Youth is a weird prerequisite for Steal Youth

[GurpsObserver]

The Steal Youth spell has the spell Youth as pre-requisite, but it seems that makes it superfluous.

The Youth spell costs 100 energy to remove one year from the subject's age, with one try per month, and can be used on anyone including the caster.

Steal Youth costs 10-30 energy to take 2-6 years of life from a subject and transfer 1-3 to the caster, but a critical failure costs 20 years of aging and a point of IQ. It is also resisted, so the effective energy costs and risk of critical failure are increased for repeat castings.

Youth is the better spell to cast for personal immortality, since it avoids the risk of cumulative IQ loss, avoids making enemies by destroying the lives of sacrifices, and falls within the 100 energy ceremonial casting limit for nonmage spectators without Powerstones. And one could get ceremonial support with the promise of Youth (or by building goodwill with the huge profits of Youth castings).

Burning 2 years of someone's life to save perhaps 80 energy (when that person could generate over a thousand energy via Steal ST) seems like a crazy tradeoff. To be fair, Steal Youth could be helpful for a nasty necromancer who cannot get access to large amounts of energy or ceremonial supporters, and so engages in 'slash-and-burn' life-extension, but I would suggest a better approach would be to change the pre-requisites so that a pure necromancer can master Steal Youth without Youth, e.g. Age and Magery 3 (since Age can be learned purely from necromancy).

Those pre-requisites allow for eternally youthful necromancers living off the life of others, who aren't automatically able to renew the youth of others or skip the sacrifices for trivial additional work.

[David Johansen]

There are a lot of weird prerequisites in GURPS Magic.

[Anthony]

It's a lot easier to afford 10 energy than 100, resistance isn't that relevant if you are kidnapping peasants, and if you have skill 16 critical failure is rare.

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Youth is for sane, rational people who plan ahead and accumulate resources.

Steal Youth is for deranged psychopaths who hate the world and want victims to scream in torment.

See the difference?

(Besides which, it's more likely that the Youth Stealer will use an item instead of a spell, making prereqs moot.)

[hal]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It's a lot easier to afford 10 energy than 100, resistance isn't that relevant if you are kidnapping peasants, and if you have skill 16 critical failure is rare.

In the pre-GURPS MAGIC 4e days, getting 100 energy was difficult, if not impossible. Now? Not so much.

3e version:

"Spectators. Unskilled observers can aid a ceremonial casting; they usually
chant, hold candles, etc. Each spectator contributes one and only one energy
point to each spell cast, up to a maximum of 100 “spectator” energy points per spell. Sincere belief and desire to help is required; you cannot collect a crowd off the street, pay them a fee, and use them for spectators."

4e version:

"Each unskilled spectator who supports the casting (by
chanting, holding candles, etc.): 1 point, to a maximum
of 100 points from all spectators."

Note the difference. In one, it spells it out saying you can't just take someone off the street, pay them, and expect them to have a sincere belief and desire to help. 4e rules don't have that limit.


So, how hard is it to pay say, 1/8th of a day's labor, to cast a ritual spell that takes 10 seconds to cast (10 x 1 second to cast for ritual magic)? If using TL 3 income...

700/4 = 175 for the week. 175/5 = $37 for the day's labor. 1/8th of that is a mere $8 per person. Toss in extra money for candles and the like, maybe even pay double THAT rate, and you end up saying $20 x 100 or $2,000.

All that just for one HOUR'S worth of ritual magic.

Dumb question time. If you cast this ritual once per minute, 60 times per hour - in theory, one could knock off 60 years off of 60 recipients (after all, you can only cast the spell once per month. One COULD read that it is one try per target per month as opposed to one casting of the spell per month.

Either way you want to look at it, spending $10 per point works well enough simply for those people with struggling income. Paying $8 per hour is double what they'd normally make.


So - while on the face of it, 100 energy seems like a lot. That was true in 3e days, not 4e.

[scc]

Originally Posted by hal

In the pre-GURPS MAGIC 4e days, getting 100 energy was difficult, if not impossible. Now? Not so much.

I understand what you saying, but we don't have a Magic 4e yet, the current version is 3e for GURPS 4e, yes it's weird and confusing, but that's the way things are.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by hal

In the pre-GURPS MAGIC 4e days, getting 100 energy was difficult, if not impossible. Now? Not so much.

3e version:

"Spectators. Unskilled observers can aid a ceremonial casting; they usually
chant, hold candles, etc. Each spectator contributes one and only one energy
point to each spell cast, up to a maximum of 100 “spectator” energy points per spell. Sincere belief and desire to help is required; you cannot collect a crowd off the street, pay them a fee, and use them for spectators."

4e version:

"Each unskilled spectator who supports the casting (by
chanting, holding candles, etc.): 1 point, to a maximum
of 100 points from all spectators."

Sounds like they boosted normal magic while nerfing ritual magic. Used to be you could get a +1 to skill per 2 days (1:2d,2:4d,3:6d,4:8d,5:10d,6:12d,7:14d) repetition, now it's √(days÷2) instead (1:2d,2:4d,3:8d,4:16d,5:32d,6:64d,7:128d) which takes way longer (Thaumatology 127, Extra Time, Multi-Day Castings).

Hopefully the "preparations take at least half an hour of uninterrupted work" only refers to the baseline and it can still be shortened to 1/10+1d (3+1d) for -2 or 1d seconds for -5.

"A magician can only have one ritual in extended preparation at a time" is killer though, I don't think that was present in 3e so using time-reduction you could probably have been prepping multiple rituals simultaneously.

I'd like to know what the theoretical value of an advantage to restore that capability. Perhaps not "unlimited rituals" but a leveled trait where each level allows you the ability to be prepping an added ritual simultaneously to the first.

