3 letter word magic and being knocked out.

I dislike magic. For whatever reason I was never drawn to ttrpgs for magic. Even when I was a kid playing tunnels and trolls I would always play as a fairy but I would always want to use a dagger as the weapon and not some spell.

So to learn and understand magic a bit more I am trying to just throw it into my games to see the reason and the limits for it.

I ran an intro game for two people this week. Black sword hack adventure ripped from chaos crier one (with extra parts taken from Knock). Players find themselves in a mine and they have to fight their way out or influence their way out or whatever.

As the players end up there without weapons I thought. Maybe they have magic. So I allowed for any three letter word spell and the cost was a D4 in HP. Ironically both players had 4 or less HP to begin with, and the words were any languages known at the table which meant at least 5. My example spell was "Hat" and a hat appears and it costs a D4. so... possible death. BUT to also play with high knock out, low lethality, one could be revived with help and a sandwich. (There were no sandwiches)

First spell "eat" and 10 sandwiches arrived. This was before anyone was knocked out so the limits of their HP was not understood. But then I realised. This could be a circle of no death. Spell, die, sandwich, arise. So I put limits. max hp amount of spells per day. So then one player started writing down possible spells whilst the other player quickly figured out how to use sandwiches to gain influence over the other mining slaves. When a fight broke out one cast - "dog" to fight a beast, the other cast "dig" and hid. Guess which one died?

The adventure went on, and I understood that whilst costly magic makes sense, costly magic with caveats was also needing a strategy. It was only one or two decisions that kept the players alive and those decisions leaned more on roleplaying than the magic system we were trying. Some of old school play is based on a brick wall problem and players are given straw brooms and a hammer handle and they need to figure out how to get over or around or to topple the brick wall.

What if the brick wall was actually a group of scrawny strangers under the oppression of a bully and the players are given a language puzzle with no limits and some random encounters after the fact.

Still fun. I think I will keep experimenting with these ideas and maybe this will be a separate school of magic no books needed. Or maybe "spell slots" can be wounds that are taken on their body taking up equipment slots. Or maybe players can choose. The dice or the slots. Or even further maybe the word is chosen by the player and how the spell works is stated by another player.

Could be a bit of fun.