[PhobosAnomaly]

Hello!

So I'm new to GURPS, but I've been playing D&D for a couple of years and the group decided to switch it up a bit recently for the sake of a more "realistic" system. We're playing a low tier setting with a magic element (imagine English history but with spells).

After the success of a kind of fighterish character in the last game, I decided to try out a character based on Magery, given that the rest of the group gave up on it because of the time involved to create such a character.

I'm three days in with my research, and to be honest - the character already feels like a cheese... I'm not sure if this is a real deal or am I actually doing something wrong?

With 180 points available, some slight disadvantages and rearrangement of the basic attributes, I ended up with the character that has 20 IQ and 3 Magery. I would've gone rampant with Magery but this is the setting limit, and I've read somewhere 20 IQ is a common maximum for a human. I mostly followed other limitations based on the Basic Set, so I didn't e.g. reduce my Will by more than 4 (now it's 16 anyway!), etc.

Even so, the guy has about 50 spells in his grimoire, all of which naturally start at 20/21 because of the IQ+Magery level, most of which can be cast for free and easily maintained, two of which are buffed up to 25 just so I can be perpetually protected and/or evasive. Also, he has about two dozen IQ-based skills that are exceptionally high, each with a cost of 1 skill point, a courtesy of a high base IQ. So not only is he a better "rogue" than the party rogue, he can also play several other archetypes with minimal cost, and all that prevents him from being a one-man army is low ST/DEX which should be provided by the party's fighter.

This is great, of course, but what bothers me is that once I, as a player, starts cheesing like this, the GM will have to counter-cheese to equalize the challenge. I already can predict no-mana zones, enemies with Mana Damper etc. But once this starts, it all really becomes a contest of how long I can evade mage-killer traps before an inevitable fail. What's the point, then?

All the situations we've experienced so far, though, would have been a breeze for a character like this. The problem with it is that this is really the only way I see that magic can be viable. A spell at level 15 just doesn't cut it. Expensive in regards to energy, most are hard to maintain, casting success isn't a guarantee, you cast a couple and you're done for, other characters do everything better. You just have to go all-in.

And once you do get all-in, it just gets exponentially insane. All IQ skills are suddenly very easy, your perception is brutal, you can succeed in almost every Will save imaginable (unless the GM goes - "you have a -5/-10 penalty, haha!"), and you can have so many spells you literally have to print a spell-book to track them.

I see this as a problem. If a GM has to limit the player in a fundamental way (I'd say limiting IQ is the most obvious), something is wrong. But then, again, I wouldn't even play a mage if such limits were in place, as he would feel as an afterthought otherwise.

I guess the whole point of this is to ask - is there something I'm not seeing? Is a mage really as powerful as this first impression seems to make him? Also, what would you recommend a GM to do to make the system a bit more limiting, but in a way that still makes magery worth taking?