Alternate Spells-as-Skills-as-Powers Riff

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Belatedly:

Originally Posted by Gef

Interesting.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Gef

The exception is one-use items (potions), which just take a Triggered Delay enhancement. Repeat for extra doses (or charges); that'd get you plenty of cheap-but-weak magic items. That apprentice could make a wand of Firebolts (Triggered Delay: Point wand and say boom) with 40 charges (shots) in a work day (based on fatigue recovery time and assuming an energy reserve). Market price, counting overhead and distribution costs, would be about three times an apprentice's daily wage. Sound like a good deal?

Assuming IQ 11, Magery 1:

{"Fire Bolt" (IQ/Easy; IQ+0; 12 or less) [1], "Delayed Trigger" (Tech/H; Fire Bolt -5; 7 or less) [0]}
... would have the apprentice succeed once every six attempts. Eww. Add a TDM of "Easy" (+4) and take thirty seconds per casting (Extra Time +5). That'd be a +9, taking that 7 to 16, which means its' normally not worth the bother of rolling as you're only really rolling to see if they critically fail.

However, thats' slow due to the fatigue costs. Adding {"No Cost" (Tech/H; Fire Bolt -4; 8 or less) [0]} ... would allow the apprentice to spam it every 30 seconds, succeeding on a 12 or less. Failure has no cost as you don't pay fatigue for miscast spells, and the success rate is high enough that specific failures aren't going to waste much time. 8 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds * (2/3 of the time casting) is 19,200 seconds. Divided by 30, is 640 attempts. With a success rate of 74.1%, they'd succeed 474 times a day. Six days a week.

That ... thats' a lot of firebolt charges. ;)

Hmm.



(Assuming an eight hour work day, one hour of education and two hours of self-teaching as the normal apprentice schedule; four hours of "study" per day, two on the spell being cast and two on learning new spells. Spells of reduced sleep {Less Sleep 3 (Reduced Fatigue Cost 2, +40%) [9]} are essentially mandatory if the apprentice wants to have time for anything else.)

Originally Posted by Gef

For major items, I predict you'll eventually settle on a skill for Make Specific Major Item, with prerequisites in the form of spell skills for every effect the major item incorporates. A major item skill would be developed per invention rules, each one would be a trade secret, and probably more difficult than very hard. While there's no theoretical limit on how many skills there could be, in practice there'd be a set list, standard products on the market, with a few new ones each year (or decade,

Maybe. I'd be happy to go with trade secrets, harder than very hard and a regular set of enchantments. I'm not sure if I'd be making the enchantments themselves a learnable skill. I'd have to look at the numbers for it.

Originally Posted by Gef

depending on how rare wizards are and whether there's a patent system to protect inventors).

This version of Magery is trainable. Outside social factors and given enough time, anything sapient they can communicate with can be taught. Most of them are going to be terrible at it, but they can at least try!

Training a 15 point advantage is time consuming though. If one uses the Improvement Through Study Rules, (which I sometimes do and sometimes don't!) even Intensive Training would require the instructor to have Teaching 12+ and Magery 2+ in order to train someone in Magery 1 and would take 94 days at 16 hours per day ... and have a lot of wash outs. 375 days with normal instruction, eight hours per day, every day. Etc.

Not many societies are going to be happy with their better mages being too busy turning out more mages to do anything else. At a year~ per newbie mage who doesn't know any spells to cast yet ...

Price tags, price tags.