A Wizardry Talent (unpublished 1982 Interplay article)

[Skarg]

Like TippetsTX, I don't mean to be negative about the suggestion, but to explain in detail what I meant:

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

My Wizardry Talent as proposed in my article and used by my group, or the Apprentice+Wizardry talents combo Chris invented and shared with us, are the most expensive Talents in the entire game. Nothing else costs more than 3, few cost more than 2, but these cost 7, 8 or 9 with prerequisites. The only way to make anything "rare and unusual" in this game is to make it expensive, and these talents cost way more than all the others. The talents needed to become experts and masters in all the other fields don't cost as much as we charge for someone to be a starting wizard. How is that encouraging all the common NPCs in our worlds to become wizards?

Because in original TFT, about 1 in 300 people just "are" wizards. There is no way to make someone a wizard. At most you can train them at 1/3 rate and they will still lack some aptitude at using it.

So if you want to have 100 people in your army who can effectively cast several spells, you'd either need to recruit all the wizards from a population of 30,000, or you'd need to spend a huge amount of time training them and they'd still probably only know a couple of spells each.

If wizardry is a 5-point talent, it may be quite hard to train them, but it is much more possible. And it may well be very worth the investment. It is plausible to imagine a nation where a very high fraction of people are wizards. Also, these wizards are much more likely to have several mundane talents each, which was not the case in original TFT due to the doubled cost.

If training rates are comparable, then a 5-point talent is like training a Master Physicker, or a soldier who knows say, Bow, Pole Weapons, and Shield. Well, presumably you also need to teach them spells, but even if it takes several years to train a wizard, you can do it to anyone, and so how many wizards are in a population will just be about organization, will and resources, no longer an inherent limit in the population.

Originally Posted by David Johansen, post: 115106, member: 52

Besides that, the proportions of wizards to everyone else in any campaign world isn't determined by any rule anywhere, it's entirely up to the GM -- that's the final authority on anything like that.

A GM certainly can say that in their part of the world, anyone can be a wizard and it's just a matter of whatever. Or that there just is a much higher fraction of them. Or that everyone's a wizard if they learn spells for 1 point each. Those are just all significantly different from the 1 in 300 standard description in ITL.

Originally Posted by David Johansen, post: 115106, member: 52

Player characters on the other hand are built by the players. Some players only build wizards, some heroes, and some both. These proposed wizardry talents aren't making it any "cheaper" to build a wizard, but rather more expensive in its way. Under the RAW it's free to make your character a wizard, not something you have to spend half or more of your talent points on. And to maintain the original balance of power, with my Wizardry Talent the other talents no longer cost wizards double so that it all evens out. It's just less rules for the same effect.

Unless I mis-read, it is actually much better to be a wizard with your rules.

A RAW IQ 12 starting wizard has up to 12 spells, and maybe some talents but those will eat into their IQ points for spells.

If I understand correctly, an IQ 12 starting wizard with your wizardry talent has 7 points in talents at the non-wizard rate, plus 12 spells.

In RAW, 7 points in talents would tend (depending on which ones) to use all of an IQ wizard's IQ, with none left for spells.

Say a wizard starts with Literacy, Swimming, Horsemanship and Sex Appeal. If I understand your system, that'd be possible for a wizard with IQ 9. An IQ 12 wizard would have 3 more talent points, and 12 spells.

If I get that right, compared to original TFT, an IQ 12 wizard, to have those talents and 12 spells, would need to start with IQ 19. To have 3 more non-wizard talent points like the IQ 12 wizard, that'd be another 6 points in the old system, or total 25.

No?

Originally Posted by David Johansen, post: 115106, member: 52

If you're worried about a non-wizard player character choosing to change careers and become a wizard sometime after they were built, you (1) aren't going to see any stampedes, the Wizardry talents are too expensive for that, and (2) nobody can just say hey, I've decided to spend these 8 talent points I haven't been using, tomorrow morning I'll wake up as a wizard. No GM would allow that, would you? That would be like allowing the desert nomad player character suddenly becoming a Seaman+Shipbuilder overnight! No, no, nooooo. The hero character who wants to change and become a wizard has to find teachers, a school of magic, get accepted by the Guild, go off to study for years -- all things totally under the GM's control.

There is nothing to be afraid of here!

I missed something if it actually costs 8 points.

