The Wizard's Expanded Spellbook

[Daedalus]

The Infinite Magic rules allow a Cast a Spell action to regain 1 Power, so Water of Life is discarded after use--good. However, I'd still like a hard and fast rule for spells such as Sacred Spring rather than a guideline about not wanting to be "That Player." This should make Infinite Magic fit for all types of players and situations. Some ideas:

1.) If the spell cost or less is rolled on a red die after casting a spell, it is discarded. Optional complication: After casting a spell, place a power token on it or rotate the card 90 degrees. The new cost is the sum of the spell cost plus times cast.

2.) A spell with a cost of 4 (or 5) or more is discarded when cast. After casting a spell, place a power token on it or rotate the card 90 degrees. The new cost is the sum of the spell cost plus times cast.

Either idea could be limited to the text of specific cards such as Sacred Spring if you wish, though personally I prefer a global rule that would be included as part of the cast icon.

3.) After casting a spell, place a power token on the card. Optional complication: After casting a spell, place all power tokens on the card used to pay the cost. A spell may not be cast again until it is free of such markers using a Gem of Focus.

This suggestion would stop spells such as Tempest that are too powerful if cast on consecutive turns. It's even possible to combine it with suggestion 1 or 2 if card rotating were used, though pehaps that would be too much.

Now back to some spell feedback:

CONTROL SPELLS:
Mind Snap

Checking up on the black die, I noticed your FAQ download can no longer link to the Those Colored German Dice topic. Maybe the FAQ should include the URL for pasting into a browser window.

Soul Share

"When moving, those Heroes may roll twice and take the better of the two rolls," means the movement dice are rolled twice during the first Hero's movement and then the higher roll is used by both Heroes, correct? Is it correct that if one Hero were wearing plate mail, a and would be rolled?

Haste

Does "After the current turn ends..." refer to after the spellcaster's turn? Do you have some other card effect that makes this necessary? Otherwise, I'd just say "After your turn."

[Count Mohawk]

The Infinite Magic rules allow a Cast a Spell action to regain 1 Power, so Water of Life is discarded after use--good. However, I'd still like a hard and fast rule for spells such as Sacred Spring rather than a guideline about not wanting to be "That Player." This should make Infinite Magic fit for all types of players and situations.
*ideas snipped*

I suppose asking the players to "pretty please don't break my game over your knees" wasn't really going to cut it as a proper rule. Very well; to the drawing board once more!

The problem with Infinite Magic is that degenerate players can and will loiter around in empty rooms, recharging their Power and healing the party back to full (plus some gratuitous Rock Skin, I suppose) before opening the next door, and have no compunctions about attempting to do this outside of every room. There are two ways to confront this problem: Nerf the problem spells down so they're no longer a problem, or limit the players' access to those spells. Your suggestions are creative, but I'm going to eschew them, as I think I have a better way.

The source of any Wizard's power is, er, his Power. I think the real problem is not in the ability to cast Sacred Spring and friends multiple times, but the ability to do so every time M/Z has no monsters on the board and is not otherwise menacing the Heroes. It's sort of the same issue as the well-known "phallic formation", in that the game rewards players for taking time to set up outside of each door before opening it. The solution? Take away the benefits of loitering. Suppose I add the following line to each of the four Gems:

Use once per room or corridor.

The result? The Wizard may make sure to recharge in every room and corridor, but won't drag the game on loitering around.

One hidden benefit to limiting the Wizard's recharging in this way is that I can make more powerful foci, banking on the fact that the Heroes won't be able to spam-cast Fireballs, Genies and other high-impact spells every other turn with them. (Although I'd also have to figure out what comes after "transcendance" in rising order...)

Mind Snap

Checking up on the black die, I noticed your FAQ download can no longer link to the Those Colored German Dice topic. Maybe the FAQ should include the URL for pasting into a browser window.

That was definitely linked at one point; I must have broken it during an edit session. It's fixed now.

