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Old 01-11-2021, 06:02 AM   #11
Gumby Bush
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: FL
Default Re: Witchcraft - Spellcasting Style

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Dalton View Post
something more versatile than wizardry, but also more psychologically based.
...
To further balance this, I'm adding a psychological component. How effective your magic as a witch is gets influenced by what people expect from you. What people believe a witch can do makes it easier for them to use those spells. So, in a European setting, spells that involve curses, transformation, mind control, and speaking to the dead are easier to do (no penalty), but throwing fireballs, teleporting, and other flashy types of magic are not expected and so harder to use (easier to resist, or harder to cast). But in a Chinese setting, the witch would find it easy to do divination, magical medicines, and spells that enhance herself, but mind control and traditional curses are harder. This means to be really effective, the witch has to learn what the people around her expect her to be able to do and alter her use of magic to reflect that.
Jinumon's suggestions are quite on point, I think.

If you are up for some more... difficult stuff (both to grasp and to GM): This would be an excellent fit for a (very lightly modified) version of Ritual Path Magic, especially the "you can do everything, but what people don't expect of you will be harder" element.
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Old 01-11-2021, 10:34 AM   #12
Mr Dalton
 
Join Date: Jan 2021
Default Re: Witchcraft - Spellcasting Style

A lot of people to reply to. I'll try to get to the key points, but there's a lot of text.

Sorry about forgetting to space things out. I used to post on forums more, but I've done that less and less as the years go by.

I do have access to some GURPS books. My friend bought the basic set, which I've borrowed. The local library also has a few - which surprised me, honestly. For the rest, I've been finding resources online, which is not as easy as it is for Pathfinder. Pathfinder's got the D20 wiki, that basically catalogues everything. GURPS wik, comparatively, doesn't explain the rules very clearly (or even at all, in some cases), but at least points me in the direction of resources, but I'm going to buy some books for myself once I actually work out which books have the materials that I most want to use.

I've been using the GURPS: Magic book most (will probably buy that one first), but the library doesn't have Thaumatology or any in that series. The wiki has a few powers listed that it's showed how they're constructed and that's helped me put together basically how this system works. It seems that once you know the base rules, it's possible to do basically anything you want, as long as you can afford the points.

LokRobster and DangerousThing: For starters, there can be male witches, but they might be at a disadvantage depending on the culture they're in. A culture that expects all witches to be female would be less inclined to believe in a man's power, thus making it less effective. In a Chinese culture, though, they actually don't gender magic users. The concept off a magic user in China is more determined by HOW you use the magic rather than who uses it, so a male witch would be every bit as effective as a female witch - but only for things Chinese culture expects them to be able to do.

And on that grounds, yes, if you come from a culture that absolutely does not believe in magic, that would effectively give you magic resistance, up until the point where the preponderance of evidence forces you to believe it. Additionally, if you have a reputation for being not very good at magic, your magic is weaker. This is why the teaching structure for witches often includes an apprenticeship, but then you have to leave and go somewhere far away so that your reputation for being a beginner at magic doesn't hamstring your power.

Also, knowing that this is how a witch's magic works can give you an edge. If you know that how strongly you believe in the magic determines how effective it is against you, you could effectively depower a witch like Peter Dickinson in Flight of Dragons. But you have to be absolutely sure of yourself. Just a little bit of doubt can make all the difference between victory and spending the rest of your life as a toad. This is why witches shroud themselves in mystery. They keep people guessing on how the magic works and never reveal their secrets, because as soon as people figure out that you can resist a spell by just not believing in it, you've lost all power over them.

Gmillerd: Part of it is bias. You tend to favor the system you're familiar with even if one is provably better. It colors your perspective of how things are supposed to work. Starting in 3E set the expectations of what the game should look like, so it made GURPS manuals seem more incomprehensible up front. But also, the basic manuals could provide examples of how you could combine limitations and modifiers with advantages to make them more unique. The rules are all there, but without examples, some people will find it harder to grasp how it's supposed to work. Once I actually saw an example on the wiki of how those are combined to produce unique abilities, it clicked.

And yes, I know duty is a disadvantage. The patron grants powers, yes, but you have to perform services in return, as the duty disadvantage says. And the magic has built in things to it - the power reserve of the familiar would normally be free to use, but I alter it so you can only access it if you're doing something that fits with your patron's interest. For example, the player took the Conspiracies patron when they built this as a Pathfinder character. Translating to GURPS, they can use the familiar's power reserve when casting spells for the purpose of uncovering or protecting secrets, aiding people engaged in conspiracies, or working against conspiracies the patron disagrees with. But otherwise, you have to draw on your own power.

