Quote:
Originally Posted by Bazial
That's a good point. I've always liked threshold magic for the flavor, but how it inherently changes the economy of spellcasting I never pondered that much.
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I went through the chat logs of my online game at one point and tallied up how much FP people actually used in adventuring situations - the theoretical throughput is 50-250 FP per 8 day day, but it's hard to optimize to that in adventuring conditions - and it worked out closer to 30-40 FP/day.
I then ran a different online game using Threshold Magic, a standard Threshold of about 25, and a Recovery Rate of about 35, and it worked out pretty nicely: the wizard went over threshold toward the end of the day, and there was a definite sense of "now I have to conserve magic" but he could still contribute if things got really dangerous. He pushed himself too far a couple of times - I was using a more generous Catastrophe table but he went overboard - and pretty much had to say "I cannot cast spells for a week or my character will explode." Fortunately, they were done with the adventure then and could take the time off.
Long story short, moderate threshold, high recovery rate, less punishing catastrophe table gives you slightly more impressive wizards who can't wreck your game world's economy the way FP casters can. The recommend high threshold, low recovery rate, punishing catastrophe table gives you wizards that can do an impressive thing every few days but don't do very much magic otherwise.