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Old 10-06-2020, 06:54 AM   #1
Plane
 
Join Date: Aug 2018
Default how to make conscious targets unaware of resisted spells

B241/M14:
A conscious subject is aware that something is happening
The benefit here is that this awareness allows one to waive a resistance roll: unconsciousness means you always resist.

The "always resist" group also includes conscious people who are "unfamiliar with magic" or "wary of hostile magic".

I'm going to wager the 1st could be represented by "doesn't even have a default in the Thaumatology skill". You don't even know magic exists, you just feel something is wrong and instinctively fight it off like you would when unconscious.

It's the 2nd "wary of hostile" situation I'm wondering more about... would this be like Reaction rolls or Fright Checks to determine whether or not someone is? IE whether or not they are able to waive a resistance roll toward helpful magic?

This might be "I don't trust this mage, he says he's just doing a Body Reading (M88) to assess my injuries, but I suspect he may be casting Foolishness (M134) instead!"

If you have no way of telling what the spell is (just "something is happening" .. do you even know it's magic?) then I'm guessing you might do something such as Influence Skills to try and get someone to "open up" and "not resist" what is happening at a certain time.

Even if you trusted a mage though, you might fear other mages might be casting spells too. Like it would be possible for 2 mages to try and complete spells on a target at roughly the same time, so you could think you're non-resisting an ally mage's Body Reading when in reality it's the invisible enemy mage casting Foolishness on you that you're non-resisting!

For someone paranoid about this, they might have trouble opening up (non-resisting) spells unless their mage was able to convince them they were safe from enemy spells and didn't need to worry about resisting them. Like perhaps being inside a pentagram, giving them various talismans, etc.

For mages who are targets of ally mages spell, one way you could know whether to resist or not is M102's Identify Spell since by casting it on yourself you would know what spells are currently being cast on you. To give extra time for using Identify Spell, an ally mage with the Continuous Ritual perk (from Magical Styles) might intentionally stretch out the time, giving you more time to evaluate the spell before it went off.

Due to the "in the last five seconds" window of Identify Spell, another option besides Continuous Ritual might be to give the spell a Delay enhancement. Fixed Delay is unfair in this case, so Variable Delay is +10% (-2 to skill +2 energy per T39) in which case you could specify up to 10 seconds for it to take effect. I expect that's when you would actually make the resistance roll, but in the meanwhile you would have that 5 second post-casting window to use Identify Spell (and 5 seconds after to think about what IS told you) to figure out whether or not you want to consent.

Mage Sight (also M102) could be useful here since it detects Enchanted beings. This isn't helpful for detecting mid-casting spells, so it would ONLY be useful in the case of spells enhanced with Variable Delay. The color of the aura would tell you what college the spell was, and crit success would fully identify what spell it was. You would just have to look at yourself to see what aura the spell created on you.

That's more costly (3 to cast) than Identify Spell, but if you have Mage Sight 20 you can maintain it at 0 cost, so you can just spam-cast it on yourself until you get a critical success (you'll know because it costs you 0 energy instead of 1) and then just maintain that indefinitely, either via the -1 or by investing energy via Maintain Spell (1 energy per 5 minutes). This is one of those cases where you would want to "Steal Spell" to regain control of your crit success prior to it expiring, to avoid needing to spam-cast Mage Sight to get another crit.
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