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Old 07-16-2019, 05:07 PM   #19
Steve Plambeck
 
Join Date: Jun 2019
Default Re: IQ to power spells

Quote:
Originally Posted by JLV View Post
Honestly, this is much closer to the way we did it back in the day (that campaign lasted for over two years); we just treated it more or less like "mental fatigue" though we labeled it "Mana" instead. (Which title I actually got from DragonQuest, not from GURPS.) Basically Mana was a resource that was available to you, but which you could only handle as much of as you had IQ points. Once you ran out, you could continue to cast spells, but now you were suffering wounds as in original TFT -- boy howdy, let me tell you, the Wizards were pretty stingy with spells once their Mana allotment for the day was up! (You recharged Mana at either Midnight or Noon -- you could pick which one when you created your character, and thereafter it was always the same time for that particular character -- the players took to calling that being "Day Aspected" or "Night Aspected" for some reason that was never particularly clear to me, but hey, they enjoyed it so I rolled with it!)
Wow, so similar to the house rules my group used as well so very long ago, with the exception we allowed an individual's Mana stat (we called it MV, for Mana Valence) to recoup at the same speed as ST fatigue. We were inspired by a different source though, the Larry Niven novel "The Magic Goes Away" and its sequel, "The Magic Returns". As I toy with the idea of starting a new gaming group to play TFT again after a 23 year hiatus, I'm very tempted to try your Midnight/Noon system JLV - that's just eloquent.

Our old house rules, as they were left standing back in the day, would be far too much to lay on brand new, novice players. My original group had almost 200 pages of house rules written before ITL and Advanced Wizard came out. While I'll dump and simplify most of that in favor of just using the Legacy Edition for new players, using Mana to pay spell costs is something I'll definitely be keeping along with some related changes.
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