Staff Mana without using Experience Points

[Steve Plambeck]

I teased in the thread on XP I had a personal solution to decouple Staff Mana from the XP system. This would be desirable if you felt spending XP on things besides Attribute increases was gamey. You could use this as a model and tweak it to your heart's content.

First, drop all the Staff spells except the original IQ 8 one. It's not that Staves have to lose any of their new features. Instead, these features become conferred on a wizard's Staff automatically as the wizard improves. Even SJ has pointed out that a wizard's Staff doesn't actually change, it's really the wizard's learning and ability to do things with the Staff that are changing. The only ability I want to talk about here though is the Mana storage that ITL introduced with Staff II.

My preferred method is to allow the wizards to store increasing levels of Mana in their Staves as they acquire progressively higher and more expensive wizardry talents. But if you don't like or want wizardry talents, just ignore that part and only go by the IQ levels suggested below. Ok, at:

IQ 8 - the figure takes the Adept talent. Being IQ 8 it can learn the Staff spell and create a Staff, but at this level it has no clue how to store any Mana in it yet.

IQ 11 - the figure takes the Wizardry talent, which confers (among whatever else) the ability to store Mana in their Staff equal to their own ST minus 6 (a minimum of 2, assuming they have a minimum ST of 8).

IQ 14 - the figure takes the Sorcery talent, which confers (among whatever else) the ability to store Mana in their Staff equal to their own ST minus 4 (for a minimum of 4).

IQ 17 - the figure takes the Thaumaturge talent, which confers (among whatever else) the ability to store Mana in their Staff equal to their own ST minus 2 (for a minimum of 6).

IQ 20 - the figure takes the Enchanter talent, which confers (among whatever else) the ability to store Mana in their Staff equal to their own full ST (for a minimum of 8).

IQ 23 - the figure takes the Arch Mage talent, which confers (among whatever else) the ability to store Mana in their Staff equal to their own ST times 2 (for a minimum of 16). (Too generous? Well, you don't have to go this far).

So that's it. Keep in mind this is only setting the maximum Mana capacity for Staves. These wizards would still have to follow the rules to charge the Mana, use the Mana, and recharge the Mana.

This differs from RAW in that XP would no longer be spent on Mana Staff capacity. That capacity could not increase however without spending XP to increase either ST or IQ. As worded above, the Mana capacity of the Staff increases 1 if the wizard's ST went up 1. Or, the Mana capacity goes up 2 each time the IQ increase 3, but you could spread those levels out differently if you wanted too.

Either way, the Mana capacity doesn't go up unless XP gets spent on Attribute increases, which means it goes up more slowly as the figure's Attribute total grows. Yet, that capacity will always be relative to whatever ST the wizard started with or grew to. With a big jump to double capacity coming later (under RAW that's at IQ 17 with Staff V, but in my example I put it quite a bit later, not that you couldn't move that up if you wanted to).

To review, in my example the progression of increasing Staff Mana levels from low to high is: 0 (zero), ST-6, ST-4, ST-2, full ST, and double ST.

Some sample builds and their corresponding Staff Mana capacities using the IQ cutoffs from above:

ST 09, IQ 11: 3 Mana (9-6)
ST 08, IQ 14: 4 Mana (8-4)
ST 12, IQ 12: 6 Mana (12-6)
ST 11, IQ 14: 7 Mana (11-4)
ST 13, IQ 11: 7 Mana (13-6) (would be DX 8 as a 32-pointer)
ST 10, IQ 17: 8 Mana (10-2)
ST 10, IQ 20: 10 Mana (STx1)
ST 09, IQ 23: 18 Mana (STx2)