And no, I wouldn't allow waking up as a wizard. I tend to require characters find appropriate learning materials and teachers and use them for months per talent/spell point learned.

And I think we're getting into confusion about the new XP system, which is it's own issue and makes things complicated.

What I was writing about in a previous post here was thinking about if someone were using the Legacy XP system where the 39th attribute costs 2000 XP, the 40th attribute costs 4000 XP, the 41st costs 8000 XP, the 42nd costs 16000 XP, and talents cost 500 XP per point.

I think that poses its own problems, but combining it with your system, and thinking it was 5 talent points for wizardry, I was thinking about a later-game experienced PC amassing XP and wondering what to do with it. 5 talent points would be 2500 XP to become a wizard. That looks to me like, in a game where someone can and does get that much XP and looks at spending it, 2500 XP to become a wizard starts looking like a really good deal compared to gaining +1 in an attribute.

And the sample characters in the new published adventures tend to include some characters in the 39-42 point range. Most of the fighters in that range might be much more powerful characters if instead of +1 attribute they were a wizard with some spells.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

I don't think it is the initial cost that potentially alters the wizard-to-hero balance in the world... it's the exchange rate. An IQ 12 starting wizard pays 5 points for the Wizardry talent, has 7 points left over for other talents at the 'muggle' rate and also now has 12 points for spells. If I understand the proposed rule change correctly, isn't that the equivalent of a 19 IQ? A starting hero with the same IQ on the other hand only gets 12 points for starting talents. So in addition to a bias towards maximizing starting IQ, in the long run it seems like wizards will become much more versatile than non-magical types (having equal access to talents and spells) and therefore should be the default career choice of any intelligent sentient being.

But as I said before, there's nothing wrong with that if it creates the kind of game that you and your players want to play. And to be clear, I'm honestly not trying to be patronizing. I think it is very interesting proposal that you have obviously put a lot of time and playtesting into... much more than my own controversial rule changes.

P.S. I often have a tendency to over-think these kinds of meta-game design elements so 'your mileage may vary'. ;)

No offense taken TippetsTX, I didn't find that in the least condescending.

Actually, it's more like preserving the original balance established in the Melee and Wizard micro-games. Under the original rule system, a hero "knew" whatever he needed to use every weapon class, and wizards knew one spell for every point of their IQ (and could use any weapons too when they chose or were forced too). It's this original balance my old group's Wizardry Talent keeps intact -- that's what we invented it for.

If one would prefer, you could use the Wizardry talent tweaked to the ITL balance. Instead of granting 1 spell per IQ point, grant 1 spell per 2 IQ points. Of course this is ironic because talents then cost their original costs, but spell costs then double for wizards. Kinda like writing a sentence to say something positive, but doing so by using a double negative; yes it means the same, but it's too wordy.

Incidentally, an IQ 12 starting wizard pays 7 (not 5) points total to get my version of the Wizardry Talent because of the two 1-point prerequisites, leaving that wizard only 5 points for any other talents. That's 1 fewer points than the normal ITL starting IQ 12 wizard; that wizard effectively has 6, because she's paying double talent costs against that IQ of 12. So the that RAW wizard of IQ 12 can only know 6 spells if she buys a paltry 3 points worth of talents (at the 2x cost for wizards to take taklents). My apologies to all 12 IQ wizards, but I find the latter statistics to be intellectually just lame. The real inequity here is that the IQ 12 ITL wizard gets only half the abilities of the IQ 12 Wizard game wizard.

The Wizardry Talent is not designed to actually have anything to do with magic and spell casting per se. The name infers otherwise, but what it is really is a rule about character learning and memory capacity. And not just that capacity for wizards, but for all characters. For me the only significant weak spot in ITL is the non-standardized way it handles memory, using this patchwork of multiple rules and rates. But define a magic-user by means of a talent, with the price for that talent or talent combo set high enough, and you can eliminate all those other memory-related rules, rates, and exceptions! Preserving the balance, and without ever touching the rules that regulate magic itself.

But only if you want to. That's just how I'd do it.

[zot]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Because in original TFT, about 1 in 300 people just "are" wizards. There is no way to make someone a wizard. At most you can train them at 1/3 rate and they will still lack some aptitude at using it.

So if you want to have 100 people in your army who can effectively cast several spells, you'd either need to recruit all the wizards from a population of 30,000, or you'd need to spend a huge amount of time training them and they'd still probably only know a couple of spells each.