Soul Share

"When moving, those Heroes may roll twice and take the better of the two rolls," means the movement dice are rolled twice during the first Hero's movement and then the higher roll is used by both Heroes, correct? Is it correct that if one Hero were wearing plate mail, a and would be rolled?

You know, that was actually what I was originally going for, but I couldn't figure out how to word the ability without also crushing the font smaller than it already is. The current text, however, is more properly interpreted as "each of those Heroes rolls their own movement dice twice and takes the better of the two rolls"; the linked Hero's movement doesn't affect their own movement.

Haste

Does "After the current turn ends..." refer to after the spellcaster's turn? Do you have some other card effect that makes this necessary? Otherwise, I'd just say "After your turn."

...yes, it should say "after your turn ends". Although there are a couple of scroll spells that can be cast out of turn, none of them have a MTG "Quicken" effect. (How did I miss that?)

It appears you need to rename either the Scroll Deck Card or the Spell Scroll Card so they match.

SON OF A WALRUS

[cynthialee]

A turn time limit on a quest would be a great way to nerf infinite magic.
Sure you can use all the spells in the world you can get back due to cool downs...but can you do the quest in the allotted time?

[Anderas]

Yes I think too this problem is best addressed elsewhere :
A proper evil wizard deck removes the advantage of being slow and building phallic formations.
And good quest design has its own methods to hurry the heroes a bit, while in terms of difficulty, it allows for the party to split up.

If you want to use your system with the base game, you already have difficulties in a range that allows splitting hero groups, but no way to hurry them up. That task would then be in the evil wizard deck:
Put two or three door openers and one or two interrupts, they'll learn quickly.

[Count Mohawk]

Thus, shortcut cards!
(I haven't decided what should go on the back yet.)

I'd say an abridged version of your Expanded Magic--Magic Selection Rules printed on the back for reference would be useful.

Got around to drafting this today. The refcards are 3.75" x 5", which snugly fits four to a page on normal 8.5" x 11" paper. To those of you who use A5 size paper or whatever, I apologize. Aside from the sample below, you can download the refcards from a link in the first post, right below the actual cards for Expanded Wizardry.


Other minor edits include the use of some of the glyphs from the font HQModern I just finished, as well as a change to the BG of the Fire spells to make them higher contrast and thus more readable. I probably should have mentioned on the reverse side that the heart symbol stands for "Body Points" and the diamond for "Mind Points", but I ran out of room.

[Anderas]

I have just seen that change here!

I was about to do the same, removing the very elegant mastery test because nobody ever understood.

Then I wanted to add some spells so that the Wizard without mastery does not run dry so fast and looked for ideas in your thread, just to see you did the same.

Now, my spell set will likely look very much like yours, with some minor flavour changes.

[DullandRusty]

I have just seen that change here!

I was about to do the same, removing the very elegant mastery test because nobody ever understood.

Then I wanted to add some spells so that the Wizard without mastery does not run dry so fast and looked for ideas in your thread, just to see you did the same.

Now, my spell set will likely look very much like yours, with some minor flavour changes.

funny that you say than anderas... we just officially adopted your mastery system for our wizard (although I changed the cost of a few of the spells)..

our elf has been reworked to cast 3 different spells (elfsongs): twisted wood and 2 custom spells with different effects that change the behavior of the monsters. the elf in our system is more of a hybrid of slight spell casting (not crazy powerful), melee or archer based, with specialty of evasion of attacks.

we do have a few other spell casters with different systems, but for the wizard we like the mastery system.

[Anderas]

Now, that's interesting!
My reasons for changing back:
* It works only together with EWP cards, without time pressure the wizard can heal too many mind points.
* I had one quest where the only spell used was Fireball (ok, I suppose I could make that spell more expensive without changing the system)
* My daughter is 5.
* All the symbols were annoying me, I want to reduce them to a reasonable number.


Well. As I have all the cards already prepared, I guess it is next to no work to make two versions: The Daughter Version and an updated "Master" Version.

I guess it is about the cost, after all. Which cost did you change?