And I do have intent that sometimes the obligations are a bit more direct. I haven't built in the desire for sacrifices as something the patrons of witchcraft specifically demand - though, individual patrons might demand blood - but there could be other impositions. A patron focused on animals might forbid you to eat meat. A patron interested in plants might force you to plant a tree once a month. Etc. And one duty in particular that all patrons share is for teaching: if you come across a weaker witch, you have a certain amount of obligation to teach them a little magic. This is how the patrons ensure that those with talent can get taught and prevents witches from hoarding magic power for themselves.

The extent of these extra duties would probably be determined by what level they take the Duty disadvantage at, but the more they subject themselves to their patron's will, the less gaining the advantage of magic costs. You could, in theory, give yourself a low amount of obligation, but you'd have to invest way more personal effort into getting to higher levels of power, and even then, there would still be some obligation. You never get magic for free. The patrons offer power because they want to do things, but need mortals to act for them to accomplish it. Basically, the patron is asking you to do things for them and in return, you get to use the power they teach you to do your own things on the side as an employment benefit.

I'm not sure if I made it clear. My thinking about the improvised spellcasting is that they're not learning spells to use as the baseline, they just have a basic skill and that's what they use to determine their skill level in casting a spell. A wizard has to spend tons of points learning individual spells, but he has no real obligation to anyone because he learned his power completely on his own. A witch doesn't have to learn spells, he just asks favors of his patron through his familiar, but the patron demands stuff in return. Overall, the cost in points to be an effective witch is considerably less than the cost in points to be an effective wizard, but you have a supernatural entity standing over your shoulder telling you to do stuff all the time.

Also, I think I explained this, but in case it's still not clear: by psychologically based, I mean that the magic exploits people's psychology to make itself more effective. The more you can convince the subject of your magic that it works, the more effective it is. It's a bit like in Discworld: being a witch is no good if people don't know you're a witch; that's why you wear a tall, pointy hat.

Jinumon: Thanks for those. I'll give them a read. That will probably be really useful. I'm copy and pasting your test into the file on my computer where I've been making notes on how the modifications work.

And with that, I must tear myself away from my ramblings and get to work. Thanks for the advice.
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Old 04-26-2022, 04:24 PM   #13
Mr Dalton
 
Join Date: Jan 2021
Default Re: Witchcraft - Spellcasting Style

Bumping this back up, but now that I've played this for a while, some balance issues are coming up that I need to deal with.
Namely, reducing all spells to a single skill is getting abused. The character in question has just dumped all his character points into that one skill and now not only does he eat all the penalties that were supposed to discourage you from attempting to do things outside of the superstitions, it also has reduced the casting time of all his spells enough that, unless it's something really big and powerful, there's very little wait time for his casting. Some of the spells he more often now take only 1-2 seconds. the overall effect is that it just ends up removing all of the elements that were supposed to make witchcraft what it was and makes it almost regular wizardry that costs like 1000% less character points to master.
:|

Open to hearing ideas if people have any.
What I'm thinking at the outset is adding that witches have to use psychology at every new place they go to in order to convince people that they are, in fact, witches. If it's a place they intend to stay, they can do it slowly, building a general "witchy" vibe so that people are more willing to believe you can do magic when the time comes. For places you're just passing through, you've got to do something more flashy to get the point across right away, which requires some thought because you have to do something to get rumors spreading right away, but you don't want to do something that's gonna get a torch-bearing mob coming after you.

I'm also thinking of making the penalty for trying to do magic in a way that doesn't match the local superstitions a flat -10 penalty, but each time you fail, it hurts your reputation, increasing the penalty by 1 for that location. So, if you're not careful, you could end up being a super powerful witch in your home town, but go a few towns over and suddenly you're just some crazy vagabond with delusions of grandeur.
On the flips side, you can use psychology and propaganda skills to get people to think you can do kinds of magic that other witches can't, but that takes time and controlled demonstrations to get people to buy it and it only works for very specific uses.

If anybody has other suggestions, I'm glad to hear them.
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Old 04-26-2022, 07:30 PM   #14
Lovewyrm
 
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Default Re: Witchcraft - Spellcasting Style

I'm kinda new to GURPS myself, and I can see it being one of the best systemse in existence (especialy with the right mindset of using it).