The RAW is inconsistent about this.

It says clearly the 1 in 300 ratio is due mainly to the length and difficulty of magical training, i.e. wizards are made, not born. It provides no way, however, to transition from "muggle" to wizard. In the modern world about 1 in 500 is an engineer and the reason for the ratio is the same. Anyone who spends 4 or more years and completes the courses (IQ 11 or 12, probably) can become an engineer at any time in their life.

I do like the idea of a high-buyin talent that provides a payback as a barrier to entry (like I used in Theurgy) and I think one would make a good way to transition from "muggle" to "regular TFT" wizard if you're not using the proposed Wizardry talent. I'd probably also make it a 5-point talent and just have it grant 5 spells along with changing a character to "wizard cost" for talents from then on. Characters who started with it would have to pay "wizard cost" for all their starting talents, i.e. you couldn't "front-load" talents at "muggle cost" and then take the 5-point talent "at the end".

[zot]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

Incidentally, an IQ 12 starting wizard pays 7 (not 5) points total to get my version of the Wizardry Talent because of the two 1-point prerequisites, leaving that wizard only 5 points for any other talents. That's 1 fewer points than the normal ITL starting IQ 12 wizard; that wizard effectively has 6, because she's paying double talent costs against that IQ of 12. So the that RAW wizard of IQ 12 can only know 6 spells if she buys a paltry 3 points worth of talents (at the 2x cost for wizards to take taklents). My apologies to all 12 IQ wizards, but I find the latter statistics to be intellectually just lame. The real inequity here is that the IQ 12 ITL wizard gets only half the abilities of the IQ 12 Wizard game wizard.

If you want to eliminate the extra IQ pool for spells, you could just have Wizardry grant 5 spells, plus one extra spell at IQ 16. That would preserve the IQ point cost for spells and leave wizards with the same number of starting talent points (keeping Sorcerer's Tongue "free" at IQ 16).

[Shoug]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

I also did away with the artificial distinction between Heroes and Wizards by creating two new Talents. Apprentice was an IQ8 Talent that allowed a character to learn any spell from IQ8 up to IQ13. Wizard was an IQ14 Talent that allowed spells up to IQ20.

Now that I'm thinking about it, why even use such talents as Wizardry when the staff spell exists? Staffs are the very mark of wizardry! If I were going to remove the distinction between heros and wizards, I'd do it with the staff. It requires up to 5 talent points to take the staff spell, requires that you hold a staff, and requires that you use XP to charge your staff with mana. The use of a staff represents some great level of commitment to the use of magic, such that you're spending all this XP to gain access to more mana.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by Shoug

Now that I'm thinking about it, why even use such talents as Wizardry when the staff spell exists? Staffs are the very mark of wizardry! If I were going to remove the distinction between heros and wizards...

Why have a Wizardry Talent along the lines I originally proposed? Because Shoug, as I tried to emphasize at the end of my last post, the function of such a Talent in the game wouldn't be to alter any of the rules about magic, nor to alter the distinction between heroes and wizards. Nor do either of those things have to be a byproduct of such a Talent.

The function of the Wizardry Talent is to clean up, standardize, and simplify how memory and learning work in the game. And that is all. The spells, staves, and mana have nothing to do with this Talent.

Education and memory must be regulated in any RPG, but they are not easily regulated by the rules of TFT. It's all a bit clumsy and some parts are kind of vague. And there are inconsistencies in the memory regulations, the biggest perhaps being the difference between wizards built under the rules in Wizard and built under the rules in either editions of ITL and AW. (AW still matters because the changes it brought are now incorporated in the latest ITL, but now with a few more changes added on).

Learning and memory could be much more easily regulated in TFT with two very simple changes. To wit:

(1) A replacement to the talent-cost-for-wizards doubling rule. How to do that without giving wizards twice as many of the talents already listed in the game? We don't want that to happen and change the balance. So make them (wizards) take one big new talent, one that only wizards can take, that ties up half their talent points in the first place. Now all the talents can have the same cost at all times for all characters, yet wizards can still only have half as many of the old talents just as they did before. Call it the Wizardy Talent (because only wizards can take it) and job (1) is done. Yes, you can still dress up this Wizardry Talent with colorful, in-game language, like "this skill confers the knowledge to focus mana into spells" yada yada yada, but that's all that is.

