Goodman Games

This is the only thing that really bothers me about the game.
My roommate and I rolled up some characters and ran them through their paces and one character ended up a wizard. Randomly rolled Read Magic as a spell, then randomly rolled 01 on the mercurial magic table "At great cost. Every time the wizard casts the spell, someone he knows dies (judge’s choice)." That's just... kind of dumb, and a little daunting for a GM because what if the player doesn't care and just casts the spell willy-nilly?

I love the concept and some of the results are great (got Corrosion Touch with Magic Missile!) but then some results are ridiculous or, as Evil Genius states, crippling. I'll probably only apply Mercurial Magic in games I run if it makes the spellcasting interesting in some way.

I also find it hard to gauge the power levels of spells, but this is a minor quibble. I'd love to design my own spells for the game but I simply don't know where to begin.

He'll run out of people off-stage that he knows, and it'll start affecting the rest of the party!

...and suddenly, you have an interesting situation.

When the dice throw weird stuff at you, the first thing to think is not how it could go wrong, but how it could go right... See if you can't make something interesting out of it, before rejecting it. Stretch your imagination. Steal from other's ideas...

Maybe it not only kills someone he knows, but their ghost comes to tell him what is the magic writing says -- and then it tries to kill him! That would cut down on willy-nilliness. And it takes his cavalier attitude in stride and re-creates the crisis that was intended.

Re: mercurial magic, I'd try to go with it as-is (love the ghost idea) but I'd consider that to be one "implementation" of Read Magic. If you can find or research another version of Read Magic it would work differently for you. So right there he has a goal, find a more usable version of this important spell. (That's just a house rule, I don't pretend it's the intent of the rules-as-written). You might also consider allowing someone to suppress a spell's MM effect if they take a penalty to their roll, perhaps equal to spell level.

Those are both interesting ideas!

Glad to hear it. And yes, that 'research alternate version' idea is rock solid.

Give it a little time, and you'll switch Mercurial Magic to the "Three Things I Love About DCC" thread...!

Maybe the wizard should try to get to know some of the NPCs or monsters that are making it difficult for the party?