How to Make Your Wizard More Magical with Skill Trappings

Unlike their D&D counterparts, Savage Worlds Wizards don’t have a plethora of spells littering their character sheet. Also, there isn’t a described cantrip mechanism that lets them do little magical things all day. But that’s a problem that a little imagination can fix without altering the rules at all using skill trappings.

What are Skill Trappings?

Skills are just a mechanic to differentiate characters who are good at something from those who are not. The Healing skill doesn’t go into detail as to how to stitch a wound or apply a bandage. All it cares about is success for failure at healing someone. How is left up to description and the trappings of the setting. For example, in a fantasy game, Healing would include the use of herbs and prayer. In a futuristic setting, it would include dermal regenerators or bacta tanks. The result is the same, but the trappings differ.

Applying that to Magic (aka, The Harry Potter Effect)

A wizard knows magic, so there really is no reason that he wouldn’t employ it to assist him in using skills. Instead of using brute force and nimble hands to repair something, he’ll apply heat and telekinetic forces to do the same thing. This doesn’t mean he gets any sort of bonus for using magic. Instead, the trappings of the skill change for him.

Let’s look at an extreme example: Harry Potter. The characters in Harry Potter use magic for everything from dominating friends and family to folding laundry. In fact, if you took a wizard’s wand away he couldn’t operate a toaster.

So, let’s pretend that you wanted to play a Savage Harry Potter game. You wouldn’t go through and pull out every little spell they used. Instead, you’d just make all those little spells trappings for normal skills, then give extra bennies to players who are good at roleplaying their skills (i.e. having a eidetic memory for made-up Latin).

Mechanical Effects

There are time, occasionally, where a specific trapping should have a mechanical effect. These are more rare than it often seems, as trappings are powerful and extra mechanics should be avoided, but sometimes it happens.

For example, in Harry Potter, if you take a wizards wand away, he should get a -2 penalty to all skill rolls because he lacks the proper equipment. If the party is being tracked by a magic-sniffing wolf pack, the wizard will draw their attention when using a little levitation to help him climb a tree (+2 to their notice rolls). Alternatively, if the party is in a mana-rich environment, such as at the crossing of two lay-lines or in a mana pool, the wizard might get a +1 bonus to all skill rolls. These are small, incidental mechanics that can probably be adjudicated on the fly, but should be considered.

What We’d Like From You

The idea of magical skill trappings seems sound, but we need more examples if people are going to be convinced. We’d like you to come up with some and leave them in the comments for other readers to be inspired.