[peterb]

As a response to the comments above, I wrote this bare bone alternative wizardry system:

Fatigue and spell buffer

• Each school of magic is a separate skill.
• Spells need not be memorized.
• Spells can be cast from books, at double the casting time.
• Each spell has a difficulty rating of 0 to 45 which is subtracted from the school skill level (d20 spell level x 5).
• Casting a spell is tiring. Each spell has a FP cost equal to its difficulty rating. Spells with DR 0 costs 1 FP to cast.
• Spells can be manipulated by expending more fatigue points. Each expansion of area, range, duration or additional targets or missiles costs 5 fatigue points each. Example: by default the spell magic missile creates one magic missile, adding three extra missiles costs 15 additional fatigue points, for a total cost of 20 FP.
• As the mage improves her skills she will become less fatigued by casting spells. This improved ability to manipulate magic energy is represented by a Spell Buffer. A wizard’s Spell Buffer is equal to one tenth of her combined magic skill values (rounded to the nearest whole number). A wizard with a total of 93 points in three skills thus has a Spell Buffer of 9 points. The Spell Buffer can be only used instead of FP to fuel spells. The mage recovers the buffer at the same rate as she recovers FP.
• A wizard can only manipulate an amount of fatigue points equal to half her school skill level, drop the reminder, at any given time. Thus a wizard with a skill of 63 can only manipulate a maximum of 30 fatigue points at any given time. She couldn’t expand a fireball (a 15 FP spell) more than 15 points and she couldn’t cast a spell with a higher DR than 30 (a 6th level spell in d20 terms), in effect a wizard cannot cast spells with a d20 spell level higher than the 10s digit of his spell school skill.
• Expanding fatigue points to rapidly could be dangerous as the wizard runs the risk of exhausting himself, possibly even killing himself.
• Learning a spell is a two week task that has a chance of success equal to school skill – difficulty rating. A wizard with 55% skill would need to roll 40 or lower to learn the spell fireball (DR 15). A wizard may add a week to his studies and increase his chance of success by the average of his INT and POW (rounded to the nearest whole number) percentiles. Our wizard, with INT 14 and POW 15, could thus add 14 percentiles to his chance of learning the fireball spell.