A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

This is about a house rule that very nearly became canon.

Many, many long ages ago (actually it was November 1981) I submitted what I still consider my original group's most important TFT house rule to Metagaming. To my delight at the time, William Gustafson wrote me to say he wanted to include our Wizardry Talent as an optional rule in the upcoming second edition of In The Labyrinth! He went on to ask me if I'd write it up as an article for what was to be Interplay #9.

Heck yes, I was flabbergasted! And more than happy to write the article, which I completed and mailed to Gustafson right after the holidays. It was now January, 1982. I waited with baited breath for my next issue of Interplay to arrive in the mail, and see my own name in print. Plus of course I assumed every TFT player in the world would be impressed by our house rule, adopt it, and cheer.

And as all us old timers know, there never was a Metagaming 2nd edition of ITL, nor a ninth issue of Interplay -- it all went kaput in 1982. TFT going out of print was unthinkable to me, and besides now I wouldn't become famous.

The link below will take you to my unpublished article "TFT: What Makes A Wizard A Wizard?", for Interplay #9, 1982. Of course I had no computer yet, this is a scan of the browning original typed pages I recently rediscovered. Of course my group's Wizardry Talent itself was never lost, as we continued using it, revised and expanded, for almost another 20 years. This article shows it in its original, simplest form.

https://1drv.ms/b/c/c21a9b09d5f79c77...cYkLA?e=vok6o4

Aside from nostalgia, this in a good excuse to kick off a discussion of alternative rules for how learning and memory work, both under the old and newer rules. I've had quite awhile to think about it since I wrote the article.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I have always considered the doubled cost of talents for wizards as an indication of the very wildness of magic. In my understanding, magic required a highly trained form of thinking in order to be understood at a fundamental level as wizards do, and that this form of thought is so outrageous and arcane that a person trained in it is himself For whatever reason, when you gain a general grasp of magic, you lose your grasp of reality. It's like a form of autistic savantism which is learned rather than formed genetically.

This article is quite interesting, and I may experiment with this rule yet. It opens up the door for more diverse wizard characters. Bravo!

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Oops, that quote formatting is a mistake. I can't, however, seem to edit it. Whatever.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Very cool! Thanks for sharing the original Interplay submission!


It seems like it would definitely attain its goals of giving wizards a talent budget that isn't at odds with spending IQ point on spells, and simplifying the talent costs for wizards.

I quite like the idea of letting wizards get a few talents without feeling like they're sacrificing many spells to do something fairly basic.

It seems to me though that there would come a point with higher IQ levels (starting at IQ 14 and steadily rising from there) where wizards would seem to get even more talent points than non-wizards would. Especially for quite-high-IQ wizards.

I think I might then tend to prefer a house rule where wizards can increase their Wizardly IQ, or Wizardry (i.e. Magery in GURPS) independently of their IQ for other purposes. Of course, that would be more complicated rather than less complicated. (But personally I like separating them out so not all powerful wizards are super-smart at everything.)

It'd be great to see what your later versions of this are like, too!

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Thanks for the cheer Shoug!

But wow to what you're quoting. Somewhere I read the exact same thing being said about astrophysicists! And for the same reasons. Once you begin grasping the greater reality behind things, it actually rearranges your mind.

I used to work with academics, and the physicists were definitely "different" from everyone in the other disciplines.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Simplicity was the goal, and in that regard it worked perfectly.

The catalyst was our group trying to get through the transition from original Melee and Wizard to ITL when it finally came out. We started in 1977 (!) so by that time we each had big stables of PCs and NPC's (we had 3 GM's) and the rules in AW and ITL were invalidating all of our beloved characters. We had written our own "Skills" before "Talents" came along, and everyone was going to lose at least half of what they knew, and we weren't about to make that adjustment. An IQ 12 wizard should know 12 spells dang-nab it, and retain swimming or riding or swordsmanship after using them all in multiple adventures. And the Wizardry Talent solved the problem with one sweeping blow.

As I'll write in more detail later, we contrived multiple talents to keep our wizards occupied and the higher IQ ones from getting too deeply into the mundane talents: Wizardry, Sorcery, Advanced Wizardry, and Advanced Sorcery. Also, both Literacy and our World's own version of the Sorcerer's Tongue (Runish, the "language of creation") were prerequisites of the first Wizardry Talent, which itself was prerequisite for the Advanced versions, and all of that tied up a lot of memory. And all without losing any spells.

And now, I've been planning how to best re-work my old group's house rules on magic and memory to be ready to start a new group to play the Legacy edition. Because I'm not already busy enough! :)

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I also did away with the artificial distinction between Heroes and Wizards by creating two new Talents. Apprentice was an IQ8 Talent that allowed a character to learn any spell from IQ8 up to IQ13. Wizard was an IQ14 Talent that allowed spells up to IQ20.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I like this suggestion, and think that charging 6 talent points is not unreasonable. The wizard does get a full IQ # of spells in addition to a # of talents, so this does add to the wizard's pool of useful (hopefully) actions.

I need to think about the dropping of the doubling of learning spells for non-wizards and the -4 DX penalty. Not sure those will work as well as the wizardry talent sounds like it will.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I may not have mentioned the costs we used above, but it actually worked out to 7:

Literacy (1)
Sorcerers Tongue (1)
Wizardry (5) - prerequisite both of the above

7 talent points is a lot to get started in any career, but being a wizard ain't just any career. It was possible to become a starting wizard in our World for only 6 talent points if your native tongue was already Runish (the Sorcerers Tongue if it were Cidri), but the only eligible race that applied to in our World were the Elves (which we thought should naturally be more inclined to magic).

We simply didn't allow figures without the Wizardry talent to know spells in our World, so that eliminated the problem of what to charge non-wizards for learning them -- it just didn't happen.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I knew I'd seen that somewhere in one of the other threads! I think the Apprentice talent is a brilliant idea.

Wish I'd thought of that. I'd have liked to have made my group's Wizardry talent at least IQ 11 or 12, but they wouldn't go for that big a departure from the RAW. Magic use starts at IQ 8 and why would there be lower IQ spells than the minimum IQ a wizard had to have from the start anyway? Splitting the spell tables along a natural divide based on two separate talents that way fixes things nicely! (I'm probably going to steal that idea if I may for my future house rules :)

I actively disliked the character CLASS system in D&D and felt TFT was so much stronger for avoiding that kind of thing, except it hadn't quite because Wizards and Heroes were still class distinctions. That goes away with talents for magic-users to explain why some characters are wizards and others are not. Now it's just for the same reason some people are chefs and some are not -- it's just what you chose to learn. The more self-determination we give players, the better!

