Two sohei walk into a haunted castle...

Last night we ran another play test of Chanbara.  Things are going well.  Dean and Alexei were the only two players available, and they are both playing sohei.  It made for an interesting experience, and helped us to find some fuzzy areas in the rules that need to be ironed out.

Little Sparrow the Sohei by Dean Flemming

Basically, I was going for OD&D levels of sparseness of spell and ability descriptions.  And we found out why the descriptions of such things have gotten longer and more legalistic over the decades first hand.  Now, I don't need to go to Pathfinder lengths to describe every little detail and proscribe every possible abusive case.  That last part is something individual GMs should be able to handle.  But I do need to be concise yet specific in the use of certain abilities.

I also need to think of some sort of caster limit.  Chainmail roll to cast mechanics are working well as a means of working spells in play, but while in a wargame there's a limit to the amount wizards will be casting determined by the length of the "battle," there's no such limit in RPG campaign play.

Some sort of limit needs to be in place.  Now to figure out what.  I don't want Vancian spells per day by level, nor a spell point system.  But possibly a hard limit on spells per day regardless of level?  Or fatigue such as the Stars Without Number system strain mechanic?  Something else?

One proto-idea floating around in my head would be a system of diminishing returns for casting the same spell more than once.  So a caster would be able to cast each spell they know once per day at no penalty, but each additional casting of each spell would be at a penalty, have a cost, or cause some sort of hindrance.  Having to track it for every spell, especially at high levels, would get tedious, I think.

At the moment, I'm leaning toward a modified SWN system strain mechanic.

Oh, and the two sohei, both designed for hunting undead, did really well in the castle versus skeletons and jikininki, but had a hard time in a random encounter against a group of kama-itachi (flying sickle weasels).  Probably as it should be.