But it sure seems like magic is the weakest point of it all. I got into D&D because of the monsters, the handbooks on those just drew me in.

GURPS is not only kind of weak on that front (from that I have gathered) but I did searches through the wiki and all that, and magic seldomly gets added.

Maybe it's because of so many ways to express it, powers/advantages/sorcery, 'by the reallife sourcebook' (aka the 'magic' section in the basic set + the magic sourcebook), etc.

But I sure don't get the 'whimsy' from GURPS on that front, only the 'genius' from thinking the systems up.
hard to explain.

In my case, it's extra agonizing though since I'm in the progress of making a fanworks sourcebook (based on GURPSlite, so anyone can use it, but with the intent for them to get into GURPS proper) for a show I'm a fan of, and the magic there is both subtle yet also a bit overpowered because everything is low tech. So while magic isn't that showy, it still gives you a pretty huge edge and only by virtue of the characters demeanor/character, being 'good' they don't abuse it.

And casting magic is almost possible for anyone (symbol magic in GURPS?) too, thus I'm going for something completely simple and homebrew.
(Although I suppose it being skill based it does have some similarities with the basic set magic, but not exactly like it. That's another damn danger of GURPS, so many books (which I don't have) so thinking up your own is precarious (I sure am wary since it already is 195 pages strong, which are mostly fluff tho).

For example a grimy body disadvantage, where one leaves skin flakes, greasy fingerprints, shed hair, everywhere, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if thats somewhere in a sourcebook, or the mechanic of it but damnit I thought of it myself in that case!
Or being as thin as a stickbug...I'm aware of skinny but being THIN THIN like that is relevant to the material I'm trying to cover.

But I digress.
I am intimidated by using magic in GURPS, but I sure do like the mechanics, it just paralyses me and I kinda wish there were fewer systems ...
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Old 04-26-2022, 07:56 PM   #15
Mr Dalton
 
Join Date: Jan 2021
Default Re: Witchcraft - Spellcasting Style

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lovewyrm View Post
I'm kinda new to GURPS myself, and I can see it being one of the best systemse in existence (especialy with the right mindset of using it).

But it sure seems like magic is the weakest point of it all. I got into D&D because of the monsters, the handbooks on those just drew me in.

GURPS is not only kind of weak on that front (from that I have gathered) but I did searches through the wiki and all that, and magic seldomly gets added.

Maybe it's because of so many ways to express it, powers/advantages/sorcery, 'by the reallife sourcebook' (aka the 'magic' section in the basic set + the magic sourcebook), etc.

But I sure don't get the 'whimsy' from GURPS on that front, only the 'genius' from thinking the systems up.
hard to explain.

In my case, it's extra agonizing though since I'm in the progress of making a fanworks sourcebook (based on GURPSlite, so anyone can use it, but with the intent for them to get into GURPS proper) for a show I'm a fan of, and the magic there is both subtle yet also a bit overpowered because everything is low tech. So while magic isn't that showy, it still gives you a pretty huge edge and only by virtue of the characters demeanor/character, being 'good' they don't abuse it.

And casting magic is almost possible for anyone (symbol magic in GURPS?) too, thus I'm going for something completely simple and homebrew.
(Although I suppose it being skill based it does have some similarities with the basic set magic, but not exactly like it. That's another damn danger of GURPS, so many books (which I don't have) so thinking up your own is precarious (I sure am wary since it already is 195 pages strong, which are mostly fluff tho).

For example a grimy body disadvantage, where one leaves skin flakes, greasy fingerprints, shed hair, everywhere, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if thats somewhere in a sourcebook, or the mechanic of it but damnit I thought of it myself in that case!
Or being as thin as a stickbug...I'm aware of skinny but being THIN THIN like that is relevant to the material I'm trying to cover.

But I digress.
I am intimidated by using magic in GURPS, but I sure do like the mechanics, it just paralyses me and I kinda wish there were fewer systems ...
I thought the magic in GURPS was limited at first, too, but it's really not. Because so many mechanics are different, even spells that seem limited can be quite powerful if you know how to use them. And by tweaking some rules here and there, it's easy to make it even more so. Frankly, magic is easier to make overpowered in GURPS than it is in D&D if you're careless.
Which is the situation I'm in now.

As for "the whimsy," that's all in how you present it. No system is ever going to be whimsical, because a system has rules to follow. But you can add personal flair to make it fee more so.

Last edited by Mr Dalton; 04-26-2022 at 08:56 PM.
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