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I use a variation on that from someone's house rules:
Apprentice 2-IQ 8-11
Mage 2-IQ 12-16
Mysteries 2-IQ 17+

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

A campaign-logic/situation side-effect of having wizardry be a talent, is that it implies anyone could train in it.

So for example, an organization (guild, military, slaver, etc) could in theory train any number of wizards, which potentially has huge implications for how common wizards are, industrial magic, ubiquitous magic, etc.

Also, in the context of the new XP system, it also implies that in games where a lot of XP is given out, high-level fighters with a bunch of XP wondering what to do with it might want to consider becoming wizards . . .

(Of course, to some players, that might sound interesting or cool, but some of us might rather like campaign worlds where only 1 in 300 people are wizards, and it isn't just something a person can pick up through study.)

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

In ITL Legacy, organizations should already be training their members in spells, since the new ITL gets rid of the -4DX for non-wizard spell casting. The only disadvantages for non-wizards I see, besides the increased cost to learn spells, are that they can't use books or scrolls and they can't learn the Staff spell. From what I read, non-wizards are able to create magic items other than staffs so mass production should already be under way.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

In original TFT, we did have quite a few non-wizard NPC spellcasters (often with a status of apprentice or servant or slave or similar) trained by wizards and militaries and guilds, most commonly in the Aid spell, despite the -4DX penalty (you'd just wait for them to make a roll - they weren't needed for many other tasks).

Fortunately, there may still not be all that many non-wizards with IQ 14 (for Weapon/Armor Enchantment, or more IQ for higher enchantment spells), and fewer who are going to choose to go into enchanting, but yeah, the lack of a -4 DX penalty in Legacy Edition, and the lack of an IQ limit on learning, does imply more people would learn at least some spells.

The main difference with a wizardry talent is that more people could learn large numbers of spells - you could have as many full wizards as you could organize to get into training.

If Wizardry costs 5 learning points, and NPCs learning it is as easy as learning 5 talent points, it seems like society might tend to have an awful lot of wizards, especially if spells were researched that could effectively replace mundane talents.

And games with highly-experienced characters would I think also have many more wizard/warriors, and even a kind of "why aren't you a wizard?" expectation for more experienced people, as it'd become quite a "good deal" compared to going for a 40th or higher attribute point.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Skarg beat me to it... I also think that wizardry as a talent that any anyone can learn would create a society with far more wizards than the default assumption for Cidri. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I prefer the rarity currently implied in the rules.

In fact, I have further expanded on the idea "wizards are born, not made" by establishing that, in my campaign, the ability to perceive and influence the forces responsible for 'magic' is a genetic mutation found sporadically throughout the diverse races inhabiting Cidri. Individuals w/o this marker can never learn how to cast spells, though there is a segment of the population who may, with difficulty, unlock a latent predisposition for magic use (i.e. heroes who pay a higher 'cost' to learn spells).

TBH, though, doesn't the ability to aquire spells or talents independent of IQ increases remove one of the justifications for such a rule?

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

There's no rarity of Wizardy in TFT at all at the moment if you follow the RAW exactly. In any case, just because a Talent exists doesn't mean that it will or should be be readily available to NPCs. Is your campaign world overrun with Alchemists, Boomerang throwers, etc? I doubt it.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

True, but like Skarg, I prefer it when rules can be applied equally to PCs and NPCs... it makes encounter and world-building more consistent and logical. And the IQ requirement along with the substantial XP cost for the Alchemy talent is more than sufficient to keep those nuts to small numbers (and prevent them from blowing up half the empire).

BTW, the odds of being born a wizard is only slightly more than a human on Earth being born with 11 toes or fingers (1 in 500 apparently).

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I feel like something got lost in translation....

My Wizardry Talent as proposed in my article and used by my group, or the Apprentice+Wizardry talents combo Chris invented and shared with us, are the most expensive Talents in the entire game. Nothing else costs more than 3, few cost more than 2, but these cost 7, 8 or 9 with prerequisites. The only way to make anything "rare and unusual" in this game is to make it expensive, and these talents cost way more than all the others. The talents needed to become experts and masters in all the other fields don't cost as much as we charge for someone to be a starting wizard. How is that encouraging all the common NPCs in our worlds to become wizards?

Besides that, the proportions of wizards to everyone else in any campaign world isn't determined by any rule anywhere, it's entirely up to the GM -- that's the final authority on anything like that.

Player characters on the other hand are built by the players. Some players only build wizards, some heroes, and some both. These proposed wizardry talents aren't making it any "cheaper" to build a wizard, but rather more expensive in its way. Under the RAW it's free to make your character a wizard, not something you have to spend half or more of your talent points on. And to maintain the original balance of power, with my Wizardry Talent the other talents no longer cost wizards double so that it all evens out. It's just less rules for the same effect.

If you're worried about a non-wizard player character choosing to change careers and become a wizard sometime after they were built, you (1) aren't going to see any stampedes, the Wizardry talents are too expensive for that, and (2) nobody can just say hey, I've decided to spend these 8 talent points I haven't been using, tomorrow morning I'll wake up as a wizard. No GM would allow that, would you? That would be like allowing the desert nomad player character suddenly becoming a Seaman+Shipbuilder overnight! No, no, nooooo. The hero character who wants to change and become a wizard has to find teachers, a school of magic, get accepted by the Guild, go off to study for years -- all things totally under the GM's control.

There is nothing to be afraid of here!

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I don't think it is the initial cost that potentially alters the wizard-to-hero balance in the world... it's the exchange rate. An IQ 12 starting wizard pays 5 points for the Wizardry talent, has 7 points left over for other talents at the 'muggle' rate and also now has 12 points for spells. If I understand the proposed rule change correctly, isn't that the equivalent of a 19 IQ? A starting hero with the same IQ on the other hand only gets 12 points for starting talents. So in addition to a bias towards maximizing starting IQ, in the long run it seems like wizards will become much more versatile than non-magical types (having equal access to talents and spells) and therefore should be the default career choice of any intelligent sentient being.

But as I said before, there's nothing wrong with that if it creates the kind of game that you and your players want to play. And to be clear, I'm honestly not trying to be patronizing. I think it is very interesting proposal that you have obviously put a lot of time and playtesting into... much more than my own controversial rule changes.

