3 Character Types: Fighter, Wizard, Mixed (Bard, Cleric, Monk)

[flankspeed]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

... First, I did away with the Hero/Wizard distinction. Then I created two new Talents:....

I had not thought of the idea of breaking up magic talent into two tiers rather than breaking out all their skills into separate talents as I suggested in a slightly earlier post.

The first part of your two-tier system that I might adjust by house ruling would be to not have any talent cost more than three points of IQ simply because that is the current highest amount used in the rules as written. Also, forcing magic users to learn a talent takes a big bite out of the number of spells they can memorize, and that is already a major change to SJ's original game balance.

The second part I would consider house ruling is that of lowering the required IQs, since requiring a 14 for true wizards skews them toward such a heavy investment in IQ at the expense of both ST and DX. I may be wrong, and your hedge category somewhat covers this (depending on whether the requirement is IQ 8 or 11/12), but in SJ's rules, you could make a lower IQ wizard (even less than IQ 12) who was still somewhat deadly because he had more ST and higher DX.

I also think this low-IQ, high-ST/DX character is a nice way to indicate a magic user who is something of a D&D sorcerer-type able to cast more spells with greater accuracy but being less versatile and limited in knowledge.

I don't mean any criticism, just thinking out loud, and my opinion is open to change through playtesting and further discussion. Thank you for contributing the food for thought!