic surges are more or less powerful depending on the level of the spell that triggers them. This means that you don't have to worry about casting fireball on yourself when you can only cast level 1 spells and cantrips, but when you're slinging around 8th and 9th level spells, you'll wish that was the extent of your problems.
   1. Current plan to execute this is, when appropriate, to have the player roll 1d4, add the level of the spell minus 1 to the result, and consult a table of 12 options of increasing power
3. Bad, Neutral, and Good Variations on a d20 scale. Along with your d100 roll, you roll a d20 to determine if your results are good, neutral, or bad. This allows rolling with advantage and disadvantage, or adding your PB to a roll to try to exert control over the randomness.
4. Organization. The results may be random, but the table itself is organized so that Narrators can quickly find specific wild magic surges if they would prefer a particular effect.
5. None of this d50 Nonsense. If we're rolling a d100, we should have 100 different outcomes.

Any other things you'd like to see, or concerns with the ideas listed above?

my main concern is this sounds like a lot of tables. which i guess is the intent, but also kinda sounds like a pain.

...wait, t&t has a wild magic table?

W'rkncacnter said:

my main concern is this sounds like a lot of tables. which i guess is the intent, but also kinda sounds like a pain.

...wait, t&t has a wild magic table?

Click to expand...

It's under exploration challenges. Pg. 155

xiphumor said:

It's under exploration challenges. Pg. 155

Click to expand...

...it's mislabeled as a d8 table, too.

I'm on board with all the ideas proposed.
This could also open the gates for some true Wild Magic spells, like the old Nahal's Reckless Dwemer that automatically triggers a wild surge but allows you to roll more favorably.
The only concern I have is too many tables or too many nestings: one main table and some secondary tables seems the right balance for me. I wouldn't want to roll 6 times on different tables

lichmaster said:

I'm on board with all the ideas proposed.
This could also open the gates for some true Wild Magic spells, like the old Nahal's Reckless Dwemer that automatically triggers a wild surge but allows you to roll more favorably.
The only concern I have is too many tables or too many nestings: one main table and some secondary tables seems the right balance for me. I wouldn't want to roll 6 times on different tables

Click to expand...

This is fair feedback. Would “No more than one nested table per result?” be a decent policy?

xiphumor said:

This is fair feedback. Would “No more than one nested table per result?” be a decent policy?

Click to expand...

In principle sounds right to me. One roll on the main table, and another roll on a specific table.

lichmaster said:

I'm on board with all the ideas proposed.
This could also open the gates for some true Wild Magic spells, like the old Nahal's Reckless Dwemer that automatically triggers a wild surge but allows you to roll more favorably.
The only concern I have is too many tables or too many nestings: one main table and some secondary tables seems the right balance for me. I wouldn't want to roll 6 times on different tables

Click to expand...

Someone pointed out to me that I was misinterpreting that spell back in the day. It's not, "spend a level 1 slot to get whatever spell you want with a small risk from the wild surge." It's, "spend a level 1 slot, and you just get a wild surge, but since the surge can refer to the initial spell, you have to pick what that spell is, meaning there's a small chance to get a high level spell for cheap, but usually you get random crap."

xiphumor said:

1. Nested Randomness. You don't always polymorph into a sheep, and your skin doesn't always turn blue. The primary wild magic table redirects you to smaller tables that increase the range of possibilities.

Click to expand...

I was converting a wand of wonder (using the extra versions in the 2e Encyclopedia Magica book) and I just did things like "roll a d4: 1 - X; 2-3 - Y; 4 - Z" within the entries that had choices like that. I don't think I had any sub-table that went above a d4--I'd have to go back and check. It did mean that a few options were repeated--there was "you summon an animal" there three or four times, with different animals each time, because it was in more than one of the WoW tables--but with nearly 100 entries that wasn't a big deal (I didn't go for a full 100, but I probably have about 70-80 different entries).

One thought is that if you have these "sub-tables," to always have them use a d4 (or d6 or d8). Therefore, if you wanted, you could roll your d% and d4 at the same time and save a step, and if the initial result didn't have a sub-table, you didn't lose anything.

xiphumor said:

1. Scalability. Wild magic surges are more or less powerful depending on the level of the spell that triggers them. This means that you don't have to worry about casting fireball on yourself when you can only cast level 1 spells and cantrips, but when you're slinging around 8th and 9th level spells, you'll wish that was the extent of your problems.
   1. Current plan to execute this is, when appropriate, to have the player roll 1d4, add the level of the spell minus 1 to the result, and consult a table of 12 options of increasing power

Click to expand...

Far too complicated. It might be easier to just have them conjure a fireball that inflicts damage as if cast with their highest-level slot (so if you have 8th-level slots, it inflicts 11d6 damage), but that inflicts 4d6 damage if you only have 2nd-level slots and 2d6 damage if you only have 1st-level slots.

xiphumor said:

• Bad, Neutral, and Good Variations on a d20 scale. Along with your d100 roll, you roll a d20 to determine if your results are good, neutral, or bad. This allows rolling with advantage and disadvantage, or adding your PB to a roll to try to exert control over the randomness.

Click to expand...

I think this should be just a note above the table, and not a d20. 1-2: good; 3-4: neutral; 5-6: bad (or potentially 1: good; 2-5: neutral; 6: bad, if you want to be less random).

xiphumor said:

• Organization. The results may be random, but the table itself is organized so that Narrators can quickly find specific wild magic surges if they would prefer a particular effect.
• None of this d50 Nonsense. If we're rolling a d100, we should have 100 different outcomes.

Click to expand...

As I mentioned, I did mine with slightly less than 100 entries, as some entries covered two numbers. I did this because, as a wand of wonder (and not wild magic), some entries were effectively insta-kills, especially the petrifaction entry and some of the spells, so I didn't want them to be quite as common.

xiphumor said:

Any other things you'd like to see, or concerns with the ideas listed above?

Click to expand...

I guess just decide ahead of time how much this is going to be wild magic and how much it's going to be lolrandom.

I was a great fan of the random character generation in Sentinel Comics. There the dice rolled over. Not only did the die types determine the levels of the power/qualities (with d8, d8, d6 you got two with a d8 and one with a d6) but the dice were also used to roll on the table. For a d8, d8, d6 you'd roll all three dice and can then decide which up to two you'd use to determine the result of the table roll (if you rolled a 3, 7 and 5 you could choose between 3,5,7,8 or 12)

Things like these could be features for wild mages who can somewhat control the way the magic goes wild.

Or maybe 1d10 per spell slot rolled by the player for the "tens" and one (for the "ones") by the narrator. If high rolls are good and low rolls are bad, maybe require the player to take the lowest die for "difficult" situations or highest roll for "good" situations. Or add another randomizer like "if the narrator roll is even take the highest of the player's rolls, if it is odd take the lowest".

The possibilities are endless