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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8801365" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I know this is a 5e thread but...I don't run it and still feel like blabbering about my home game, which is Dungeon World."Petty" casters make up the vast majority of spellcasters in the Tarrakhuna. I would call them capped at level 3, maybe level 5 for the notably powerful ones. Truly archmage-level spellcasters are rare and significant.Thing is...many important magical effects aren't spells in the standard sense. They're rituals. Some rituals are arcane in nature (e.g. teleportation circle usage, putting an enchantment on an existing magical object), some are primal (putting down the spirits of the unquiet dead, enriching the land, binding native-plane spirits), some are divine (resurrecting the dead, creating food and water, purging poison/disease), some are no particular school (creating magical traps/sensors, divinations, purifying materials/alchemical reagents.) You don't need to be potent in the "archmage" sense to be an excellent ritual spellcaster. The party has an ally, Hafsa, who is a gifted artificer-type Waziri mage; she's big on theory, analysis, and engineering, but weak on regular spellcasting. They've worked with druids and shaman who were similarly ritualists WAY more than they were spellcasters.Refining your magical senses, learning to read and manipulate the flows of magic, developing the intuitions necessary to identify sources of power and exploit them...these are skills almost anyone can learn, they just take a lot of time or dangerous exposures. The vast majority of humans cannot "directly observe" magic--they might feel a weird vibe in areas where magic is super strong, but to most people, a fireball just seems to sprout out of the fingers of a wizard casting it. To someone actually trained in magic, who has awakened their magical senses and developed them sufficiently, the actual "mana" or "aether" dynamics that lead to the fireball happening can easily be identified. Such training takes several years for most folks, and even the gifted still need multiple years to truly reach proficiency.Experience can certainly help as well. I've leaned into the Druid having a better idea how spirits work, while the Bard is more in tune with things that affect, or arise out of, people because that's what Rawuna (aka Bard) magic does, it's all about the ebb and flow between people. A Wizard will be generally good at identifying the components of something, the "what" and "how," but less adept at identifying "who" or "why" unless it's fellow-wizard magic (in which case certain signatures are identifiable.)Our party Battlemaster--who explicitly did not have any magical training prior to our adventures--has just recently embraced a dark power that touched him in the past. This is allowing him to awaken his magical senses in a dramatically faster way than most folks, but it also means his intuitions will be weak because....he just doesn't have the experience yet. Learning to master this skill will be a growth process for him, and I'm looking forward to how that plays out as we develop his Compendium Class.</blockquote>

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