Syntatic Magic Rotes and standard spells

[mehrkat]

Hi All,

I have a world that I'm working on that I want to encourage Syntactic magic but also make combat magics feasible and possible. One of the aspects of Syntactic Magic is that is takes a bit to cast most effects compared to standard magic and costs a lot of Fatigue.
What a really want to encourage is for Mages to take the words of power but also create their own rotes and in fact have higher skills in the rotes than the words. Note I'm not interested in staying strictly to RAW but am more trying to think of obvious abuses that make it vastly overpowered or encourage a specific small set of abuses.
I can see 2 ways to do this:
1. Have spells and rotes be average or hard techniques based on the lowest Word skill involved and allow it to be over the Word skill level. A big advantage I'm thinking of giving the rotes and spells would be the decreased fatigue and time casting cost of using the words straight based on the magic chart for skill level.
2. Have spells use the lowest rote as the starting default so instead of the spell using IQ + Magery for starting level it would use Lowest Word level.

Note I'm planning to use standard Magery limit of 3 and the point level is planned for midrange 150 to 200 points so flaws that don't show up except by abusing really high levels are ok with me.

[Refplace]

Sounds workable, buying up Rotes above the word level should help get you what you want but still most will opt for the extra power and flexibility that high Word skills get them.
How about adding an option to create fetishes or soemthing that apply to specific rotes?
One way may be that you can make a fetish up to the bonus you get from your Rote skill and never based off a word?

[Anders]

Something like this?