P.S. I often have a tendency to over-think these kinds of meta-game design elements so 'your mileage may vary'. ;)

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Over the course of an adventuring wizard's career, the Wizardry talent approach would allow a wizard a greater selection of spells as a beginner and a few talents as well. Beyond the startup advantage, every advance will have to be paid for with experience points, just like any other character, so he won't be gaining talents or spells any faster or slower than he otherwise would. New IQ would have to be gained to gain higher levels of spells or talents, just like anyone else. In addition, as I understand the system, there are other, expensive advanced talents to act as shiny items to attract the wizard's attention. In short, beyond a short term advantage in the number of spells, beyond startup, there is an advantage that declines in extent as the character develops.
As the author of the talent said before, "There is nothing to be afraid of here!"

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Like TippetsTX, I don't mean to be negative about the suggestion, but to explain in detail what I meant:


Because in original TFT, about 1 in 300 people just "are" wizards. There is no way to make someone a wizard. At most you can train them at 1/3 rate and they will still lack some aptitude at using it.

So if you want to have 100 people in your army who can effectively cast several spells, you'd either need to recruit all the wizards from a population of 30,000, or you'd need to spend a huge amount of time training them and they'd still probably only know a couple of spells each.

If wizardry is a 5-point talent, it may be quite hard to train them, but it is much more possible. And it may well be very worth the investment. It is plausible to imagine a nation where a very high fraction of people are wizards. Also, these wizards are much more likely to have several mundane talents each, which was not the case in original TFT due to the doubled cost.

If training rates are comparable, then a 5-point talent is like training a Master Physicker, or a soldier who knows say, Bow, Pole Weapons, and Shield. Well, presumably you also need to teach them spells, but even if it takes several years to train a wizard, you can do it to anyone, and so how many wizards are in a population will just be about organization, will and resources, no longer an inherent limit in the population.


A GM certainly can say that in their part of the world, anyone can be a wizard and it's just a matter of whatever. Or that there just is a much higher fraction of them. Or that everyone's a wizard if they learn spells for 1 point each. Those are just all significantly different from the 1 in 300 standard description in ITL.


Unless I mis-read, it is actually much better to be a wizard with your rules.

A RAW IQ 12 starting wizard has up to 12 spells, and maybe some talents but those will eat into their IQ points for spells.

If I understand correctly, an IQ 12 starting wizard with your wizardry talent has 7 points in talents at the non-wizard rate, plus 12 spells.

In RAW, 7 points in talents would tend (depending on which ones) to use all of an IQ wizard's IQ, with none left for spells.

Say a wizard starts with Literacy, Swimming, Horsemanship and Sex Appeal. If I understand your system, that'd be possible for a wizard with IQ 9. An IQ 12 wizard would have 3 more talent points, and 12 spells.

If I get that right, compared to original TFT, an IQ 12 wizard, to have those talents and 12 spells, would need to start with IQ 19. To have 3 more non-wizard talent points like the IQ 12 wizard, that'd be another 6 points in the old system, or total 25.

No?


I missed something if it actually costs 8 points.

And no, I wouldn't allow waking up as a wizard. I tend to require characters find appropriate learning materials and teachers and use them for months per talent/spell point learned.

And I think we're getting into confusion about the new XP system, which is it's own issue and makes things complicated.

What I was writing about in a previous post here was thinking about if someone were using the Legacy XP system where the 39th attribute costs 2000 XP, the 40th attribute costs 4000 XP, the 41st costs 8000 XP, the 42nd costs 16000 XP, and talents cost 500 XP per point.

I think that poses its own problems, but combining it with your system, and thinking it was 5 talent points for wizardry, I was thinking about a later-game experienced PC amassing XP and wondering what to do with it. 5 talent points would be 2500 XP to become a wizard. That looks to me like, in a game where someone can and does get that much XP and looks at spending it, 2500 XP to become a wizard starts looking like a really good deal compared to gaining +1 in an attribute.

And the sample characters in the new published adventures tend to include some characters in the 39-42 point range. Most of the fighters in that range might be much more powerful characters if instead of +1 attribute they were a wizard with some spells.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

No offense taken TippetsTX, I didn't find that in the least condescending.

Actually, it's more like preserving the original balance established in the Melee and Wizard micro-games. Under the original rule system, a hero "knew" whatever he needed to use every weapon class, and wizards knew one spell for every point of their IQ (and could use any weapons too when they chose or were forced too). It's this original balance my old group's Wizardry Talent keeps intact -- that's what we invented it for.

If one would prefer, you could use the Wizardry talent tweaked to the ITL balance. Instead of granting 1 spell per IQ point, grant 1 spell per 2 IQ points. Of course this is ironic because talents then cost their original costs, but spell costs then double for wizards. Kinda like writing a sentence to say something positive, but doing so by using a double negative; yes it means the same, but it's too wordy.

Incidentally, an IQ 12 starting wizard pays 7 (not 5) points total to get my version of the Wizardry Talent because of the two 1-point prerequisites, leaving that wizard only 5 points for any other talents. That's 1 fewer points than the normal ITL starting IQ 12 wizard; that wizard effectively has 6, because she's paying double talent costs against that IQ of 12. So the that RAW wizard of IQ 12 can only know 6 spells if she buys a paltry 3 points worth of talents (at the 2x cost for wizards to take taklents). My apologies to all 12 IQ wizards, but I find the latter statistics to be intellectually just lame. The real inequity here is that the IQ 12 ITL wizard gets only half the abilities of the IQ 12 Wizard game wizard.

The Wizardry Talent is not designed to actually have anything to do with magic and spell casting per se. The name infers otherwise, but what it is really is a rule about character learning and memory capacity. And not just that capacity for wizards, but for all characters. For me the only significant weak spot in ITL is the non-standardized way it handles memory, using this patchwork of multiple rules and rates. But define a magic-user by means of a talent, with the price for that talent or talent combo set high enough, and you can eliminate all those other memory-related rules, rates, and exceptions! Preserving the balance, and without ever touching the rules that regulate magic itself.

But only if you want to. That's just how I'd do it.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

The RAW is inconsistent about this.

It says clearly the 1 in 300 ratio is due mainly to the length and difficulty of magical training, i.e. wizards are made, not born. It provides no way, however, to transition from "muggle" to wizard. In the modern world about 1 in 500 is an engineer and the reason for the ratio is the same. Anyone who spends 4 or more years and completes the courses (IQ 11 or 12, probably) can become an engineer at any time in their life.

