Completely getting rid of PreReqs for magic

[MKMcArtor]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Well yeah, of course. Who doesn't tweak?

As a quick aside, one of the things I've been enjoying about the GURPS community since coming here in November is just how much creative energy there is here. I like that how even the people who seem to stick almost exclusively with RAW still tweak the system by deciding what they allow in their campaigns. It's all very refreshing, and I bring this up so I can (finally) answer your question:

A very large percentage of people who play other RPGs.

[Anaraxes]

You're having to find work-arounds to make the system work the way you want.

That's true of any system, and especially any of them that have pretentions to being generic or reusable. You might get lucky and find a system design that just happens to exactly match the game world you want to run. (More likely in this case, you just happen to want to run the game world published for that system, not your own.) But then you can't take that system to another game without tweaking it.

Solitary mages taking a long time to enchant a magic item is working as intended. Maybe in your setting mages can make major artifacts with a snap of the finger. Maybe it takes a little longer, but not as long as the "slow and sure" method given in Magic. But there's no way one defined time period is going to satisfy all three of those cases, instant to slow. And if the Magic rules happened to fit your notion of how long enchantment to take, they wouldn't fit someone else who had a different notion.

So, everyone has to tweak if they want the rules to naturally produce their setting. That's especially true of magic in fantasy games, as it tends to leave quite a mark on the feel of the setting. But it's also true of the advantages, skill levels, equipment, tech level, and so on allowed in the setting. Tweaking the magic system is part of the setting design task for the GM.

[Gudiomen]

Originally Posted by trooper6

Why dp people look at Magic differently than they do the other elements of GURPS? You don't use all the Advantages in every campaign.

There are a few causes. First, and foremost, which relates directly to what you're saying... is that magic isn't like advantages, for example. Advantages are modular, you can freely pick any you want, no strings attached (except a few very specific cases).
It's a set of options to pick from.

Magic is a system. The elements are all tied together, and changing one has effects on the whole system you might not otherwise want.

There are clear guidelines for modifying advantages (enhancements and limitations), in magic you're on the dark, changes have to be arbitrary with no system to back you up... it's hard to foresee the consequences or predict balance issues.

Advantages are a part of what Basic Set has to offer, while Magic is almost entirely about a single system, and then little vague notes of how you can make things different.

Advantages are more or less universal, baring cinematic, supernatural or silly ones, and those are clearly defined. 90% of the time, players can be built without supervision from the GM. They are also less numerous, specially in each character, and easy to supervise. Magic is diverse, complex and very setting specific... you either take it as is, or you have to redesign the ENTIRE prerequisite system, for example... which is no easy task, and hardly ever rewarding.

Advantages each are about one thing, they may work together or do similar things sometimes, but they are not redundant. Magic breaks up abilities into successively redundant things (levitation - fight; night vision - dark vision). In the advantage system you only take, or upgrade to the most relevant. In magic you end up with a ton of virtually useless spells.

All in all, the advantage system has a series of strengths that magic does not, so the comparison is rather weak. If anything, it highlights the shortcomings of magic. Imagine if you had to take Night Vision (advantage) before you took Dark Vision (advantage), or if skills were all in series of prerequisites of minor meaningless tasks.

"I want to ride a horse"
"First you must learn the Saddle Horse skill, then the Mount Horse skill and then the Ride Horse skill, which includes the other 2, but you must learn the others first."
sounds silly, but Ignite Fire and Create Fire are basically like that... it'd make a lot more sense to upgrade, rather than have separate abilities that do the same thing in different levels and in particular arbitrarily different ways.

Magic isn't generic or universal, it's "average"... which isn't the same thing.

Seconly, a lot of people have a gripe that Magic was mostly a cut-and-paste job from 3e to 4e. Almost nothing new was added, some of the 3e terms and mechanics were ported over. It was badly done, Kromm himself says he should have edited it himself to reduce some of the inconsistencies.
I for one was ok with Magic 3e, I was content with the system, most books in 3e were a bit setting specific.

Thaumatology is more of what magic should have been, a set of OPTIONS, each treated more or less equally without the assumption that you were going to use their system. Nobody is saying that Magic doesn't fit any setting, but that it doesn't fit all settings... Thaumatology proves this, with examples.

Also, some of the solutions you proposed, like Clerical Magic were absolutely vague in Magic, and were only decently developed latter on. I tried to do this many times on my own... and inevitably came up with "Where do I start?" and "I have absolutely no idea if this is balanced..."

Magic isn't a bad book in itself, it's just not what it should have been. It's not the generic book for MAGIC in GURPS, it's one very extensive installment of a particular use of the rules.

So yeah, there's a bit of a grude with that book, those and other reasons (the CRAPPY art work and quality standard bellow general GURPS 4e) are others.

Other books fixed the problem, but the sentiment is still there.

[Joseph R]

Gudiomen, your points all seem reasonable. However, I think the answer to your criticism of Magic is there in your last post.

You feel that (among other things) Magic is too specific, rather than truly generic. However, it had to come with some basic assumptions, because many fantasy RPG gamers who might use GURPS 4e just want a magic system (any system) which they can use "out of the box", so to speak. Without having to make design decisions on day 1, when they might not feel comfortable changing and tweaking yet. This is likely required if as the publisher, you are hoping to entice new players to GURPS with the release of the new edition, including players who might not have played previous editions (or even other RPGs at all). Therefore a ready-to-use magic system was probably something of a necessity, "warts and all". And it had to be ready very soon after the Basic Set was published. That also answers your other criticism (which as you said, others have expressed previously). The reasons for both of these "issues" are fundamentally the same.

