I’m working on a hack of Mouse Guard to play Dark Sun. The focus on community and survival in a hostile environment makes MG a great fit for the setting, but there are a couple of sticking points. One problem is magic. As a d&d setting, dark sun has a good seven kinds of magic-using characters (wild talents, trained psions, defilers, preservers, clerics, templars, druids), and because I’m a masochist, I’ve sketched out systems for them (with copious aid from the magic burner). My question is “what is the appropriate way to incorporate these into recruitment, such that there’s a fair trade-off for getting fancy powers?”
What would happen if I decoupled character age (and the balance of health vs will) from the skill checks awarded to the different age groups? Then there would be four skill “tiers” (tenderfoot, guard mouse, patrol leader, etc) which could be reassigned to the different magic styles - templars and clerics who use Faith would get the least skills; druids, defilers and preservers, who only need one magic skill, would be next; psions, who can use up to six psionic skills, would be the next rank; and characters who don’t use magic would get the most skill points. Would this be a total disaster?
Alternatively, I could just make it so that each magical style requires the character to purchase a trait (e.g. “wizard”) that can’t be used as a normal trait, but just serves to enable the use of magic.
Is there another, smarter way to do this? I’m nervous about messing around with the details of recruitment, but I’d really like to find a way to integrate magic into the process.