Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Cule
Do you see a way that could be made to work? Mechanically, I mean. I'm thinking that this would be a hodgepodge of just about everything from GURPS Thaumatology but I could be persuaded to use any fairly chunky simulation.
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I can see several possibilities with GURPS. I'd start by stealing the concept of the mage's sigil from Ars Magica, and saying that every magician has something distinctive about their magic. What that might be is described below.
There are two GURPS systems that use the character design system, Sorcery and Ritual Path Magic. For those, the sigil is a package of Enhancements and Limitations that's individual to each magician. Sorcery requires spells be pre-built, RPM allows workings to be designed on the spot, and the choice of those depends on how much flexibility and complexity your players are comfortable with.
Realm Magic seems just too flexible and powerful for a game where magic has these limitations, or too difficult to run if every magician has his own set of Realms.
Verb-Noun syntactic magic, on the other hand, is fairly easy to limit by limiting each magician's set of nouns (or verbs). There's a character in Roger's WWII game who does Zoroastrian magic, with only three nouns: Light, Fire and Truth, plus a full set of verbs. This is quite limiting, but rewards ingenuity.
Symbol Magic could also work, if symbols are ideographic. Take Ancient Egyptian as an example: every magician could share some basics of the lexicon, but would have different versions of bigger concepts. This could come quite naturally to the players if they're prepared to dig into the ways they think about language and meaning and express those in their characters. Many people have rather quirky ways of dealing with these concepts.
Path/Book does not seem such a great idea for this. There are a limited set of Paths, and being confined to just one would be very limiting.
Magic as Powers makes it easy for everyone to be individual, but doesn't readily make
magicians, as opposed to people with abilities.
I think Verb-Noun may be the best idea, if you want characters to be individual, but keep the game mechanics fairly consistent between them.