Monday, July 26, 2021

Wisdom for Wizards

Hot Take: Wizards' power should scale more from Wisdom than Intelligence. 

Maybe. I'm not 100% convinced. But given the historical tradition of the clergy as the educated, monastic, institutional class and sorcerers as the mysterious, outcast, freak class, I'm inclined to base Clerics on Intelligence, and Wizards on Wisdom. There's decent arguments against this (and really it should scale off of both but that's a level of crunch nobody wants to deal with), but we're going to roll with it.

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Anybody can cast a spell. It takes time and knowledge and effort and you might mess it up, sure, and those who carry around ancient tomes full of spells might well be wizards, but merely spellcasting does not a wizard make.

What makes a wizard? Secrets. Insight. Perceiving reality as others do not. Seeing that which others cannot. Wisdom.

With that in mind, here is Wisdom for Wizards:

10 Wisdom
You are as perceptive and observant as an ordinary person. You know that which an ordinary person would.

11 Wisdom
You can always remember your dreams.

12 Wisdom
You know when you perceive a lie, be it written or spoken. When you meet someone, you instinctively know one secret about them.

13 Wisdom
You can speak the secret language of birds; if properly bribed and persuaded, you may be able to recruit spies.

14 Wisdom
You can see through illusions, and can see invisible things.

15 Wisdom
You can see ghosts, faeries, demons, angels, and spirits. Each of those—whether others can see them or not—will sometimes tell you things they wouldn't others.

You can also see DEATH. When you die, he'll come to collect you personally.

16 Wisdom
You can read all written text, no matter its language or script. You know the secret language of runes.

17 Wisdom
You can see the true forms of shapeshifters and the disguised. If they have multiple forms, you can see one form in your left eye and one in your right.

18 Wisdom
If looking through a mirror or lens, you can see and speak into other planes of existence, like Hell or Fairyland; assuming there's someone there, they can see you and reply in turn. 

19 Wisdom
You can see into the future. If you keep your eyes closed for more than a minute, you will start to see fragments and snatches of what will, inevitably, happen to you. The visions may be unclear, but they are always accurate.

20 Wisdom
Any question you perceive—through sight or sound or another force entirely—you know the full and complete answer to, whether you want to or not. 

There maybe should be some hits to your CHA or INT to go with this, but whatever it's fine. 

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It's etymologically sound, nerds.

4 comments:

  1. This puts me in some kind of mind-frame where every point of STR gives you more attacks and such...

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    1. Yeah! Like there's gotta be some kind of odd hack floating in the ether where there aren't classes, just composite pseudo-classes based on bonuses from ability scores. It's a weird idea, honestly, but not one I'm sure I dislike?

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  2. It is etymologically sound, but it's also backwards. The classes came first, the scores came after. Intelligence was so named to be "the magic-user stat" and Wisdom "the cleric stat."

    A fun exercise I've done in the past is to start with classes and then re-name the stats to fit them as prime requisites even better. Given a class list like warrior, thief, monk, mage, cleric, and bard, one can work forward and build a game where the stats that describe a character are named Valor, Subtlety, Discipline, Curiosity, Piety, and Creativity (just as an example).

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  3. Honestly, I kinda want to make a whole system based on stuff like this. Thanks for the ideas!

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