[Mettius]

Wow, this thread filled up. :)

As the player of the mage character in question in the campaign which sparked off this thread, let me toss in my comments, if not solutinos. ( This isn't short, bear with me.)

The issue with GURPS magic, as is, for me in this style campaign is that:
1. Regular spells seem impossibly hard to use outside of effective melee ranges. (-1/yrd to skill)
2. Fatigue rules cause any but super high skilled mages to drop quickly unless they cast 1FP spells.
3. We don't like the "powered by batteries" feel of manastone based mage-might.


Our budding mage hero "Manucius" weighs in at 192 point (he was less in 3rd ed.) Note: This is a campaign feel of... generally low fantasy but with a backdrop of epic powers. I liken it to Tolkien which I call "Epic Low-Fantasy". (You worry about things like food, and magic isn't a commondity to be toyed with, yet some have vast powers at their disposal)

Back to Manucius, he has Magery 3, HT 13 and FP 13. He was hardly munchkined as a character (he was built as a feasible low tech blacksmith who discovered he was a mage mid-campaign). At age 18 he has mostly 1 and 2 points in skills (though he's beefed up on broadsword lately, 4 pts!)

The "nerfed" reference may have been started by me. I was referring to GURPS wizards vs. many of their fantasy novel counterparts. Due to #1 above, regular spells just don't work much beyond point blank ranges due to the massive skill penalties. This makes it almost impossible to simulate such flavor as say a "Heat" spell at an orc at range (causing his armor to broil him). Can the wizard kill at range, yes with missle spells. The point is not "can a GURPS wizard be as comat effective as warriors", but rather how to better simulate fantasy like Eddings, Tolkien, and others.

I definitly think that a wizard who has some massive effect on 10,000 orcs probably should collapse in a heap, if not near death from the effort. And this would probably be a one shot spell for him.

Given our hero in question, I think allowing something like 2-3 times magery in extra fatigue (mana only) is a good place to address issue #2.
The idea of a meta spell which would allow the wizard to effectively use something akin to extra time or aim (take 3 extra seconds focusing to draw and channel 3 extra fatigue into the spell being cast next) is not a bad option either.

The point PoweredByCoffee made about 1/3 fatigue being too high as a fatigue point, I think is quite valid. Making it a flat 2 or 3 remaining FP, or at least 1/3 basic or general fatigue (ie before adding in the extra mana only fatigue). Helps. Someone with 30 points of fatigue shouldn't start collapsing at 10pts remaining. While some sickly 6 fatigue dude can go to 2pts remaining first.

This leaves only Regular spells and their near point blank range requirement (#1) as a problem to solve for our style of campaign. The -1/Magery Increment house would have the effect of letting a mage of moderate power effect targets still inside of tactical range, but well out of melee. This still doesn't allow for a scenario like Saruman effecting weather 50-100 miles away (yes this is an area spell but it is still -1/yrd to edge of area from the wizard).

We had the assumptiong that lvl 3 magery was the highest one could go (from 3rd ed.). And that if only >1% of the population had magery, and of them 80% were Magery 1, 15% magery 2, and 5% magery 3.
Hence the "low" level 3 of magery. For 4th ed. (as was suggested in this thread) cranking the character up to higher magery will help with the effect we desire for this campaign.

*************KEY POINT****************
Any changes to this basic assumption of -1/yrd will of course have effect on the rest of the magic system. Perhaps even making missle spells obsolete. This must be weighed.
This is the potential house rule I'm most interested in hearing feedback on.
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The nice thing about GURPS is that it is an excellent framework for innovation, in which a little adjustment here and there can simulate about anything you want, without haveing to reinvent the wheel to do it.


PS. We have run a lot of GURPS Fight Club (as we called it), just our version of SJohn's Gladiator rules, modified for 4th ed. and placing much less restrictions on character creation. And munchkined 150pt wizards often did about as well as any other 150 munchkined fighter. Terrain often dictated the outcome though. In SJohns stock arena the wizards died a lot. Because they need more time to get spells off while the munchkined fighters always had the inititive and basic speed to close to melee within 2-3 seconds. Fireball wizards didn't have time to get 3 turns invested for a truely devistating attack (they need to aim too!), so a 2-4 point fireball was typically all they could afford to toss off. If they missed, they died. :)
But this was only one style of wizard, and I digress.