Ideas for Spell Selection

[daid13]

Now I don't like the randomness of which spells you know, so I came up with the idea that, each wizard chooses their spells in the list building stage but if they want to at start of the battle they can replace one or more of their spells with a randomly chosen spell of their lore but that spell has an increased chance of miscasting. This might require a small change to the cost of wizards.

[solith]

I don't think you've realised just how big an impact this would have on the game as a whole.

Consider this: if every wizard could freely choose which spell(s) from their given lore they had, I think every army with the option would take a level 1 wizard on a horse (or other fast creature) with Purple Sun. The entire purpose of this character is so charge forwards in a suicidal attempt to throw a Purple Sun at the enemy's face. You don't care if your wizard dies afterwards because he's quite cheap and his potential for damage is so ridiculously high. Now High Elves won't care about this all that much, but for Dwarves or Ogres with their low initiative (for example) this would be terrible.
In addition, because war machines auto-fail initiative tests this would mean that people would rarely, if ever, take them - because why would you when they'll usually be killed in turn 1?
With few cannons being used anymore, the main reason to not take monsters would be gone; and while all these Purple Suns might stop people taking monsters with low initiative, any monster with a higher initiative or that's fast enough to keep away from rampaging Death wizards would see much more use.

And all this from a 100-150 point character that at least 4 armies can, and probably will take.

I'm sure I've not even considered some of the changes you'd see after letting wizards choose spells, but the option to auto choose a single spell from a single lore would likely make the poor Dwarves all but unplayable - apart from any other changes.


I think if you wanted to be able to choose your spells - which I actually think is a nice idea, it would make building synergies within your list so much more effective - would require every lore in the game to be re-written.

[Prince of Spires]

Consider this: if every wizard could freely choose which spell(s) from their given lore they had, I think every army with the option would take a level 1 wizard on a horse (or other fast creature) with Purple Sun.

It's a very theory hammer idea that somehow never realy materialised in the real WH world. At the start of 8th ed. there was a lot of this going around. Many races had this option and spell selection abilities (or ways of ensuring that you got the spell you wanted) and a lot more powerdice generation abilities to take out some of the weaknesses.

And still you didn't see all armies running around with this kind of set-up. Too random, to likely to fail, too expensive, not worth it.

So while the whole suicide mage thing sounds great on paper, it never realy materialised.

Rod

[daid13]

I also had the idea of dividing each lore into two parts one they can choose from and one they can roll from. Don't know if that would be enough though.

[Domine Nox]

You could leave it random but give Lvl 3 and 4 mages the ability to +/-1 from a spell selection die.