Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Goodwin
First: the rules already make explicit that ST loss to spellcasting is fatigue, and recovers more quickly, even though a wizard can still die from it. I propose that a wizard's mana score is equal to their IQ.
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I'm late to the party, but this comment quoted above really caught my eye.
My group in the 80's implemented exactly this. We called it Mana Valence, or the MV attribute, and set it equal to the wizard's IQ. Spell costs were paid for out of MV instead of ST, and the MV used recovered as if it were fatigue. If a wizard increased IQ, their MV increased accordingly. We used this house rule for over a decade of heavy play, so consider it vetted. It resulted in no imbalance in the overall system.
De-coupling spell casting costs from the ST attribute largely removes the need for any kind of separate health attribute. Players' wizards began putting their EP on additional IQ instead of ST, which does indeed work out to be much more natural feeling, and eliminates the need/temptation to create muscle-bound mages. I owned one PC, a wizard of only ST 8 (but IQ 16) who represented an elderly widower gone off for adventures late in life, and he survived many hard battles and lived to retire gracefully.