[Magic] Spells as familiarities

[Prince Charon]

Standard magic has spells as skills, and the ritual variant basically has them as techniques, but it could fit some settings to have them as familiarities (pB169). So, as with Ritual Magic, the Colleges are VH skills, and there may be a core skill, but the spells are various familiarities of the Colleges. The prerequisite chains still exist (e.g. you need to become familiar with Create Fire and Shape Fire before you can even try to make a Flame Jet, and you still need Magery 1 to try to make a Fireball), applying that rule to familiarities doesn't seem like it would create problems, and thus spell-based Magical Styles would work rather similarly. Also, it's a good idea to still list all the spells a character is familiar with.

This does mean that it's possible for wizards to learn a lot of spells fairly quickly, even if you adjust the time required to work off the familiarity penalty upwards (e.g. 'Spells have a familiarity penalty of -4, and require sixteen hours of study or use to become familiar, and Very Hard spells double these numbers'). There are some settings where this might be appropriate, though: Spells in Harry Potter might be techniques or familiarities, given the number of spells known and how fast the kids seem to pick them up, and some video game and other fantasy settings seem to work similarly. It's just a question of whether you want that sort of game.


Thoughts?

[Dammann]

I like Ritual Magic, and I like this. I do feel like imposing a cost of some kind is about needful to keep casters from running away with all the niches. I prefer a shorter spell list (partly to reduce option paralysis).