by Tott » February 12th, 2020, 6:40 am
Discussion of the wizards strengths or lack thereof have been going on since HQ released, i personaly think he can be quite strong but even when played well hes really just a support character for the others. he only has 3 spells that actually do any damage and in a game where killing monsters makes up a big part of experience, whoevers controlling him can often feel left out. one of the major problems can be players tend to hoard their limited spells until theyre 'needed' and often dont cast them when they should do. overcoming that psycology can make a massive difference to the play experience, but again, it doesnt help you kill the bad guys much more.
My approach to this was to expand each spell group to 9 spells each, making multiple copies of spells like fireball but also adding additional spells with the more powerful spells like genie only having a single copy, then forming a draw deck and each turn the wizard or elf draws a hand equal to the mind pool. some spells were marked active, some passive and some reactive. spell casters could cast 1 active spell per turn and any number of reactive or passive spells. at the end of their turn each spell caster discards any unused spells but may choose to keep up to 1 card from their hand. when the draw deck is empty, the discard pile is shuffled and returned to the draw pile.
this lets spell casters always have a supply of spells to cast without contstantly having access to really powerful spells or casting genie each turn, it also opens up design space for items to buff spell casting or deck manipulation.