I do like the idea of a high-buyin talent that provides a payback as a barrier to entry (like I used in Theurgy) and I think one would make a good way to transition from "muggle" to "regular TFT" wizard if you're not using the proposed Wizardry talent. I'd probably also make it a 5-point talent and just have it grant 5 spells along with changing a character to "wizard cost" for talents from then on. Characters who started with it would have to pay "wizard cost" for all their starting talents, i.e. you couldn't "front-load" talents at "muggle cost" and then take the 5-point talent "at the end".

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

If you want to eliminate the extra IQ pool for spells, you could just have Wizardry grant 5 spells, plus one extra spell at IQ 16. That would preserve the IQ point cost for spells and leave wizards with the same number of starting talent points (keeping Sorcerer's Tongue "free" at IQ 16).

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Now that I'm thinking about it, why even use such talents as Wizardry when the staff spell exists? Staffs are the very mark of wizardry! If I were going to remove the distinction between heros and wizards, I'd do it with the staff. It requires up to 5 talent points to take the staff spell, requires that you hold a staff, and requires that you use XP to charge your staff with mana. The use of a staff represents some great level of commitment to the use of magic, such that you're spending all this XP to gain access to more mana.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Why have a Wizardry Talent along the lines I originally proposed? Because Shoug, as I tried to emphasize at the end of my last post, the function of such a Talent in the game wouldn't be to alter any of the rules about magic, nor to alter the distinction between heroes and wizards. Nor do either of those things have to be a byproduct of such a Talent.

The function of the Wizardry Talent is to clean up, standardize, and simplify how memory and learning work in the game. And that is all. The spells, staves, and mana have nothing to do with this Talent.

Education and memory must be regulated in any RPG, but they are not easily regulated by the rules of TFT. It's all a bit clumsy and some parts are kind of vague. And there are inconsistencies in the memory regulations, the biggest perhaps being the difference between wizards built under the rules in Wizard and built under the rules in either editions of ITL and AW. (AW still matters because the changes it brought are now incorporated in the latest ITL, but now with a few more changes added on).

Learning and memory could be much more easily regulated in TFT with two very simple changes. To wit:

(1) A replacement to the talent-cost-for-wizards doubling rule. How to do that without giving wizards twice as many of the talents already listed in the game? We don't want that to happen and change the balance. So make them (wizards) take one big new talent, one that only wizards can take, that ties up half their talent points in the first place. Now all the talents can have the same cost at all times for all characters, yet wizards can still only have half as many of the old talents just as they did before. Call it the Wizardy Talent (because only wizards can take it) and job (1) is done. Yes, you can still dress up this Wizardry Talent with colorful, in-game language, like "this skill confers the knowledge to focus mana into spells" yada yada yada, but that's all that is.

(2) And stop treating each spell like it's a talent. It's not logical, but worse it unnecessarily complicates the talent points scheme we just fixed in step (1). Let's get consistent. We have bards in this game. We regulate who is and isn't a bard by use of the IQ 9 talent Bard (2). This isn't a game about music, but if it were, answer this: How many songs does a bard know? How many instruments does he know how to play? If that was game-critical, like spells are, it would have to be regulated. But it wouldn't make sense to charge 1 talent point per song. A bard with a repertoire that small would get run out of the tavern -- or knifed in the back the third time he sang "Shallow" on the same night.

There ought to be separate memory pools for different kinds of learning. Wizards should memorize spells like chefs memorize recipes, or bards memorize songs. The original spell memory pool established in Wizard allowed a wizard to memorize as many spells as they had IQ points. That is a fine and simple rule, I wish AW hadn't gone and messed with that, and bringing it back completes the improvement to TFT's memory and learning system.

This is why I worded the Wizardy Talent as I did in the article I wrote for Interplay, so as to handle both of these fixes in one single place:

"WIZARDRY (5). This is the ability needed to be a wizard. Entitles a figure to learn spells at an IQ cost of 1 each, independently of talents..."

(Note the article didn't mention the two prerequisite talents my group used, which brought the total cost up to 7, that being one half the talent points of an IQ 14 wizard.)

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I'm having a difficult time understanding some of the things you're saying. They seem to be based on a whole bunch of assumptions that aren't necessarily true.

How are wizards built differently in Wizard and in AW/ITL? In both games, you receive an amount of spells equal to your IQ upon chargen. The only difference between Wizard and ITL that I can see is that you now also have the option of partaking of Talents at the cost of #of spells memorized.

Why is removing the wizard/hero spell/talent cost system necessary to "cleaning up" the system? It seems decidedly less "clean" to me to, instead of actually just making talents cost twice as much for a wizard, estimating a starting wizard's IQ and then cutting that in half to find the cost of your wizardry talents.

Why shouldn't spells be treated as talents? What do you mean by your comparison of wizards to bards and chefs? If songs or recipes were as difficult as spells to learn, they would cost 1 talent point each to learn. This is one of those assumptions that you gloss over with zero explanation. You have assumed that the game mistakenly made spells work differently than other things. Why shouldn't they? The mechanic of learning a spell with a talent point seems to be in flawless accordance with the fundamental assumptions of the talent system as things are RAW. Spending a talent point represents time that your character has spent learning/experiencing/training in a thing. How doesn't spending them on spells make sense?

The difference between you're way of looking at the game and my way of looking at the game is that I actually fully allow the rules of the game to inform my understanding of the world in which the game is set. If I wanted to play in a different world where things worked differently, I would look to the rules and see how the vision they embody differs from my own, and then I would adjust them to fit. I think that's what you're doing too, in fact, but you've assumed that your houserule somehow better reflects the intended reality of the game world than the original RAW themselves. The "Wizardry Talent" that would actually reflect the reality of the game world while also making wizardly training actually come in the form of a talent would probably read, "Wizardry (1): When you take this talent, forget all the Talents that you know except for the ones which you purchase a second again, and then learn 1 Spell. It now costs you only 1 point to learn Spells, and all talents cost twice their listed price."

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Thanks for even reading and commenting on that whole post Shoug -- it was much too long and did cover such "a whole bunch" of stuff at once I realize I blurred some of my own points. I'll be a bit more focused I hope with replies to specific parts of your comment.

