What is wrong with GURPS Magic?

[Henchman99942]

Compared to memorizing spells in AD&D, I think the range of potential spells in one's Repertoire makes it MORE flexible. You CAN have a general purpose mage. Admittedly, you have to climb a tech tree if you want a powerful spell, but you can have a host of low power spells under one mage. So what if you can only cast those spells at 13 or 14 skill. You can have dozens of them. You can select a specific spell for your situation. AND you can pre-cast spells in advance and have their affect in play before any potential dangerous situation. GURPS lends itself to the clever character who can come up with creative uses for a variety of spells.

I prefer playing low point campaigns. Fantasy campaigns start out at 100 points. Think of a first level magic user in AD&D who knows only a handful of spells and most of them are fairly useless or get used up quickly.

[GodBeastX]

Hooray for this thread.

I need something more formulaic so I can rebalance it per campaign. At TL3 magic system isn't that bad, at TL8-12 it becomes very crappy.

I think it's too bad at scaling the AOE and such as well. Considering that area effects have negative PER hex and then huge mana cost for radius.

I feel like DUngeon Fantasy sorta handwaved some of the issues.

I still can't figure out how to do something like a Warhammer Campaign with the magic system as is when you're looking at storms and spells that are supposed to tear through power armor.

[ClayDowling]

The magic system to choose is definitely dependent upon the flavor preferred by the game. The Magical Styles book is also an awesome supplement to the regular magic system. It is very close to what I need for a Matthew Swift/Midnight Mayor style campaign.

Also, having used it for straight up TL3 fantasy, it's pretty awesome. It brings the same simplicity to the game table that the rest of the GURPS system has. It was one of the things that helped sell me on GURPS.