Quote:
Originally Posted by scc
OK Magic gets a lot of flack, most of the time it's for having too many spells, others it's for being too cheap in light of Powers (A nonsensical argument) and even people upset about the way it makes you spend only a single point of each spell and pour points onto the core stat. While fixing the whole system is too much for a forum post I can make an attempt at fixing a single college.
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To me, the main problem is that that there's no way to create new spells like you can with RPM or Sorcery. So if I have specific spells in mind (for example, creating spell lists from a specific setting), then I'm stuck with house rules and wild guesses.
A lot stems from that. Magic as written is one of the few systems that has an identity all its own, with a unique if rather bland feel-- IMO a departure from the general GURPS approach of allowing you to simulate other settings' features. Your best bet is usually to take a close-enough spell, drop all other effects, and try to make up the difference with fluff. Or chain spells together, itself a problem. The spells you do get have some minor inconsistencies with how they integrate with other 4e systems. There's also the damage scaling problem, but I think that's going to be intrinsic to any GURPS magic system. Spell creation lets you bypass this by tuning your spells for a given setting, so this doesn't affect RPM or Sorcery as much.
The niche protection problem is important, but IMO a GM can engineer around that with the tools he already has. The limited and inflexible nature of GURPS Magic is to me a much harder problem to solve.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scc
I hope this proves to people that it is possible to fix Magic. Please note however that this was just something that I threw together in about 3 hours and should only be taken as a proof of concept and starting point and not a finished version a a fixed Fire College. If this process of merging multiple smaller spells and very similar spells together is applied all across Magic I can see it's spell count shrinking from the 450 it is now to around 250-300, it may even end with Fireball and Lightning become the same spell
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Since obviously you and I disagree about what the core problem with Magic is, your particular solution won't scratch what I consider to be the most important itch. But it's still an interesting approach. My own idea was to find a way to use Powers-to-Skills with the Sorcery system and try to rebuild the spells in GURPS Magic that way, but obviously that doesn't address any of
your concerns. That thread was going pretty well but kind of trailed off.