You said "The only difference between Wizard and ITL that I can see is that you now also have the option of partaking of Talents at the cost of #of spells memorized" [italics mine]

Oh, but that is a huge difference, isn't it? I contend it is. An IQ 10 wizard that knew and utilized 10 spells throughout what could have been a long career already under the original 1978 Wizard rules as written, suddenly cannot go forward under the ITL/AW rules without forgetting two spells for every 1 talent point now needed. To take a 2 point talent such as Sword, that same wizard has to give up 4 spells under the ITL rules.

One's mileage about issues like this will vary considerably with how early you started playing, and how much you played in those early years. Perspectives will vary. I got Wizard in January 1978, found out I had friends playing Melee, and we joined forces to become a gaming group that logged hundreds of hours playing TFT under those original rules. 12 hour play sessions bi-monthly. We all had characters near and dear to our hearts that we'd taken to hell and back (literally in a couple cases), and of course lost more characters than survived. That only made the long-term survivors more special.

We didn't scrap or gut those figures, or change the Secondary World we'd built, because TFT "changed the rules" by bringing out ITL. Instead, we adhered to the original rules in as much as possible. It's funny but an "original" rule suddenly can become a "house rule" when the official rule changes :) And by "original" I mean a wizard memorizing as many spells as their IQ, with no more restrictions on anything else than any other figure has.

Yes, you might suggest we could have grand-fathered in the old characters, with any new starting characters adhering strictly to the newer ITL rules. We pretty much did do that with the non-wizards, but wizards themselves were too much changed; we wanted to keep a level playing field between old wizards and new wizards, and between wizards in general and fighters.

You see, all of our characters had what we called skills long before TFT introduced talents. We played a lot of outdoor adventures, multi-part "campaigns" that involved travel and "game turns" as opposed to combat turns, and all kinds of in-game situations had fleshed out our characters and their abilities. Swimming, climbing, driving, horse riding, literacy, second and even third languages, swordsmanship, archery, and a plethora of mundane skills that had come up in actual game situations were all duly noted on our character record sheets. There were often in-game justifications, ruled on by the GM of the day. Morgan knew how to swim because he came from a riverside culture. Yang knew how to climb because he came from the mountains. Everyone knew how to ride a horse. All wizards were literate. Wizards were also usually stuck as our cart drivers, so presumably they knew how to do it. The wizard who came from the wood elves was assumed to have woodsman/naturalist skills; if you wanted to know if the mushrooms were poisonous, you'd ask him. And the wizard Yamadra regularly fought with a sword (he just didn't try casting spells at the same time he held it, but he sure knew how to use it). If a character demonstrated a skill by making a saving roll in a life-or-death situation, say swimming or climbing, it went on their record sheet that they knew how to do that. Just as important, it went on a record sheet if a character did not have a skill: Lars is afraid of water and couldn't swim his way out of a puddle; well now how do we cross the stream?

Again, we played hundreds of hours like this before ITL and its learning restrictions for wizards came along. At no point were we playing outside the RAW at the time. And still, wizards had the highest mortality rate of any of our characters, and now along come rules saying they have to lose half their spells to keep only half their "skills".

A typical wizard in our game had roughly the equivalent of 7 points of talents or more as you'd measure under today's ITL rules, and one spell for every point of IQ. Hundreds of hours play-testing proved that worked, and nothing was tipped too far in favor of wizard figures -- they were still the most likely to die first in most battles.

One of our IQ 14 wizards, converting from the Wizard/Melee era to the ITL/AW rules, would have to:

(1) Forget all their spells to keep the 7 talent points worth of skill the average one already had, or

(2) Forget all their skills to retain those 14 spells (I seem to have forgotten how to read since yesterday, and I keep falling off my horse), or

(3) Lose about 7 spells, and lose half their survival abilities for long-term, outdoor adventuring (We have to cross this stream before the orcs catch up, or we're all dead? Oh why did I give up swimming? I'd fly across, but I gave up that spell too!)

So Shoug, that's my perspective on how very different a wizard can be under ITL/AW as opposed to original Wizard/Melee rules.

And it all comes down to "the wizard/hero spell/talent cost system" I feel needs to be cleaned up. A system that has two different memory costs depending on the character has one extra thing to always remember, and teach new players. That's not as clean as dropping my one Wizardry Talent into the system, and forget it.

Not for everyone. If you never played TFT extensively before the current memory/learning system you won't feel the need. But you also won't know what you're missing.

I'll come back to the other questions in a later post.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Oops! I meant to answer that.

I did not actually propose that, setting the cost as equal to half a wizard's IQ, as part of my own proposed Wizardry Talent. I suggested that as a compromise solution for someone who was unhappy that a fixed-cost wizardry talent wouldn't result in exactly the same amount of talents for wizards with IQs very much below or above average.

Of course the average IQ of wizards isn't really known.

But personally I would always go with a flat, fixed cost. One cost that never varied. It wouldn't be as clean a rule otherwise.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

The RAW are fine, but it's worth remembering that the distinction between Wizards and Heroes, both in Talents and other capabilities, came about as a result of the way TFT developed. Although TFT was a breath of fresh air when it came out, having very well integrated systems, it wasn't perfect; it couldn't be because it wasn't designed in one piece.

Melee came first: there were only Heroes and only two Attributes. That was the system.

Steve later created Wizard to add Magic but has written himself of the difficulties he had in achieving his goal. Wizards were created as "different" from Heroes and the game required a new attribute IQ. So already there's a compromise, but that was ok as they were still just microgames and the Talent system didn't exist.

Later came ITL and the Talent system which defined what your character was trained or skilled to do, but once again this was compromised as the distinction between Wizards and Heroes had already been set in the Microgames and was carried on here.

If the system had been designed all in one piece, then logically there would have been no need for the artificial Hero/Wizard distinction. Wizardry would have been defined by Talents the same as everything else in the game beyond Attributes (Alchemy, Horsemanship etc).

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

With this new talent in play, can a PC still learn just one spell and cast it at reduced DX?

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

TFT Legacy removed the -4 DX penalty that was in the old TFT. The only DX reduction now would be from iron/steel weapons and armor.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

The Wizardry Talent I proposed, as originally worded, doesn't change any rule like that one or any other.

For the Legacy era it really should have a word or two on this subject added. By the way it alters the memory cost rules for wizards, it should say something clear about the memory cost for non-wizards learning spells as well.

If I were the GM who had to interpret this Wizardry Talent as worded, I'd say it implicitly limits spell learning to characters that take this talent and all of its prerequisites.

