What is implied about the setting by GURPS Magic?

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Whitewings

months or years of work

M87

The “flow” of mana into the Timed Out area is effectively nil.
Powerstones won’t recharge,
enchantment is impossible,

I've been wondering... if the effect of this is to change even "Very High Mana" into "No Mana", what stops a mage from bringing along someone with "Mana Enhancer" inside the area to restore the mana flow and allow 0-time enchantments?

M86 "Accelerate Time" also conspicuously does not appear include a similar prohibition against enchantment... so if you had that at skill 20 (-2 to FP cost) then could you indefinitely maintain a "crafting area" so that every hour you spent inside crafting was only 30 minutes outside?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Whitewings

25. -5 for Low Mana, -5 for the assistants, and the lead enchanter has to have at least 15 after correcting for that.

The Power of the Item needs to be a base 20 to work in Low Mana. That's the more usual calculation. I appear to have missed the very narrow contest of your remark about the team of 6.

Q&D can be only half as attractive as S&S anyway. In most Q&D calculations the assistants are using Powerstones. In Low Mana thsoe are more expensive both because they need a base Power of 20 to work at all but also becaue they recharge 7x slower.

That Skill-25 Enchanter can get around the need for Power 20 Powerstones but the 7x slower things requires that he have a (relativley large) area of Normal Mana within reach. He probably jsut built his house in the nomrla Mana area for the convienince of casting simple and useful spells without the -5 and went into S&S when he hit Skill-20. That's if he lives and works in Low Mana anyway. He might just move soemwhere the Mana's higher.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Q&D can be only half as attractive as S&S anyway. In most Q&D calculations the assistants are using Powerstones. In Low Mana thsoe are more expensive both because they need a base Power of 20 to work at all but also becaue they recharge 7x slower.

You can always just use "Charge Powerstone" to borrow against future regenerations. A bunch of powerstones that won't recharge for a long while might be shipped by some minion to some higher-mana area to be left there for a long while.

If you're worried about someone taking them for their personal use you could probably enchant the power stones with protections so that only you could use them.

One-College Powerstones are another way since then you could make them only useable for enchantment-college antics.

Getting a base power of 20 on a One-College powerstone would be easier since you could spend extra Energy making them to increase your effective skill. Getting +5 to skill on a 20-energy normal powerstone would cost you an extra 20 energy (40 total) but would only cost you 12 extra (24 total) on a one-college one.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That Skill-25 Enchanter can get around the need for Power 20 Powerstones but the 7x slower things requires that he have a (relativley large) area of Normal Mana within reach. He probably jsut built his house in the nomrla Mana area for the convienince of casting simple and useful spells without the -5 and went into S&S when he hit Skill-20. That's if he lives and works in Low Mana anyway. He might just move soemwhere the Mana's higher.

Or again: just make an item with "Charge Powerstone" and stop relying on natural regeneration altogether. It's pretty slow compared to the rate you could just recharge your own energy with and then funnel it into the stone.

The only problem of course being the risk of critical failure every time you do that, so ideally you will have the "Stable Casting" enhancement on your Magery, or use "Skills to Salvage Critical Failures" (Thaumatology 40) perhaps via the "Extra Options: Stabilizing Skill" perk (Thaumatology: Magical Styles 24) which are also good options for building large power stones in the first place (less shattering, but you will still accumulate interesting quirks via normal failures)

ONLY information spells are singled out as something that shouldn't enjoy a safety net, so Enchantment should be allowed...

I don't really like the idea of crit fails NEVER being a risk though... and actually, the spells they're basing this rule on (Healing) don't really work that way:

critical failures with certain Healing spells usually only count as ordinary failures

If we check those spells on M91...
MINOR healing:

If you have the Physician skill at level 15 or higher, a critical failure
with this spell counts only as an ordinary failure – unless you are trying the
spell more than once per day on the same subject.

MAJOR healing:

this spell functions just like Minor Healing: it is at -3 per casting on the same subject in one day, and Physician skill at level 15 or higher will mitigate the effects of a critical failure.

GREAT healing:

If you have the Physician skill at level 15 or higher, a critical failure with
this spell counts only as an ordinary failure.

I don't know whether the "unless" (more than once per day on the same) restriction from minor applies to major/great... "functions just like" under Major would PERHAPS suggest that?

That language is absent for great... but then that would make sense since "can only benefit from this spell once per day, whether cast by the same caster or by a different caster"

Of course... that doesn't really explain what would happen if you ATTEMPTED to cast Great Healing on someone who had already benefitted from it... like for example if you didn't already know it had been used one them. Would even a success just count like a regular failure? Could you still risk harming them via a critical failure?