(2) And stop treating each spell like it's a talent. It's not logical, but worse it unnecessarily complicates the talent points scheme we just fixed in step (1). Let's get consistent. We have bards in this game. We regulate who is and isn't a bard by use of the IQ 9 talent Bard (2). This isn't a game about music, but if it were, answer this: How many songs does a bard know? How many instruments does he know how to play? If that was game-critical, like spells are, it would have to be regulated. But it wouldn't make sense to charge 1 talent point per song. A bard with a repertoire that small would get run out of the tavern -- or knifed in the back the third time he sang "Shallow" on the same night.

There ought to be separate memory pools for different kinds of learning. Wizards should memorize spells like chefs memorize recipes, or bards memorize songs. The original spell memory pool established in Wizard allowed a wizard to memorize as many spells as they had IQ points. That is a fine and simple rule, I wish AW hadn't gone and messed with that, and bringing it back completes the improvement to TFT's memory and learning system.

This is why I worded the Wizardy Talent as I did in the article I wrote for Interplay, so as to handle both of these fixes in one single place:

"WIZARDRY (5). This is the ability needed to be a wizard. Entitles a figure to learn spells at an IQ cost of 1 each, independently of talents..."

(Note the article didn't mention the two prerequisite talents my group used, which brought the total cost up to 7, that being one half the talent points of an IQ 14 wizard.)

[Shoug]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

Why have a Wizardry Talent along the lines I originally proposed? Because Shoug, as I tried to emphasize at the end of my last post, the function of such a Talent in the game wouldn't be to alter any of the rules about magic, nor to alter the distinction between heroes and wizards. Nor do either of those things have to be a byproduct of such a Talent.

The function of the Wizardry Talent is to clean up, standardize, and simplify how memory and learning work in the game. And that is all. The spells, staves, and mana have nothing to do with this Talent.

Education and memory must be regulated in any RPG, but they are not easily regulated by the rules of TFT. It's all a bit clumsy and some parts are kind of vague. And there are inconsistencies in the memory regulations, the biggest perhaps being the difference between wizards built under the rules in Wizard and built under the rules in either editions of ITL and AW. (AW still matters because the changes it brought are now incorporated in the latest ITL, but now with a few more changes added on).

Learning and memory could be much more easily regulated in TFT with two very simple changes. To wit:

(1) A replacement to the talent-cost-for-wizards doubling rule. How to do that without giving wizards twice as many of the talents already listed in the game? We don't want that to happen and change the balance. So make them (wizards) take one big new talent, one that only wizards can take, that ties up half their talent points in the first place. Now all the talents can have the same cost at all times for all characters, yet wizards can still only have half as many of the old talents just as they did before. Call it the Wizardy Talent (because only wizards can take it) and job (1) is done. Yes, you can still dress up this Wizardry Talent with colorful, in-game language, like "this skill confers the knowledge to focus mana into spells" yada yada yada, but that's all that is.

(2) And stop treating each spell like it's a talent. It's not logical, but worse it unnecessarily complicates the talent points scheme we just fixed in step (1). Let's get consistent. We have bards in this game. We regulate who is and isn't a bard by use of the IQ 9 talent Bard (2). This isn't a game about music, but if it were, answer this: How many songs does a bard know? How many instruments does he know how to play? If that was game-critical, like spells are, it would have to be regulated. But it wouldn't make sense to charge 1 talent point per song. A bard with a repertoire that small would get run out of the tavern -- or knifed in the back the third time he sang "Shallow" on the same night.

There ought to be separate memory pools for different kinds of learning. Wizards should memorize spells like chefs memorize recipes, or bards memorize songs. The original spell memory pool established in Wizard allowed a wizard to memorize as many spells as they had IQ points. That is a fine and simple rule, I wish AW hadn't gone and messed with that, and bringing it back completes the improvement to TFT's memory and learning system.

This is why I worded the Wizardy Talent as I did in the article I wrote for Interplay, so as to handle both of these fixes in one single place:

"WIZARDRY (5). This is the ability needed to be a wizard. Entitles a figure to learn spells at an IQ cost of 1 each, independently of talents..."

(Note the article didn't mention the two prerequisite talents my group used, which brought the total cost up to 7, that being one half the talent points of an IQ 14 wizard.)

I'm having a difficult time understanding some of the things you're saying. They seem to be based on a whole bunch of assumptions that aren't necessarily true.