Whether that's a desirable effect or not is certainly worth talking about.

As zot points out, the latest edition of ITL seems intent on making spells easier for non-wizards to cast. I'm not at all sure I like that, but acknowledge that's the way the designer is leaning.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I think it's a good move, particularly since wizards have several spells that far outclass their corresponding talents (Silent Movement, Lock/Knock, Glamor, Persuasion, Repair, Repair Device, Meal, ... there are probably others). This gives heroes a chance to start out with talents and expand into the corresponding spells. Otherwise, to me, wizards become the superheroes of the game.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I've been meaning to return and add to what TippetsTX wrote a few days ago.

The Deryni novels by Katherine Kurtz were an especial favorite of mine, set in a fantasy world with a rare genetic mutation for magical abilities (and not every character that had the Deryni gene knew they did until something triggered it -- great reading). More recently of course we have the Harry Potter universe as an example of magical bloodlines. The premise certainly adds a nice "flavor" to use in a game.

There's no reason that would have to be incompatible with a Wizardy Talent in TFT. A person would still have to be "born a wizard", and that could be as rare as the GM wanted to make it.

But just like in the Potter books, the "born wizard" can hardly utilize their magical ability, may not even be aware they have it, without extensive training or schooling. Here the learning cost of the Wizardry Talent merely represents the time invested in this magical education, and reciprocally the time taken away from practicing and studying anything else.

And anyone who didn't have the wizardry gene would be wasting their time if they studied to take the Wizardry Talent, because it still wouldn't confer any magical abilities to the student. (Sorta like violin lessons can turn out to be a waste of time too for the wrong person.)

GM's can choose to have their world's work as they choose, making wizards as rare as they want for any in-game reason they want.

The Wizardry Talent is still just as useful for regulating memory and limiting other any talents in the characters that are wizards, regardless of what made them wizards in the first place.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

There's a lot to be said for that.

There is a great deal of symmetry in all the TFT rules, and that's part of what makes the system easy to learn and remember.

We have Heroes who use weapons. We have Wizards who use spells. But Wizards can also use weapons, subject to certain limitations. So if Heroes couldn't also use spells, subject to certain limitations, the rules would be asymmetrical.

I'd love to get everything costing the same for all characters to learn, which was the main point of my Wizardry Talent in the first place. And it does that job as far as Talents are concerned. Unfortunately the job isn't finished because we still have different learning costs for spells: 1 point for wizards, 3 points for non-wizards (Legacy ITL-16).

As worded, the Wizardry Talent confers a "memory pool" equal to IQ from which a wizard pays for learning spells. One way of looking at things would be the non-wizard, by not having taken that Talent, doesn't get that separate memory pool. So the non-wizard must still spend talent points to learn spells. That's what keeps non-wizards from going hog-wild memorizing spells, and it retains the RAW exactly if you also retain the cost of 3 learning points. Although in my house, I think I'll just charge 1 so every figure is still paying the same; I don't think that will get ugly, as the non-wizard is drawing on a smaller pool of memory than the person with Wizardry. And because I foresee a new limitation on non-wizards casting spells. As zot reminded us, the -4dx penalty for non-wizards has been dropped from Legacy TFT. But there's something else we not only could do, but kinda have to do if implementing a Wizardry Talent.

What if we make using a memorized spell exactly the same as using a weapon you pick up? Under Unskilled Rolls (Legacy ITL-8) we read "if use of a talent requires a die roll, then unskilled use should either be prohibited entirely or should require extra dice, and failure should have serious consequences."

Using a weapon requires a 3 dice roll if you have the correct weapon talent, and a 4 dice roll if you don't. The logical extrapolation becomes: using a memorized spell requires a 3 dice roll if you have the Wizardry Talent, and a 4 dice roll if you don't. This echoes that symmetry we see in so many of the TFT rules. And face it, if you put a Wizardry Talent in the game, then the RAW on ITL-8 actually require a figure without the corresponding talent (Wizardry) to roll 4 dice to attempt a spell.

And this could be a lot of fun. Again from ITL-8, "If a player tries an unskilled roll and fails by more than one point, the GM should invent an appropriate mishap". In the case of spell mishaps, there's be no limit on hilarious effects. GM: "It seems you badly mispronounced a few words in that spell Alex. You've turned yourself into a newt for 12 turns, but you will get better." "Oh dear Miri, you rolled a 20 on a 3-hex Wall spell. I'm afraid there's now a 3-hex walrus attacking your party." "Merlin, was that a gargoyle you were trying to summon? Seems you've conjured up a garden instead. Oh dear, those plants have teeth..."

GMs could write themselves little tables of possible magical mishaps, and roll dice to see which came up, with the more lethal results being the less frequent.

I like this a lot more than a -4 DX penalty! :)

Anyway, to summarize.... WITH the Wizardry Talent, have spells learned equal to IQ at 1 point each, separate from talents; roll 3d6 to attempt spells. WITHOUT the Wizardry Talent, pay for memorized spells with talent points (3 each being the RAW, or another cost by house rule if desired); roll 4d6 to attempt spells.

There's some extra room here to tweak it all a little too. I might allow the non-wizard who only spent 1 talent point on memorizing a spell has to roll 4 against DX, but the same non-wizard could spend the full 3 talent points to memorize it so well that they only have to roll 3 dice for that particular spell. Which is basically just the RAW. I certainly foresee a Thief studying the Lock/Knock spell wanting to get it right as possible every try.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

With this new approach to unlocking 'different kinds of memory' - do you think we should also have a Linguist talent, which unlocks a traunch of 'language' memory, so you can learn up to your IQ in languages?

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I proposed a rule variant to handle languages outside of the Talent paradigm here...

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=161853

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

That's kinda the same idea as this magical-memory, but everyone has a minor version for free (IQ/5), or pays for the 'linguist' talent and gets up to IQ/3 languages?

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Correct. And while I will concede a conceptual similarity here, there is a HUGE difference between 'free' IQ for spells vs. languages as far as in-game impact goes.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Love it. And TippetsTX, I read the thread you linked to and loved that as well.

We are in danger of coming up with a Unified Field Theory of Learning Stuff, aren't we? LOL

Talent points and a talent point pool, Spell points and a spell point memory pool, and Language points and a language memory pool. No competition about learning stuff that is widely different in nature. And all running under one single IQ attribute.

