I'm noting that a mage could want to recreate all their X-level spells at their max possible spell power. For example, a 1st level mage would create a 1000 SP Magic Missile spell, with 3 Missiles from the beginning. Even if the wizard is higher level, it can be a boon for one's apprentice, and would very soon replace the Magic Missile spell.
The above is excerpted from Vlad Malkav's comment on my post about spellpower.
As usual, Vlad, you're asking good questions. You've raised an excellent criticism here.
Let's get one thing clear above all else: once spellpower and spell-creation rules are firmly in place, spell creation would absolutely not be available to first-level mages, as you indicate. Think of spell modification and creation as authority- or expert-tier abilities in Alexis's sage system. Maybe even sage-tier for spell creation: it's a big damn deal.
Today I spent several happy hours working away on adding tattoos to my economic system. Last session my players, having arrived in a port city, were excited (among many other things) about the possibility of finding a sailor who could give them some. Since I recently programmed the recipes needed to produce paper, I was already mentally ready to spend time work researching ink, so a lot of the time today was spent looking into pigments, binders, dyes, and mordants, and looking for historical information on the production of same. A good chunk of that time was spent looking in vain for some example ratios of pigment, binder, and water for pigment-based inks; in the end, for the red/yellow (both ochre) and blue inks, I had to guess.
One of the projects I plan to undertake -- though not at this time -- is to establish a method for quantifying spell effects (by number of targets affected, duration, magnitude of damage or other effect, range at which spell can be cast, and so on) and apply this method to the existing spells. I want to do this so I can compare the relative strength of spells currently considered to be the same spell level. Let's call this quantified spell strength "spellpower."
Once I can perform such a comparison, I can set quantities of spellpower which mark the border between first- and second-level spells, second- and third-level spells, and so on.
The question of digital character sheets is kicking my ass. Modeling a character as a chunk of data: sure, no problem, I can do that in any language I care to use. The GUI part is all-new to me, but I have at least a stopgap solution for use with Python, the language I am currently coding in.
But the live-update part? That's trickier. I have an idea formulated which I'll code up soon, maybe later today, but for now it remains larval.
In the mean time, I can talk about what I did work on today. I fixed some issues with the pricing of alcoholic goods (so far: beer, ale, and rum) in my recipe system.