How are wizards built differently in Wizard and in AW/ITL? In both games, you receive an amount of spells equal to your IQ upon chargen. The only difference between Wizard and ITL that I can see is that you now also have the option of partaking of Talents at the cost of #of spells memorized.

Why is removing the wizard/hero spell/talent cost system necessary to "cleaning up" the system? It seems decidedly less "clean" to me to, instead of actually just making talents cost twice as much for a wizard, estimating a starting wizard's IQ and then cutting that in half to find the cost of your wizardry talents.

Why shouldn't spells be treated as talents? What do you mean by your comparison of wizards to bards and chefs? If songs or recipes were as difficult as spells to learn, they would cost 1 talent point each to learn. This is one of those assumptions that you gloss over with zero explanation. You have assumed that the game mistakenly made spells work differently than other things. Why shouldn't they? The mechanic of learning a spell with a talent point seems to be in flawless accordance with the fundamental assumptions of the talent system as things are RAW. Spending a talent point represents time that your character has spent learning/experiencing/training in a thing. How doesn't spending them on spells make sense?

The difference between you're way of looking at the game and my way of looking at the game is that I actually fully allow the rules of the game to inform my understanding of the world in which the game is set. If I wanted to play in a different world where things worked differently, I would look to the rules and see how the vision they embody differs from my own, and then I would adjust them to fit. I think that's what you're doing too, in fact, but you've assumed that your houserule somehow better reflects the intended reality of the game world than the original RAW themselves. The "Wizardry Talent" that would actually reflect the reality of the game world while also making wizardly training actually come in the form of a talent would probably read, "Wizardry (1): When you take this talent, forget all the Talents that you know except for the ones which you purchase a second again, and then learn 1 Spell. It now costs you only 1 point to learn Spells, and all talents cost twice their listed price."

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by Shoug

I'm having a difficult time understanding some of the things you're saying. They seem to be based on a whole bunch of assumptions that aren't necessarily true.

How are wizards built differently in Wizard and in AW/ITL? In both games, you receive an amount of spells equal to your IQ upon chargen. The only difference between Wizard and ITL that I can see is that you now also have the option of partaking of Talents at the cost of #of spells memorized.

Why is removing the wizard/hero spell/talent cost system necessary to "cleaning up" the system? It seems decidedly less "clean" to me to, instead of actually just making talents cost twice as much for a wizard, estimating a starting wizard's IQ and then cutting that in half to find the cost of your wizardry talents.

Thanks for even reading and commenting on that whole post Shoug -- it was much too long and did cover such "a whole bunch" of stuff at once I realize I blurred some of my own points. I'll be a bit more focused I hope with replies to specific parts of your comment.

You said "The only difference between Wizard and ITL that I can see is that you now also have the option of partaking of Talents at the cost of #of spells memorized" [italics mine]

Oh, but that is a huge difference, isn't it? I contend it is. An IQ 10 wizard that knew and utilized 10 spells throughout what could have been a long career already under the original 1978 Wizard rules as written, suddenly cannot go forward under the ITL/AW rules without forgetting two spells for every 1 talent point now needed. To take a 2 point talent such as Sword, that same wizard has to give up 4 spells under the ITL rules.

One's mileage about issues like this will vary considerably with how early you started playing, and how much you played in those early years. Perspectives will vary. I got Wizard in January 1978, found out I had friends playing Melee, and we joined forces to become a gaming group that logged hundreds of hours playing TFT under those original rules. 12 hour play sessions bi-monthly. We all had characters near and dear to our hearts that we'd taken to hell and back (literally in a couple cases), and of course lost more characters than survived. That only made the long-term survivors more special.

We didn't scrap or gut those figures, or change the Secondary World we'd built, because TFT "changed the rules" by bringing out ITL. Instead, we adhered to the original rules in as much as possible. It's funny but an "original" rule suddenly can become a "house rule" when the official rule changes :) And by "original" I mean a wizard memorizing as many spells as their IQ, with no more restrictions on anything else than any other figure has.

Yes, you might suggest we could have grand-fathered in the old characters, with any new starting characters adhering strictly to the newer ITL rules. We pretty much did do that with the non-wizards, but wizards themselves were too much changed; we wanted to keep a level playing field between old wizards and new wizards, and between wizards in general and fighters.