I can dig it.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Yes... as the Klingon proverb says "there are many ways to cook a Targ."

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

As I hinted near the start of this thread, the Wizardry Talent I wrote up for Interplay at William Gustafson's request was only the tip of an iceberg. The full house rules for magical talents my original group composed and used from 1981 forward were so radical, they would surely have been too much for Metagaming to swallow. Uh, they are still too much to swallow :) I would not use this system today in a new group. Anyone reading this would call it crazy, and that's quite alright because it was.

We had two tracks of wizardly arts, and two tiers to each track. We required any wizard to take at least one of these talents to cast spells, but in return they no longer had to pay double for other talents; and each mage got a memory pool equal to IQ for memorizing spells. Verbatim, it began with:

IQ 8 TALENT, WIZARDRY (5). Ability to gather and focus ambient mana to cast spells. Spell costs reflect physical exhaustion for the mana gathering, and are tallied as fatigue type hits against the user's ST. This talent only costs 3 IQ if you already have SORCERY.

IQ 11 TALENT, SORCERY (5), Ability to tap personal Mana Valence [your mana charge, which started as equal to IQ] for the mana to cast spells. Spell costs reflect psychic exhaustion for mana expenditure, and are tallied as hits against the user's MV. This talent only costs 3 IQ if you already have WIZARDRY.

IQ 12 TALENT, ADVANCED WIZARDRY (3). Prerequisite: WIZARDRY. Ability to focus ambient mana to cast spells with great alacrity and efficiency. [Which went on to explain the ST cost for each spell was halved!]

IQ 15 TALENT, ADVANCED SORCERY (3). Prerequisite: SORCERY. Ability to concentrate more mana than usual in MV -- 2 mana points for every 1 IQ point.

There's a bit more to my old group's old text, explaining mana recouped at the same rate as fatigue, and a wizard couldn't mix both power sources for the same spell at the same time. Wish I had it all on computer, but alas no.

I know what someone will say. We must have blown up our planet with too many spells - hahaha. In point of fact, we reserved those two Sorcery Talents for a tiny number of rarely seen NPCs that, by copious ingestion of youth potions, had survived in hiding for a couple hundred years since a religious order had nearly exterminated all the wizards in the World. Those two talents, all enchantment spells, and most of the new spells that appeared for the first time in Advanced Wizard were considered "lost knowledge" from a "golden age of magic". We always intended to eventually restore that lost knowledge though a great in-game quest, but we never got to that campaign. In fact I can only recall one PC taking that Advanced Wizardry talent. He was mine and he only had ST 8 to begin with, so no, we never blew up our World! :)

In any event, taking all four of those talents would have cost 16 talent points. Imagine the starting wizard with 32 points to pay spell costs, plus twice his ST added in. But then that superhero would have to have started with ST 8, DX 8, and would probably have been skewered by a crossbow bolt and killed before getting off one spell in combat - LOL.

But the basic IQ 8 Wizardry Talent worked out perfectly well. Wizards having their full IQ compliment of spells even after Talents came along didn't rock the boat -- that was the ship we'd sailed since 1978.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Looks like it only requires 14 points (but IQ 15 prereq for Advanced Sorcery) because sorcery and wizardry only cost 3 if you know the other one.

So a starting wizard could be ST 8 DX 9 IQ 15 and know all of those, and would have half-ST costs for spells, 8 ST-based mana, and another 30 IQ-based mana.

Team them up with a couple of assistants at say ST 10 DX 13 IQ 9 with the Aid spell, and they could Aid the wizard/sorceror's DX.

Or someone could start with ST 8 DX 12 IQ 12 and start with Advanced Wizardry and one talent, 12 spells at half-ST-cost, 8 ST-mana and 24 IQ-mana.


I don't think it's all that crazy if that's what you want, and if the GM gatekeeps access to the talents by the characters' background or in-play activities needing to be special training, and that's the world/game situation you want.

It does make a very large difference in the power balance, especially the advanced talents, compared to original RAW ITL/AM/AW. The available mana especially. But it's not all that much different from a high-powered game where powerful wizards have access to strong ST batteries and/or apprentices.

The talent difference is pretty large, but talents aren't all that powerful for wizards compared to their spells.

Your frame of reference is a lot different since your game worlds already had wizards with a bunch of talents in addition to a full IQ of spells. In our games, most wizards would tend to have very limited talents because of the conflict of resources. Adding more talents wouldn't upset all that much, though I would expect some/many of them using them to be better wizards/combatants - e.g. taking Missile Weapons to shoot lightning and fireballs better.

The advanced talents, if available in our campaigns, would have been obvious choices for all wizards who got past starting level, especially Advanced Sorcery. From the perspective of wizards who aren't used to spending much if any IQ on talents, they'd simply want as many of these as they could get, and consider the extra talents they could learn gravy.

So I tend to think something other than just IQ ought to be determining who has talents of this type. In new ITL, there'd tend to be the 500XP per talent point cost, which could serve, but I think also has its own issues.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

So how would this system work in the context of the new Legacy XP rules?

Would you charge 2500 XP to gain the talent post-character creation?

Can a character with the Wizardry talent still purchase new spells for 500 XP each beyond their IQ score?

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

I forgot the discounts! Hahaha. It's been a long time.

Oh yeah, combining those talents would make for one awfully powerful wizard in proportion to that wizard's Attributes.

Advanced Sorcery made it possible to have that high IQ wizard who liked to work alone, reclusive in his tower concentrating on research and magic item creation. With mana equal to double that IQ of at least 15, the need to socialize with apprentices, or even have apprentices, would be minimized. This is not the wizard you ever want to **** off and see stepping out of that tower however :)

Since we were not doubling the cost of talents for wizards in our world, but weren't doing so just to unbalance everything, that was the trick to keep them away from taking too many of the fighter/hero talents: incentives to stay concentrated on wizardry. You could be a wizard with lots of weapon skills and mundane talents if you wanted to be, but then you'd be passing up these chances to be a better and better wizard.

My thing now is figuring out how best to do all this over for a new world in the Legacy Edition era. I wouldn't want to keep the two methods of spell casting, Wizardry and Sorcery, in the same world. It seems in any duel between one of each with otherwise equal attributes, the Sorcerer would beat the Wizard every time. Putting a high ST Wizard up against a high IQ Sorcerer would seem to even out, until remembering the Sorcerer will have more spells and higher IQ spells to work with in the confrontation.

