Vancian Magic

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

I’ve always liked the quasi-Vancian system of D&D because it just works. The ornamentation you suggest might be fun, or might not.

I'm not 100% sure who the "you" is here, so I'm going to assume it's me.

The system has to have some rule to say how many spells a magician can memorise. D&D uses a table based on character level, that obviously isn't appropriate to TFT. This system says: take as many as you like, but each costs a point off your adjIQ. There are other rules you could come up with, but I doubt there's anything significantly simpler, and the reduction in IQ is very much in the spirit of TFT's adjDX. So I don't think it's accurate to call it ornamentation.

Since IQ drives a lot of things besides spell selection, I’d be reticent to reduce it when learning spells.

That's kind of the point: it creates a tradeoff, that players will hopefully find interesting. If you want to be (this kind of) a wizard, you have to sacrifice some of your IQ. If you can't bring yourself to do that then there are other paths open to you.

I’d create the least fiddly system I could, then playtest.

I think the system I suggest is actually simpler than old TFT's.

One thing I’d do is consider *why* you’re using a different magic system. And if it effectively replicates the existing system on average, why bother? Or to put it another way, prepare a list of pros and cons of the Vancian system.

I kind of did, at least I listed some "interesting consequences" in my original post. Expanding:

• In my experience (*) in canon TFT Wizards tend to be most willing to cast spells when they have plenty of ST. At the end of the fight they get more miserly. But in my Vancian scheme they'd tend to cast weaker spells at the start and finish with a bang. That could be more exciting.
• In canon TFT a wizard tends to have high IQ and so be a capable scout. That kind of sucks because a lot of wizard character archetypes are emphatically not the guy you expect to spot the goblin hidden behind that tree. In my system the wizard walks around with his IQ down so he's not treading on the scout's field of expertise as much. I think that's probably a good thing.
• Wizards are no easier to kill/disable after casting than they were before. Arguably a good thing, I've often heard people say the fragile exhausted wizard is a silly feature, and house rule it out. Here it follows naturally from the system.
• Wizards are constantly under mental stress, which is maybe cool. It becomes easy to explain why some go insane, if that's a feature you like in your campaigns.
• Depending on how the system is implemented wizards might be prevented from some boring strategies like casting the same spell over and over.

So I think there are some good reasons to use something like this system. But my main intent was to implement a system that did magic in a different way with a different envelope. I think this would be helpful for campaigns that have multiple schools of magic and want them to be different.

(*) I wish I could write IMX here.