Sincere belief and desire to help is required - how I handled it

[hal]

Hello Folks,
For those who might be interested - there was a provision in GURPS MAGIC for 3e (ie GURPS CLASSIC_MAGIC) that stated you could not pull people off the street, pay them money, and expect to be able to use them in a ritual spell casting.

Problem is - what does this mean in game play. It was never really stated, and the rules don't give any specific guidelines on how to implement that. All the GM knows is that if someone is opposed to the process, the energy gathered during the ritual was penalized by -5, otherwise the caster would gain +1 energy per spectator.

So, what game mechanism does GURPS have for determining the mindset of NPC's if the GM hasn't already decided on his own what it is? How do we know if a mage is about to cast Bless Plants, that Farmer A isn't feuding with Farmer B and emotionally wishes the spell would fail even if mentally he's hoping it will succeed?

Well, wonder no more. :)

Roll a reaction roll:

Bad = "Opposed - wants the spell to fail, lose 5 energy"
Neutral = "Doesn't care - doesn't help or hinder for zero energy"
Good = "Sincerely wishes to help and wants the spell to succeed."

Some of you might end up rolling reaction rolls for 100 people at a time, but some might rather not, and use an excel spreadsheet to do it for you - or write code to do it for you.

If anyone wants the spreadsheet that permits you to enter how many people are spectators, along with a "General Disposition" modifier - and then give you a final total of how much energy was provided for that ritual, let me know and I'll email it to you.

Let's say you have a mage who has charisma 2, is respected by the village because he has a duty to friends and has always been friends with everyone. That's good for another +2 bonus. Last but not least, you as GM might say that in general, people want the spell to succeed, so I'm granting a +2 bonus.

Overall, General Disposition has been set to +6.

100 people: 85 points

why? Out of 100 people, 2 got a natural 3 reaction roll. Even with a +6, that becomes a bad reaction, for -10 energy. Of the remainder 5 got a modified neutral reaction result of 10 or 11. So they contributed 0 points to the ritual.

Now, if I entered in 50 people, the energy returned was 48 this time. Same 50 for the next spell cast, resulted in 49 energy (all with a general disposition of +6). Now, suppose the mage doesn't have a reputation with these people, doesn't have charisma or anything else? With a Disposition of 0, the results for 50 people were for 5 attempts:

-101
-94
-95
-107
-96

This is why you don't just take people off the street and ask them to help.

If it were me? If you use this method for your own games, I would suggest reducing the -5 penalty to something more manageable. Alternatively?

Award a different penalty based on the reaction level itself

Disastrous: -5
Very Bad: -3
Bad: -2
Poor: -1
Neutral: 0
Good: 1
Very Good: 2
Excellent: 3