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

Originally Posted by Gudiomen

There are a few causes. First, and foremost, which relates directly to what you're saying... is that magic isn't like advantages, for example. Advantages are modular, you can freely pick any you want, no strings attached (except a few very specific cases).
It's a set of options to pick from.

Magic is a system. The elements are all tied together, and changing one has effects on the whole system you might not otherwise want.

While I agree that the magic system in the Basic Set isn't as generic as the rest of GURPS, I don't entirely see the problem here. If you decide that spell X is not possible in your setting, and later discover that spell Y has X as a prerequisite, wouldn't it be possible to either drop that prerequisite entirely, or else substitute a different spell as the prereq?

If the complaint is about the book Magic... if it is an extension of the system in Basic, then clearly it isn't generic, and that may be a flaw. But if you don't like the system in Basic and don't want more spell options, why would you buy Magic instead of Thaumatology or Powers? After all, you probably wouldn't buy Ultra-Tech for your pseudo-medieval fantasy game.

I'm not trying to be flippant. I don't have Magic, and I'm assuming that it basically has longer spell lists and more detailed rules for the same magic system given in Basic.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Gudiomen

Just one example, there are many others.

The problem is that every time someone brings up one they get it wrong.

Yes, but that's my point you see. You're having to find work-arounds to make the system work the way you want.

I don't consider those things "work-arounds". I consider them "world-building". It's what GMs are there for.

People aren't always clear on what they say, and some people don't think (or don't have time to fully analyze) what they're writing. It's important to try to read what's behind it, what, in general, they're bothered with.
These people are probably talking about spells from other colleges that they are forced to take in order to make their college work to the fullest (take necromancy, for example). Some spells have healing spells or body-control spells as prerequisites.
Now imagine you have a setting where necromancers won't touch healing magic... it means they can't learn certain spells.

Or it means that the GM simply changes the prerequisites to suit how magic works in his setting. I didn't need Thaumatology to tell me that was an option and I find it hard to believe anyone who was making up their own setting did.

However, you didn't restrict they're access! You automatically imported a set campaign chunks just by using RAW GURPS Magic. Before you even decided how things work for necromancers in your setting, a lot of things have been decided for you.

Yup. And I found that very handy. It's like when you toss a coin to decide something and then make your decision based not on the coin but on which outcome you hoped for. It's a lot easier to start out with a system and then change it to suit your preferences than to build one from the ground up, an effort that usually aborts before you even get to use it in play.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Gudiomen

There are clear guidelines for modifying advantages (enhancements and limitations), in magic you're on the dark, changes have to be arbitrary with no system to back you up... it's hard to foresee the consequences or predict balance issues.

You know, it's a dangerous illusion to think that you can easily foresee consequences and balance issues just because advantages are modular and singular.

Advantages are more or less universal, baring cinematic, supernatural or silly ones, and those are clearly defined. 90% of the time, players can be built without supervision from the GM. They are also less numerous, specially in each character, and easy to supervise. Magic is diverse, complex and very setting specific... you either take it as is, or you have to redesign the ENTIRE prerequisite system, for example...

<cough> No. I don't. Let me give an example. I decide that Necromancy and Healing should be two separate and fundamentally opposed colleges of magic. I have two problems. Minor Healing is a prerequisite for Steal Energy. Lend Vitality is a prerequisite for Zombie. I change the prereq of Steal Energy to Summon Spirit. I change the prereq of Zombie to Steal Vitality. Done. And without redesigning the whole prerequisite system.

Advantages each are about one thing, they may work together or do similar things sometimes, but they are not redundant. Magic breaks up abilities into successively redundant things (levitation - fight; night vision - dark vision). In the advantage system you only take, or upgrade to the most relevant. In magic you end up with a ton of virtually useless spells.

That was not my experience. The low fatigue cost of the spells I got as prerequisites made them spells that, if anything, I'd use more than the big ticket items.

All in all, the advantage system has a series of strengths that magic does not, so the comparison is rather weak. If anything, it highlights the shortcomings of magic. Imagine if you had to take Night Vision (advantage) before you took Dark Vision (advantage),

Strikes me as a pretty typical progression in a Ninja superpowers game. Although of course it is not usually the case that the function of prerequisite spells are subsumed in the more advanced spell. While Lend Vitality and Summon Spirit are prerequisites for Create Zombie, they serve totally different functions in play. Create Zombie makes goons. Lend Vitality is a way to heal up people that doesn't suffer from the skill penalty that repeated healing spells inflict but instead has its own unique liability and Summon Spirit is only useful in itself for information gathering.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

The point to stress though, is that anyone who uses the given prereq system without tweaking is likely not running the setting they think they are, and they are clearly not running any type of setting taken from any fiction ever written.

How did you come to that second conclusion? It is not clear to me.

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

How did you come to that second conclusion? It is not clear to me.

It's obvious that it's not taken from any setting ever written, it doesn't even have the excuse of being a Vancian abortion like D&D magic.

Granted, while I'm rabid reader, I haven't read every book ever written, so do you happen to have some fictional work or other in mind, something like Rabid Accounting Magic 101, which you think inspired the GURPS Magic setting?
*grin*

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by The Sundered Sky

Haha..how are the games so weird? I haven't much experience with GURPS yet.

Ze says that like it was a bad thing. We've had a great, weird time playing the the Secret Masters' futuristic super spies, running around bottling up the forbidden lore left over from the pre-Atlantean ancient astronaut wars. Or at least that's the current explanation for spells that grant infravision or make you proof against the heat of a star being found in Martian pyramids written on pre-dynastic Egyptian papyri.