I
still think levels are gained too slowly. The system where you need N wizard murders to go from level N-1 to N just... doesn't make sense to me. For gameplay
or lore.
Consider this; a wizard at level 1 has spells too weak to do almost anything useful: "Death" wilts a flower, "warm" warms a bowl of soup, "fire" lights a candle. This isn't too limiting if the players are creative and the GM accomodates them; having a permanent lighter is useful, and "warm" cast on a human brain would be incapaciting at best, lethal at worst. It's a good first level, weak enough that people generally have to rely on mundane solutions to most problems, but just strong enough that it will occasionally be very useful if they're clever.
...After two more kills, that single player gets a 50% chance of having spells which can do something significant, but which are presumably still weak. It isn't explicitly stated, when it probably should be, as people will spend a lot more time at L2 than L3.
After
six kills, by only one player, they get to standard RPG wizard power level... or, rather, a 33% chance of that, 33% chance of something between "fireball" and "candle", and 33% chance of "useless". This power level isn't
bad, IMO, it's just too difficult to reach for what it is.
Consider also that if the group has three players, who all want to advance at the same rate, and never suffer any
murder-inefficient deaths, it will take them eighteen murders to all reach a 33% chance standard wizard power, in a game
named "WIZARDS!". Even if it's a more traditional game with one session per week, and players somehow kill a wizard
every session, this still means people have to wait four RL months before they get to a decent magical power level. I find it hard to believe that that's intentional, considering how focused the game is on a zany, chaotic world. I'd think you'd be aiming for quick, meteoric rises in power, balanced by frequent and surprising deaths.
Also, from a lore perspective, beyond the fact that any high level mage is
very bad news, it doesn't really make sense. Why, in such a random and chaotic world, is the only reliable and mathematical thing about magic the *exact* number of mages you need to murder to gain a level? If you've killed five mages already, the very next kill will always be when the magic happens, and never the one
after that kill. It also simply doesn't make narrative sense, since the system is indiscriminate about
who you kill. It doesn't matter whether you kill a level 1 baby mage, ten days out of its mother's womb, or a level 10 madman who rends continents apart in his search for more bubblegum; you get one more pip on your sheet, and if it isn't one of the special numbers, nothing interesting happens at all.
Guh. And because I can't not think up a system to fix any perceived problems, here: I'd just make wizard kills grant
L+1-1dL points, where L is the level of the killed wizard. This is much, much faster progression, yes, but WIZARDS! has never seemed like a game meant to be run for a long time, at least to me. It's still slow enough that I doubt people would last to L10, while being suitably random and rewarding players for going after particularly powerful and dangerous wizards.
Edit from the distant future: I came back to look at this because of a WIZARDS!-inspired game starting, and using its levelup system. What I said above is idiotic, in a way that I'm amazed I wrote, and that nobody called me out on. L+1-1dL is literally just 1dL. I'm guessing that I wrote it down wrong, or made a more complex formula that I then incompetently tried to simplify, but I don't know.
...1dL still works fine, though, and all the other points stand. Using the wizard's spell power is prolly better, as it ensures higher level wizards always give higher payoffs, while still being pretty random.--Final note:
All this can be safely ignored if you feel that the game is supposed to be less about
being a wizard, and more about
hunting wizards. The whole system strikes me as being intended for characters going through most of the levels, though relatively high-level mages do seem a bit
too powerful to be PCs. I feel that if this is the case, though, it should be stated more explicitly. As-is, I feel like most people reading through this will be expecting a lot more shenanigans
as a wizard.
I feel that staffs should always have the ability to generate their material, and should always incorporate it into their form. The former, because some of the materials are quite rare and non-trivial to find for manipulation ("Yay, I got an aerogel-control staff! ...What the hell is aerogel?"), and the latter because that's more interesting than being told "It's an ice staff which controls fire" or some other explicit explanation. Let people wonder which material the staff made out of fire
and ice controls.