You see, all of our characters had what we called skills long before TFT introduced talents. We played a lot of outdoor adventures, multi-part "campaigns" that involved travel and "game turns" as opposed to combat turns, and all kinds of in-game situations had fleshed out our characters and their abilities. Swimming, climbing, driving, horse riding, literacy, second and even third languages, swordsmanship, archery, and a plethora of mundane skills that had come up in actual game situations were all duly noted on our character record sheets. There were often in-game justifications, ruled on by the GM of the day. Morgan knew how to swim because he came from a riverside culture. Yang knew how to climb because he came from the mountains. Everyone knew how to ride a horse. All wizards were literate. Wizards were also usually stuck as our cart drivers, so presumably they knew how to do it. The wizard who came from the wood elves was assumed to have woodsman/naturalist skills; if you wanted to know if the mushrooms were poisonous, you'd ask him. And the wizard Yamadra regularly fought with a sword (he just didn't try casting spells at the same time he held it, but he sure knew how to use it). If a character demonstrated a skill by making a saving roll in a life-or-death situation, say swimming or climbing, it went on their record sheet that they knew how to do that. Just as important, it went on a record sheet if a character did not have a skill: Lars is afraid of water and couldn't swim his way out of a puddle; well now how do we cross the stream?

Again, we played hundreds of hours like this before ITL and its learning restrictions for wizards came along. At no point were we playing outside the RAW at the time. And still, wizards had the highest mortality rate of any of our characters, and now along come rules saying they have to lose half their spells to keep only half their "skills".

A typical wizard in our game had roughly the equivalent of 7 points of talents or more as you'd measure under today's ITL rules, and one spell for every point of IQ. Hundreds of hours play-testing proved that worked, and nothing was tipped too far in favor of wizard figures -- they were still the most likely to die first in most battles.

One of our IQ 14 wizards, converting from the Wizard/Melee era to the ITL/AW rules, would have to:

(1) Forget all their spells to keep the 7 talent points worth of skill the average one already had, or

(2) Forget all their skills to retain those 14 spells (I seem to have forgotten how to read since yesterday, and I keep falling off my horse), or

(3) Lose about 7 spells, and lose half their survival abilities for long-term, outdoor adventuring (We have to cross this stream before the orcs catch up, or we're all dead? Oh why did I give up swimming? I'd fly across, but I gave up that spell too!)

So Shoug, that's my perspective on how very different a wizard can be under ITL/AW as opposed to original Wizard/Melee rules.

And it all comes down to "the wizard/hero spell/talent cost system" I feel needs to be cleaned up. A system that has two different memory costs depending on the character has one extra thing to always remember, and teach new players. That's not as clean as dropping my one Wizardry Talent into the system, and forget it.

Not for everyone. If you never played TFT extensively before the current memory/learning system you won't feel the need. But you also won't know what you're missing.

I'll come back to the other questions in a later post.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by Shoug

instead of actually just making talents cost twice as much for a wizard, estimating a starting wizard's IQ and then cutting that in half to find the cost of your wizardry talents.

Oops! I meant to answer that.

I did not actually propose that, setting the cost as equal to half a wizard's IQ, as part of my own proposed Wizardry Talent. I suggested that as a compromise solution for someone who was unhappy that a fixed-cost wizardry talent wouldn't result in exactly the same amount of talents for wizards with IQs very much below or above average.

Of course the average IQ of wizards isn't really known.

But personally I would always go with a flat, fixed cost. One cost that never varied. It wouldn't be as clean a rule otherwise.

[Chris Rice]

The RAW are fine, but it's worth remembering that the distinction between Wizards and Heroes, both in Talents and other capabilities, came about as a result of the way TFT developed. Although TFT was a breath of fresh air when it came out, having very well integrated systems, it wasn't perfect; it couldn't be because it wasn't designed in one piece.

Melee came first: there were only Heroes and only two Attributes. That was the system.

Steve later created Wizard to add Magic but has written himself of the difficulties he had in achieving his goal. Wizards were created as "different" from Heroes and the game required a new attribute IQ. So already there's a compromise, but that was ok as they were still just microgames and the Talent system didn't exist.

Later came ITL and the Talent system which defined what your character was trained or skilled to do, but once again this was compromised as the distinction between Wizards and Heroes had already been set in the Microgames and was carried on here.

If the system had been designed all in one piece, then logically there would have been no need for the artificial Hero/Wizard distinction. Wizardry would have been defined by Talents the same as everything else in the game beyond Attributes (Alchemy, Horsemanship etc).