Since that's something 2 separate people could do, maybe it would fall under Compartmentalized Minds?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by hal

In the pre-GURPS MAGIC 4e days, getting 100 energy was difficult, if not impossible. Now? Not so much.

3e version:

"Spectators. Unskilled observers can aid a ceremonial casting; they usually
chant, hold candles, etc. Each spectator contributes one and only one energy
point to each spell cast, up to a maximum of 100 “spectator” energy points per spell. Sincere belief and desire to help is required; you cannot collect a crowd off the street, pay them a fee, and use them for spectators."

4e version:

"Each unskilled spectator who supports the casting (by
chanting, holding candles, etc.): 1 point, to a maximum
of 100 points from all spectators."

Note the difference. In one, it spells it out saying you can't just take someone off the street, pay them, and expect them to have a sincere belief and desire to help. 4e rules don't have that limit.

<shrug> I still wouldn't assume that wizards can easily gather 100 clog dancers unless I actually wanted an industrial enchantment setting. For one thing, in the cast of critical failures I'd give a backlash to every participant in the spell.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

<shrug> I still wouldn't assume that wizards can easily gather 100 clog dancers unless I actually wanted an industrial enchantment setting. For one thing, in the cast of critical failures I'd give a backlash to every participant in the spell.

Yeah, it's probably better to assume that 3E bit about sincere belief and desire to help. I've always assumed Ceremonial crit fail results apply to all participants, although I don't remember an official ruling confirming that.

[hal]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

<shrug> I still wouldn't assume that wizards can easily gather 100 clog dancers unless I actually wanted an industrial enchantment setting. For one thing, in the cast of critical failures I'd give a backlash to every participant in the spell.

That's what I do for my own campaign - however...

The bit of the backlash affecting everyone - as best as I can understand the wording - largely depends whether or not the spell backfire for a ritually cast spell affects simple spectators, or only affects CIRCLE magic. In 3e, the information on spell backfires affecting everyone is stated thus:

"The energy cost may be shared among the linked mages in any way they
agree on. If there is a backfire, the GM may either assess one huge result, or
roll separately for each person in the Circle. A backfire involving a dozen
mages can be a chaotic event indeed!"

Note however, there are TWO ways to cast ritual magic. THe second is an entry all of its own, and that involves spectators.

Mind you, if it were me writing this, I would have written it such that it has "Ritual Magic". If spell backfires affect everyone, I would have written it such that it says up front, that any spell backfire affects everyone involved.

Then, anything specific to Circle magic - gets described under Circle Magic. Anything unique to Spectator magic, gets described under spectator magic.

Unfortunately, in GURPS CLASSIC MAGIC, that isn't the case. The spell backfire is only listed under circle magic itself. It COULD be argued that since Circle magic was listed first, that the spell backfire concept cascades down to the spectator. But it can also be argued that it is unique to circle magic only because only in circle magic are the assistants supposed to know the spell being cast - at 15+. The Mage Assistants can add more energy at once than can a simple spectator. There are some other aspects specific to circle magic casting, but they don't relate to spectators in the same manner (ie, knows the spell but at less than 15 and can cast it, or knowing it at 15+ but not being able to cast it - perhaps a spell that doesn't require magery?)

In any event, I'm not certain whether or not one can combine both Circle Magic technique and Spectator Magic technique to have say, 3 mages with skill 15+, 1 mage (Leader) with spell skill 18, 5 mages who know the spell at 14 or under, and 100 spectators who TRUELY believe and wish the spell to succeed. If you have four mages with a 50 point powerstone each, 9 fatigue each that they can add to the mix, the theoretical top energy available to that casting group would be...

4 x 9 = 36
4x 50 = 200
5 x 3 = 15
100 x 1 = 100

Final amount available = 351 energy.

All of the above listed is LEGAL per GURPS 4e, because they give an actual example in a box on page 12 (GURPS MAGIC for 4e). What I find interesting is this provision:

"•A spectator must support the ceremony of his own free will. A mind-controlled subject cannot focus sufficient will to contribute energy."

Does this imply that you can't make/force a slave to participate in the ceremony? If forced, it would technically qualify as coerced, aka - not of their own free will. But, that's a quibble that each GM running their own campaign can decide. ;)

So, to reiterate - Ritual spell casting in 4e is FAR easier and more successful than is Ritual spell casting in 3e. I'm guessing that this was made to be so deliberately rather than an attempt to save on word count for the book in order to have it come in at under a given cost. But, that's just a guess. I think what annoys me most is that many of the spells that were "improved" over their GURPS FANTASY or GURPS MAGIC 2nd edition game mechanics - were done because people complained and complained...

PENDRAGON magic as a system states up front, you can bring back the dead to life. You can't undo aging. It is inherent to the "structure" of what is or isn't possible. Complaining that the copy spell isn't a useful as a Xerox machine misses the point that the copy spell is superior to having to produce documents using calligraphy. Having done calligraphy by hand - I KNOW what goes into it. Standardized spelling, standardized typeface etc - made reading all the more useful and easier. Having the copy spell as originally written was magical enough - but hey, those who complained got it to be EVEN Better!

While they were at it, why didn't they make a lot of the other spells more "efficient" such as the detect enemy spells, or the sense life spells etc? Why can you get more water created per unit of fatigue by using the rain spell, than you can with create water spell directly? Just odds and ends that are just plain "weird" or just odd.

In the end, make it your own. Fix what you think needs to be fixed, and enjoy gaming with your buddies at the table. I know I did for 30+ years. ;)

(as an aside? The Alaconius Method of divination to produce unquirked powerstones is used in my game worlds even if the rules say it can't. It should not have taken my posting it on GURPSNET to make it so that they changed GURPS MAGIC 2nd edition 2nd printing to include the new boilerplate "you can't do that". So, I do it despite it.)