Editing Samsara:Ultramundane abilities (section)

===Fire Sorcerers of the East (Thematic Abilities)===
This system allows one to create thematic wizards, perhaps the products of a particular school of magic.  Any effect which could be accomplished by that theme is allowable and this calls for some thinking.  Your Fire Sorcerer might have just one ability: Fire Sorcery +3.  Any magic using fire sorcery uses that ability.  

But what does fire sorcery do?  Well, that depends upon the game.  A free-form game might allow just about anything.  Shooting bolts of flame is obvious.  But maybe the fire sorcerer can step into any large flame and teleport to any other large flame.  Maybe he can perceive anybody near to a flame and thus spy on them.  Maybe he can use flames to hypnotize people.  Can he summon fire elementals?  Are there even such things as fire elementals?

Thematic abilities are the opposite of effects-based; the cause is everything.  The effects of Thematic Abilities run in the Romantic mode might be left fairly indeterminate at the start.  But in the Classical Mode, the GM might provide a list of what fire sorcery does: bolt of flame, walls of flame, resist heat and cold; but no summonings, no teleporting, no mind control and so on.

If there is a pre-determined sense of what Thematic Abilities can do, the GM might include experimentation as a mechanic.   This would mean that the player knows what can be done with his ability, but not what can’t be tried.  If the character wants to try and do something unusual, he can try with some penalty.  If he succeeds, he has now learned a new application.  

Experimentation can be tweaked in many ways.  For instance, to emphasize the struggle of the new and the overcoming of that, the GM might apply a decreasing modifier to the Contest roll.  A base -4 modifier would apply the first time an experiment is made.  If successful, the next attempt at the same experiment will be -3 and so on, until the character can be said to have internalized the experiment when he reaches 0 modifier.  If the character fails the roll, the penalty stays the same; a spectacular failure might even result in an increased penalty the next time.

To increase the struggle even more, the GM might require the actor to engage in a contest with his own powers, as he struggles to better understand them.  The Fire Sorcerer who has never tried flame-walking might have to win a contest using his INT + WIL vs. his own Fire Sorcery stat.  This would make it harder for powerful wizards to learn new tricks.  In this case, the GM might allow the player to select as many applications of his power as he has positive modifiers at the beginning of the game (Fire Sorcery +3 means that the character knows three applications).  Thereafter, anything new is going to be a struggle.

For the opposite effect, experiments might be given a Contest rating against which the character contests using his Thematic modifier plus relevant attributes.  This would allow more skilled actors to better experiment.  The Contest rating could be based off of the in-game difficulty of the action (walking of fire might be less unnatural than teleporting through fires) or of the effect’s relation to already-known applications (the Fire Sorcerer who already knows how to walk on fire, might find teleporting through flames less of a conceptual stretch than hypnotizing people through flames).