Question Regarding Sympathy Bonuses on Spellcasting

[Bazial]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Ok, then, "Book" magic instead of "Path" magic :) The spells you can cast must be in one of your grimoires. That's what makes them available to be cast in the first place.

Ritual Magic uses the prereq count as a proxy for spell difficulty. Mages don't learn individual spells. This suggestion sounds one step more strict -- if you don't have a prereq in your library, you simply cannot cast the spell at all; if you do, it's the usual prereq count penalty?

Possibly you're suggesting that there's a -1 penalty per prereq not in the library, while prereqs in the library don't add to the penalty. That would make Ritual Magic much easier, and also wind up costing mages very few CP (as there's no reason to buy up that core skill).

Unless you're also thinking that mages continue to buy each spell individually, as with standard magic. So the preqreq count only matters for spells that you haven't learned, and also aren't in your grimoire. That will make for easy casting rolls, but burn more character points on the spell list, instead of Ritual Magic's core skill(s). Standard magic usually has pretty high skill levels (the cliche mage template is IQ 14 Magery 3, so 1 CP gets you skill-15 in every spell), so they'll be able to soak a few missing prereqs. It will be a little harder than standard magic, though, and the OP suggests that low skill levels are already a problem.

Good points, and definitely something to think about. After having pondered the issue bit, this is basically what I have so far:

Mages use the core skill Ritual Magic (Grimoire), which is limited to 10 + Magery (using the variant of Magery that caps skill from Thaumatology p. 41.

A wizard can cast any spell they add to their grimoire at default, where the penalty is the spell's prerequisite modifier.

Spells can be bought up as Average techniques individually, to a max of Ritual Magic (Grimoire) skill.

I feel like this basically hits what I'm looking for; mages, with access to the right spells, are extremely versatile, but still require planning and preparation for their most powerful spells, while still being to cast some choice spells in a pinch quite easily.

Thoughts?