Which would mean finding new magical talents to act as those incentives to keep wizards on the straight an narrow, assuming they want to be the best at wizardry they can be. The new XP rules are going to make this harder, because practically unlimited talents will be available to advancing characters. I'd rather see them forced to make some hard choices.

Well I've got a couple ideas I'll drop in here when I have it all tweaked a bit more. Lovers of the RAW may hate me though :)

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

So this is the new model I'm considering for Wizardry Talents. It starts at the base with an Apprentice talent just like the one Chris Rice created and mentioned in an earlier post here. There are five total talents each spaced thee IQ levels apart, and each costing 2 talent points (I've listed the Apprentice talent as costing 4 just to simplify the table below ; it actually costs only 2 but has two 1 point prerequisites for a cumulative cost of 4). Each of these talents is a prerequisite for the next.

The intervals and costs were selected so as to use up as close to possible 50% of a wizard's talent points at each of the IQ levels. This way it's still possible to charge wizards the same number of talent points per talent as other figures, while not doubling up the regular talents they can take. (In other the words, preserving the intent of the RAW in this regard). As per my 1982 Wizardry Talent, learning spells is not charged against talent points and a wizard may memorize as many spells as their amount of IQ -- a wizard transitioning from the Wizard microgame doesn't have to forget any spells to start taking talents.

Of course this curriculum is voluntary. If a wizard decides to stop progressing as a wizard he will end up taking more regular talents than he'd been entitled to under the "talents cost wizards double" rule. The trade off then being this wizard will forgo doing magic a different wizard could. If using the old rule where increasing IQ equally increased talent points, then yes, the off-track wizard can learn more talents than before. But if using the newer Legacy rule that increasing IQ does not give a figure more memory for talents, it comes down to the same thing ; under the newer rule, talents can be bought with XP and are therefore unlimited for wizards too. So pick your poison, but the wizard who skips the more advanced wizardry talents is going to end up with more regular talents now either way.

The plan though is to tempt wizards to keep improving as wizards. So the higher level wizardry talents have to offer the magic users something they can't get otherwise, but at the same time not increase their powers, especially in combat, allowing wizards to dominate the whole game. This is the trickiest part. I believe I have a solution, and a solution that actually preserves the effects of the RAW even though it changes the wording of those rules slightly. I'm not giving this away just yet though, being curious to see if anyone can see through my diabolical plans :) So the higher level incentive talents are not named in the table below, but I already know what they are going to be. I don't have a silver dragon to give away, but the first person to guess what these incentive talents are gets a drink on me should they pass through Chicago :)


_______WIZARD TALENTS (cost)______Cumulative Cost/Talent Points Left Free / % of IQ Left Free

IQ 08___APPRENTICE (4)__________________________4 / 4_____ / 50.0 %
................(let's wizard learn spells up to IQ 11)
IQ 09___________________________________________4 / 5_____ / 55.6 %

IQ 10___________________________________________4 / 6_____ / 60.0 %

IQ 11___WIZARDRY (2)___________________________ 6 / 5_____ / 45.5 %
..................(let's wizard learn spells up to IQ 20)
IQ 12___________________________________________6 / 6_____ / 50.0 %

IQ 13___________________________________________6 / 7_____ / 53.8 %

IQ 14___INCENTIVE TALENT #1 (2)__________________8 / 6_____ / 42.9 %

IQ 15___________________________________________8 / 7_____ / 46.7 %

IQ 16___________________________________________8 / 8_____ / 50.0 %

IQ 17___INCENTIVE TALENT #2 (2)_________________10 / 7_____ / 41.2 %

IQ 18__________________________________________10 / 8_____ / 44.4 %

IQ 19__________________________________________10 / 9_____ / 47.4 %

IQ 20___INCENTIVE TALENT #3 (2)_________________12 / 8_____ / 40.0 %

IQ 21__________________________________________12 / 9_____ / 42.9 %

IQ 22__________________________________________12 / 10____ / 45.5 %

IQ 23__________________________________________12 / 11____ / 47.8 %

IQ 24__________________________________________12 / 12____ / 50.0 %

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Hey Steve, do you have an updated link to the original article?

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Odd, the onedrive link (from the first post in this thread) still works here from my end. I'll happily get the original pdf to you though, and anyone else if they need it... now where'd I put that?!? Hehehe.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Some issues with this:

• It creates an unmagic number at IQ 14. Did you consider allowing the lower-level talent to provide spells up to (8 + IQ)/2 or or something like that?
• The cost of being a wizard is fixed, so compared with RAW it's cheap for characters with plenty of talent/spell points and expensive for those with fewer. Probably not an issue for RAW ITL characters.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

If I were adding wizardly talents some that spring to mind would include:

• Cast spells without moving your hands or without speaking. Perhaps this reduces the IQ penalty, and otherwise the IQ penalty is larger, or maybe you just can't do it without the talent?
• Cast spells faster, perhaps with a DX penalty, after, say, moving half MA.
• Block spells cast against you or a nearby ally.
• Sorcerer's Tongue should be a regular language, and a prerequisite for:
• Read spells from a book.

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

Among the goodies I've considered for progressively higher wizardry talents:

• Gradually increased Staff Mana and other Staff properties -- obviating any need for multiple Staff spells or purchasing Staff mana with XP (each talent is purchased instead, maintaining balance while simplifying rules
• Enchantment itself becomes one of the highest talents -- thus replacing the magic item creation spells
• Automatic spells (perhaps one per advanced talent) such as Mage Sight and Analyze Magic that the wizard can activate at will, at any time, without a roll and without using their action for the Turn
• Exclusive access to higher level spells
• Expertise in one type of spell (perhaps +1 or +2 DX) for (T)hrown spells or maybe another class

The Sorcerer's Tongue (or your local campaign world's equivalent) ought to be the prerequisite for the first wizardry talent. At least in my world all spell invocations/incantations whether verbal or mental had to be in our magical language, or the sign language equivalent. Although a feature of this rule is that a non-wizard who speaks the language has a very good idea what spell a wizard is casting when they hear the incantation. We also had a rule you couldn't tell a lie in this language, but that might make play over-complicated.

I'm still on the fence about whether Literacy must be a prerequisite for wizardry talents (some, all, or none?)

Re: A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)
 

That's an appealing idea.

I'd not mind seeing some other wizardly talents, like Creation Mastery (increases creation spell range) and Thrown Spell Mastery (each level eliminates one point of range penalty).