[Std Magic] How have you fixed Bless?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Gef

Depends on how bad the triggering event has to be. Flu season? You need a Blessing annually, because the blessing doesn't know about other healing magic you have access to. More serious disease, or a horrible accident? You need one every few years; I can think of a few times in my life, car crash or near miss, when a Bless would've been used up.

I don't think a Bless is used up when you might run into a problem, it gets used up when you do run into it, and retroactively prevents it. Most communicable diseases - outside of nasty bits like plagues and the like - are likely either minor enough they wouldn't burn up the Bless, or are things you probably got innoculated against if you made it through childhood. Additionally, the passive +1 to HT rolls from Bless is going to make you less likely to catch much of anything, and unless you're suggesting most people caught a serious disease once a year, you aren't going to need anual renewal of the Bless. Additionally, while serious farming, forge, and wagon accidents certainly did happen, I doubt they were anywhere near as common as a car crash, and note many car crashes might not even burn up the Bless, as they don't seriously injure the driver or passengers.

Originally Posted by Gef

My campaign assumptions are that there are 3k practicing wizards of each college per 10M pop. If a third of metemagic wizards are in the blessing business (journeyman level with Shortcut to Power), each has to Bless 1000 people per year, just 4 per day, to cover the entire population annually. Further assuming typical recipients split the benefit between greater productivity and more leisure, and you get 5% productivity increase, pure profit, and that's not counting the improved morale that comes from having a more pleasant life. I wonder if that's enough to put low performers out of work, with attendant social ills, or if you need mass production for that.

Do keep in mind that those wizards are unlikely to be evenly distributed through the population - you can probably expect most of them to cluster together in major cities. It's more likely that most will be in an area where they'd only need to Bless a person a day (or less) to cover the entire population anually, while others will be in locations where they'd have to Bless hundreds each day to keep up.

As for low performers, note that Bless may well serve to make some of those who are otherwise unfit to make it in the workforce to simply have slightly less output and leisure time - that Village Blacksmith upthread needs ST, Farming, and Smith at 11 each, but with Bless he might be able to get away with having each of those at 10. People could become overly reliant on the spell, resulting in many being in such a category - meaning your society might not see a real gain from the spell, but rather ocasional loss during the periods when people's Bless has run out but hasn't yet been renewed. That's heavy on the Skepticism side of the Sliding Scale, of course, so needn't be the way your world works.

Originally Posted by Gef

A sharecropper may not make enough take home pay to purchase annual blessings, but the lord on whose manor he works may make enough to justify blessing his crew. Over time, these lords would probably figure out where the sweet spot is: One blessing every other year? Every 5? My guess is every 3 years, but again, that's where something less hazy regarding terminal conditions would be helpful.

Indeed. Assuming we're staying away from the Skepticism bit above, the break-even point would be the 14 months I listed above. That isn't quite right, as that $500 per head he's spending could have been invested elsewhere, but the other bonuses from Bless may well be enough to offset that. Offhand, I'd say the lord will probably make a tidy sum if he allows his serfs to have their Blessings renewed every other year, although honestly so long as serious accidents and sickness aren't too prevalent, he would probably make a profit if he simply lets them renew the Blessing anytime it is expended. He may need to keep an eye on some of his serfs to insure they aren't abusing the privilege ("Hey y'all, watch this!"), however.

[Anthony]

The easiest fix for bless is to simply not allow it in a game, but it does have some value. I would be inclined to completely change what both bless and curse do --for example:
Bless
Assigns the target character a good Destiny, equivalent to a 5, 10, or 15 point Destiny for a 1, 2, or 3 point Blessing. Unlike Destiny as an advantage, a blessing can be removed or resisted: it ends (but averts or adjusts the event) if an event would make the destiny impossible, and it has an effective skill for achieving that destiny equal to the spell skill.
Curse
As bless, but a bad destiny instead of a good destiny.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The easiest fix for bless is to simply not allow it in a game, but it does have some value. I would be inclined to completely change what both bless and curse do --for example:
Bless
Assigns the target character a good Destiny, equivalent to a 5, 10, or 15 point Destiny for a 1, 2, or 3 point Blessing. Unlike Destiny as an advantage, a blessing can be removed or resisted: it ends (but averts or adjusts the event) if an event would make the destiny impossible, and it has an effective skill for achieving that destiny equal to the spell skill.
Curse
As bless, but a bad destiny instead of a good destiny.

Note that this also leaves the door open for another blessing spell, which could be called Divine Aid, Blessed Endeavour or something, which would give the character a bonus on all die rolls in pursuit of a given task. In other words, grant Higher Purpose for the duration.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The easiest fix for bless is to simply not allow it in a game, but it does have some value. I would be inclined to completely change what both bless and curse do --for example:
Bless
Assigns the target character a good Destiny, equivalent to a 5, 10, or 15 point Destiny for a 1, 2, or 3 point Blessing. Unlike Destiny as an advantage, a blessing can be removed or resisted: it ends (but averts or adjusts the event) if an event would make the destiny impossible, and it has an effective skill for achieving that destiny equal to the spell skill.
Curse
As bless, but a bad destiny instead of a good destiny.

Nice.

Question is - is the spell in need of a fatigue cost change for something like that? Maybe the duration of the Destiny has to be within a given time frame - say, a day for the 1 point version, a month for the two point version, and maybe 30 months for the 3 point version?

[hal]

I've long been a fan of changing spells where required, to fit the GM's mindset or worldview as the case may be.

Imagine what would happen if someone said "Let's have a GURPS MAGIC 2" book, where people actively made an effort to create singular spells WITHOUT the prerequisites listed, leaving that up to the GM him/herself to determine for their own game universe.

I'd like to see spell descriptions where the spell does something at a lower skill level, and the higher the skill level, the better the spell itself is. Or instead of that, have "maneuvers" for the spell such that the spell caster can accept given penalties to his spell casting in order to procure the special capabilities for the spell.

There are times when I think that GURPS MAGIC should have been rewritten to change the requisites for DESTROY MANA to require SUSPEND MANA before they could destroy it. I've also never been fond of the quirking rules for POWERSTONES simply because those quirks never appeared in a standardized fashion, nor was it applied evenhandedly on all enchantments.

In my campaign world, BLESS PLANTS uses up the land twice as fast - it doesn't teleport the materials into the plant to make it more bountiful. It doesn't change the genetics of the seeds to where it has more grains per head than is normal. Otherwise, one could PLANT those seeds instead of eating them and having a non-stop double yield going forward.

One could change things with the Bless spell as well. Make it so that instead of affecting EVERYTHING, it affects a more narrow field of endeavor (making it less costly in energy perhaps?). Or perhaps as Anthony mentions, it grants certain destinies. Problem with that then, is that it would be a MORTAL granting destinies instead of divine favor - something that the Immortals might frown upon.

In one campaign I ran set in ATLANTIS: THE SECOND AGE, using the Resurrection spell didn't bring the person back to life, it allowed you to enter the death realms to bring the soul back - if you could. Cerebus would not let any souls back through something as mundane as a spell!

So, experiment with the spells, rewrite them, make them WORK for your world view as the GM instead of just using them as written. It is largely the fact that many of the spells originally introduced in GURPS GRIMOIRE (now contained within GURPS MAGIC for 4e) that I felt violated the metaphysics set forth in GURPS MAGIC (now GURPS CLASSIC MAGIC).

So, ban some spells, modify them, write your own. MAKE your magic um...

Magical?

;)