[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

Every spell cast, even a failed one, is one step closer to death for a wizard. Most would agree wizards, especially starting ones, are anemic, and you can't even offer them more iron to fix it :) So there is already a certain imbalance in the system in this regard, and a house rule that tips the scale the other way could also be construed as stabilizing rather than upsetting.

1) Yes, it is true that wizards get particularly fragile as they cast spells.

2) One of the most common house rules I have seen other original-TFT groups adopt is to have wizards only die when they take enough actually injury to do that, not fatigue. Fatigue + injury could make a wizard fall unconscious, but they wouldn't be dead unless the injury itself was enough to kill them.

3) It's not really an imbalance in the system as a whole, though, as spells do many things that can't be done without magic, including take out a hero of almost any description.

4) It gives wizards a serious side-effect to deal with, which can generally be dealt with and worked around.

5) If players still don't like wizard fragility, there are of course many house rule options.

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

The clear and obvious way is to charge heroes 1 point of fatigue for every sword swing... well no one wants that!

That would clearly be an excessive amount of fatigue to charge, so no that's not really the clear or obvious as a viable solution.

What I would think would be the most clear and obvious would be the idea you mentioned of having ST create the mana pool, but not count its use towards either death or unconsciousness. When you run out, it just means you have no mana left till you rest it back up. Utterly simple, and only slightly different from the very common house rule I mentioned above.


The other issue is attribute balance, and there you and I just seem to have opposite opinions about the value of ST versus IQ to wizards. You wrote:

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

The most underutilized attribute is IQ

but you also wrote:

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

What really makes a wizard better at being a wizard is still IQ, which is one reason I would rather base my MV stat on IQ.

Which is the the opposite of how I think about balance. I agree IQ is the main measure of how good a wizard is at being a wizard, because the spells get much more powerful with every IQ point a wizard gains. (And, also because ST & DX can both be effectively increased by others casting Aid on a wizard, but Aid won't help them cast more powerful spells, so a wizard can have minimum ST & DX and still be very powerful with apprentices.)

I agree that thematically it would make sense for mana to be based on IQ, which would tend to make me agree with you, but for purposes of balance and variety in wizard design / focus choices, I think IQ is the worst choice, because then the ways in which how good a wizard is can be described loses an independent variable.

That is, I like the aspect of TFT wizards that they have three relevant attributes which all affect different aspects of their wizardly abilities in different complementary ways. Shifting mana to IQ removes one of those (unless you count ability to survive injury and use muscles a wizardly ability), and there would be no way to have wizards who know powerful spells but who don't have a lot of mana to cast them with (e.g. the researcher types and those who depend on apprentices).

And, I think basic Wizard has a pretty exquisite balance in wizard design between the three attributes, but ST was already their least important attribute, which also tends to make me not want to throw that off by making ST such an inferior choice for wizards.

What I have been working on as a house rule is adding a separate stat for mana, which doesn't involve muscle, so I can still have different wizard designs, and have powerful casters who don't also have muscles. It's looking like basing it on ST (so ST isn't as much a dump stat), but being able to buy it up more cheaply than ST.

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

There is now I don't know how many spells for a wizard to choose from. How many of those do we actually see in play? There's a lot of colorful, interesting spells in the tables, going back to Advanced Wizard, and even some from original Wizard, I've never seen used in play, and I played continuously for almost 20 years. I think the reason for that is because wizards are discouraged from increasing their IQ's to begin with, resulting in what we often call the Conan the Wizard syndrome. That puts higher level spells out of reach. Wizard's with higher IQs (and DX) are too anemic to cast many of the spells they do know, and rarely cast the more expensive ones. Isn't the game more fun when wizards don't have to be quite as conservative?

Wait, what? You really played 20 years and had wizards favoring ST over IQ and so not getting up to higher IQ levels because of that? If so, I'd be interested to hear more about that, as it's not something I recognize, and would be interested to hear how that went in more detail. So what did your typical 36 and 40 point wizards look like in terms of attributes?

Wizards in our games would use fighters to keep them from getting attacked, and others casting Aid on them if they needed more ST for something. The wizards who had more ST than DX or IQ were often seen as best used casting Aid on higher-IQ wizards.

And powerful wizards were more likely to have ST Batteries than particularly high ST. An attribute-bloated wizard might tend to put more points in ST, but they tended to be more interested in IQ (up to 20, anyway) and DX (up to 14-15).