Come to think of it... GH actually has an offensive use: if someone is missing a mere 1 HP (ie you should just be using Minor Healing) casting GH on them would actually prevent GH being used on them later... which would be very smart if they had a lot of HP and you wanted to kill them and you knew they had GH prepped to bring them back to full...

M13 says A spell of any type can also be “Resisted.” so I think that could be one reason someone might opt to resist a Great Healing, so that it would be available later when they truly needed it. But still: you get no roll to resist if a caster rolls a crit success, so trying to GH-spam someone (until crit success) to use up their once-daily quota could still be a useful offensive option.

M14's "A conscious subject who is aware that something is happening may choose not to resist." seems to imply that people not aware and consenting of healing spells would automatically resist... "A character resists using the
attribute or other trait indicated in the spell description" doesn't exactly help when M91 doesn't list a trait in the description... Usually spells say "Resisted by X" below their names, which sort of implies that spells lacking that CAN'T be resisted... but that seems wrong... if someone wants to avoid GH or wants to stay poisoned (maybe they're suicidal) then there should be some means of staying that way.

Anyway back to Enchantment: ignoring the GH dilemma, the MHs (minor/major healing) I think avoid a crit once per day per target (the crit-avoidance only seems to apply on the 1st cast per target) so I think the "Salvage Critical Failures" rule (Thaumatology 40) should probably be limited in a similar way. So if you were using "Charge Powerstone" then only one critical failure should be averted per day.

Meta and Enchantment colleges aren't given a suggested skill on T40, but MS24 mentions "See Elemental Styles (pp. 4-5) for skills suited to eachcollege." and pg 5 says for Enchantment "Use the suggestions in Experimental Styles (p. 4)." and "Use the suggestions in Theoretical Styles (p. 4)." for Meta.

So with Meta > Theoretical and Enchantment > Experimental, Thaumatology would work for either of them, while both have interesting localized suggestions.

I don't really like the idea of guaranteed crit avoidance though. Takes away the suspense. Even Magery that is enhanced to be Stable Casting merely gets a 2nd roll of the spell to turn the crit fail to a normal fail, so there's a chance to fail that and still retain your crit fail.

Allowing "Salvage Critical" via "Stabilizing Skill" would basically invalidate "Stable Casting" enhancement so long as you kept your skill at 15+. Compare for example designing "Stable Casting" +40% as a limited enhancement (One College Only -40%). This would be a +24% enhancement on Magery, which would round up cost at least 3 points for even a single level of magery, and you would need to buy it for ALL your levels of magery or else it would NOT be stable casting so long as you used a higher level of magery.

I think maybe it would work better if the perk merely allowed you to operate as if you had bought Stable Casting for that college: allow a reroll of the spell to avoid the crit fail. Even then: require a roll of the Stabilizing Skill just to get that reroll.

That would be like applying "Requires (IQ Skill) Roll, Resisted -20%" when designing a limited enhancement. It should probably also be "Increased Immunity 4 -40%" to get the "Immune for 1 day" effect like Healing has, but apply it to any failure.

If the -60% from those is added to the One College Only -40% then you get a total of -100%. The most you can reduce the Stable Casting enhancement to is 1/5 its usual cost (+8%) which is enough to be a perk. Taking the full -100% seems only fair since you're basically getting a "applies to ALL levels of magery" enhancement. This is only going to be a raw deal for Magery 0/1, it ends up saving points for Magery 2+.

Given that we can actually design an effective "Stabilizing Skill" perk by using Limited Enhancements on Stable Casting, it could probably be used to eliminate the need for the perk altogether.

For the idea of a "I don't even need to roll my skill 15 stabilizing skill to get a chance to reroll my spell to stabilize it" I think it should at least require a "No Nuisance Rolls" perk. To avoid rolling the base spell (of course also requiring it to be at skill 15) should then require a 2nd "no nuisance rolls" perk.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Ghotfish

So, I'm planning to run a game set in the modern world, with secret magic.* This will basically use the full list of spells from GURPS Magic without any house rules eliminating anything. (I'm not using Ritual and Path magic for this).

Originally Posted by Shostak

Mana has to exist. Mana zones with levels varying off the baseline might exist.

You will almost certainly have ancient mages who have prolonged their lives by stealing the youth of others.

Power Investiture and its sanctity based magic system (M200) would seem to be on the table so mana does not "have" to exist. If magic is per Power Investiture then things change dramatically - the levels are not the same for everyone.

For example, a wizard who is in service to Ares is going to be having a very bad time in an area dominated by Eirene (goddess of peace) as they can't tap into the power of the area...while a wizard in service to Eirene would be function as if the area's magical level was very high.