Wizard spells in DF

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Bruno

If you do that, your necromancer becomes a master healer, which is what we're trying to avoid.

I was going with the idea that it’s not unreasonable for wizards who’ve quested for forbidden knowledge, in order to gain power over life and death, to be master healers. It seems thematically appropriate for necromancers to be stealing a little bit of godly power, so to speak.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by blacksmith

Does he need to go all the way to resurrection though or just pick up the highly useful healing spells?

He needs to go all the way. It isn't kosher to say, "I might someday learn X, and Y is a prerequisite for X, ergo I can legitimately learn Y." Presumably, the Wizards' Guild only teaches Y to people as part of a body of knowledge that includes X.

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

I was going with the idea that it’s not unreasonable for wizards who’ve quested for forbidden knowledge, in order to gain power over life and death, to be master healers. It seems thematically appropriate for necromancers to be stealing a little bit of godly power, so to speak.

To be honest, I somewhat agree. Remember that this is DF and that it's a tradition in dungeon hacks to try to game the system. If somebody really wants to be the Necromancer of Healing, I don't see a problem with it. For one thing, it'll mean he isn't such a great necromancer or indeed wizard when all those other things that require a sorcerer come up. For another, it ends up costing him more points than it does a cleric who just plunks down for Power Investiture and learns the spell sans other spells. I don't see much of a game-balance problem arising from this kind of munchkinism.

Think about it: "I paid 35 points for Magery 3, and then learned Lend Energy, Lend Vitality, Minor Healing, and at last Major Healing on my way to learning Resurrection. Mwahaha!"

"Er, nice . . . I guess. I paid 30 points for Power Investiture 3 and just learned Major Healing."

[Kromm]

That said, I should add that it would be fun to have an alternate path that only required purely Necromatic prerequisites . . . and that caused the target to be resurrected kind of, well, Evil.

"Who resurrected Gandhi the Cleric?"

"Oh, that was Necros the Foul. Good thing he specialized in the right wizardly spells."

"Yeah, but the cleric has gone by 'Snake Gandhi' ever since. He just tortured our donkey to death and now he's poisoning the rations."

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Kromm

That said, I should add that it would be fun to have an alternate path that only required purely Necromatic prerequisites . . . and that caused the target to be resurrected kind of, well, Evil.

Well, the rules for Zombie permit altered templates that are more expensive for a higher fatigue cost. So, just create a high-value Zombie template. In practice, I suspect this would be excessively cheap ;)

[callen]

Before the rest of my reply, any comment on the Weather spells? Did anyone notice that that is the entire list of Weather spells?

Originally Posted by Kromm

He needs to go all the way. It isn't kosher to say, "I might someday learn X, and Y is a prerequisite for X, ergo I can legitimately learn Y." Presumably, the Wizards' Guild only teaches Y to people as part of a body of knowledge that includes X.

Well, being the one who wrote the list, maybe I should point out where the list came from. I read this:

Aside from Lend Energy and Recover Energy, Healing spells are the dominion of clerics. Wizards may only learn Healing spells that either belong to another college as well or are in the only prerequisite path to a spell in a different college (e.g., Zombie requires Lend Vitality, so a wizard could learn it). In the latter case, if any other path exists, the wizard must take it instead...

(Is it OK to copy that much? I won't copy the other paragraphs.)

I never intended to take most of the spells on that list I made. I don't even want most of the healing spells. Here's what happened. The character concept had included Shapeshifting, but Shapeshifting is an Animal spell. Reading the above paragraph (and applying it to Animal) I see that wizards are allowed to take Shapeshifting. It's a prerequisite for Transform Body "so a wizard could learn it." Therefore my wizard can learn Shapeshifting. Yay! The concept is still intact.

So why did I make the whole list? Because it was easier to do that than to keep checking back and forth in case I had to deal with another spell elsewhere; after all, there are a lot of prerequisites. I just read once through the spell sheets and wrote everything on one list.

On a related note, the statement of needing to have the last step to have the prerequisites is both literally and conceptually quite confusing to me. Literally: it's a prerequisite, so you have to have it before what follows, but you can't have it before what follows. Huh??? Conceptually: if you have to understand something before you can understand a second thing, then you'll be taught the first thing before the second. It's like saying you need to learn to count to learn addition so if you drop out of class after learning to count but before addition was taught you cannot count because you haven't learned addition. Huh???

Since this didn't come from me trying to "game" the system but from a straight-forward parsing of the quoted paragraph above (though I wasn't sure about what to do with the Enchantment ones so I just included them to prevent having to go back to check them too), and since it's quite reasonable considering what being a prerequisite means, I expect others will make the same correct parsing and incorrect interpretation of intention of that paragraph.

In the end, I'm just going to enjoy playing whatever blacksmith allows. The list was posted here because we were both surprised by the number of permitted spells from prohibited colleges. He and I had already spoken about just moving Resurrection out of Necromancy; it's such a simple way to fix things, as several here have also noticed.

Chris

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

I disagree, Resurrection seems quite appropriate for a Necromancer. How about an Unusual background: Necromancer (permits access to healing spells required for necromancy)?

Alternatively one could allow 'out of college' spells to be learnt if they are necessary prerequisites, but not cast. Thus the cost of learning them effectively becomes an Unusual Background that allows you to cast a spell that normally requires knowledge out of your reach.