[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Magery

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

A concept which I think John introduced me to which is still important in 4e is the "Mage Number": IQ + Magery - 2, or "the skill level I will get by spending one point in a normal spell". Given that anyone with more than trivial core-rules magic will have lots of spells, it's important to keep that number in mind when designing the character.

I do something very similar but IQM-3 because some spells seem to randomly decide to be VH. If IQM-3 is 15, that also means hard spells get to be 16 and thus very likely to succeed.

Originally Posted by ericthered

IQ 14 is rather high, and I think as time has gone on it has become more acceptable to change the magery limit. DF changes the limit from 3 to 6, and I think a fair number of games follow suit. A mage with a bunch of spells often feels less problematic to a game than a mage who can learn any IQ-based skill on a whim.

I've largely dropped talent caps and that applies to Magery, too. There's a soft limit of 10, but more accurately I just generally don't want players to take attribute + talent above 20. So far it hasn't had any meaningful impact on how good mages are.