So, I’m about to start a one-on-one campaign with a friend. The basic plot concerns the King’s plan to create an army of War Wizards, which do not exsist yet in this setting. As a character, she wanted to be the king’s youngest daughter who gets sent away to this magical boot camp as a tribute from the king, to get everyone along with his plan.
I’m fine with this, it creates a lot of interesting drama, however - the “Prince of the Blood” Lifepath (which I’m assuming is fitting?). Gives her 60 RES. Sixty resource points! The princess supposed to be around 15-20 years old, and knowing her she’ll spend as much as I’ll allow her on spells.
Obviously a lot of those sixty points are going into relationships, affiliations & reputations, what I’m trying to figure out is how much? Do I set a limit for her, such as “you can only spend X amount of RES on spells”? In that case, what’s a logical X? How much is “just enough” for her to be a little but competent, but not better than everyone else at the school? Right now I’ve looked at the LPs in the Magic Burner & 20-25 points to spend on spells seems to put her somewhere around the rest of the student body.
If not, how many relationships “must” she buy? Just the King, or the Queen too? How the rest of the family? I get that if she doesn’t, for instance buy the Queen, the Queen won’t show up in the adventure as an acting force. Does she have to buy The Castle, home of the King? Or pay rent? The campaign will not take place in Court.
TLDR; I have a player character who’s incredibly rich and also a mage. I want to restrict her so she doesn’t start off knowing every single spell. What’s the best way of doing this?
Spell books don’t grow on trees, they need to be bought. If she wants the Resources to buy them she needs Property, Reputations and Affiliations, connections.
If she wants to live like a Princess, make sure the player knows that she has to support the lifestyle. She needs to keep up with fashion, and pay her tuition [You see her father stipulated it comes from her personal estate, not the treasury, to prove that any noble scion could do as she does], and she needs to run her own household too, and there are parties to attend, and books to fill the library, and if she doesn’t throw at least one ball a year everyone will think her a beastly peasant. A decent Ball should be at least an Ob5 test, with all the musicians and caterers involved.
Maybe the big firepower spells they don’t teach to youngsters until they have proven themselves capable of handling the small stuff. Maybe her Master is an old fashioned misogynist, and doesnt’ think women should do magic on the battlefield, only support magic.
Also, while more spells seems like it means MOAR POWWAR, it actually means more rope to hang yourself with. What’s her Sorcery score going to end up being? Think about if she uses all of the available options to help her cast (and how often she’ll be able to use those). Take that total. Compare it to the Obs of the spells she’s likely to take. This will show you the ways in which wizards can easily screw themselves even with lots of resource points. Oh, also take a look at her Forte and how she’s going to deal with tax. Body guards are pretty much a must for a one-on-one game where the PC is a wizard. Otherwise who else is going to haul your spell ravaged body out of the danger zone?
I’ve also found that using the access to all spells thing from the Magic Burner helps remove this concern. The time I used it was because I had a rich wizard and a poor wizard, and it was something I wanted to see in play. It made for an interesting dynamic—rich wizards were advantaged mostly by connections to other wizards and similar resources that helped them tame spells more easily. But raw talent counted for a lot and could easily close the gap. Anyway, if the player knows that her character will be able to get access to any spell with a Sorcery roll in play, she’ll probably be more inclined to spend on other things and to only pick the spells that the character must know.
“Yes, the princess is a shining example of the war college” (because we poured all of our time and energy into her, and left other wizards undertrained.)
What does this mean for the army’s needs? Are there a lot of jealous wizards now looking at this young welp angry that she got to learn all the spells? Did the college do this on purpose because they knew by making her the most effective, that the King would only have to risk the wizards as much as he’d be willing to risk his daughter?
Another fun consideration that comes out of this: If she doesn’t have enough Resources/Reputations, basically, the Princess has come back from Wizard College having lost touch with most of the Court’s politics and favor, as well as having lost some edges as far as expected etiquette and political savvy.
Throw her into some high stakes political stuff and see what happens!
60 RP isn’t that much. She’s pretty rich for such a young character, but so what? Just make it clear to the player that if he wants his character to actually be rich, he’ll have to spend those RP in such a way that allows her to start with a high Resource exponent. Meaning, no uber spell book for her, sorry.