varying the Non-Mages Casting in Low Mana Areas rule

[Plane]

If T58 only applied to SOME non-mages, and didn't apply to others, there seems to be 2 approaches for reflecting the absence/presence of that option on a character sheet...

PU2p20 Perk "Extra Option" : non-mages can't cast by default, unless they buy this perk
PU6p21 Quirk "Rules Exclusion: non mages CAN cast by default, unless they have this quirk

Which way to treat beneficial options might be compared to alternative advantages/disadvantages to compare pricing balances.

For example: you could instead get for the same price as an Extra Option perk: Magery 0 (Costs Fatigue 6 -30%; Maximum Duration 10 Minutes -50%)

With x10 Fatigue Point cost, you're going to be spending at least 10 FP (unless you happen to be high enough skill in a spell to get discounts... not likely for a non-mage!) even on a mere 1 FP spell. So wouldn't it be cheaper to spend standard prices and pay 6 FP up front?

For that reason... perhaps it makes more sense to treat NMCILMA as the default and select a Rules Exclusion quirk to opt out of it, and consider the lack of that quirk (basically a built-in advantage for 0-point chars, like B454's "No Bad Sight") a prereq for Magery 0, so that you couldn't take this quirk if you were a mage? The quirk would probably make sense for things like robots to take though.

That or, if it's not built-in, and you do need to buy Extra Option to get it, then you might make this EO a prereq for any kind of magery. That would make designing a mage slightly more expensive, but not hugely.

It gives a nice option to fall back on for casting spells if magery is ever crippled/stolen, and since it can't be crippled/stolen like Magery 0 -80%, I guess that's one plus it has over that... so maybe it doesn't need to be a prereq at all and instead should just be an encouraged purchase?

[dataweaver]

I'd go with Rules Exclusion and a new four-level Perk as the options available for non-mages: you can use the rule in question unless explicitly forbidden from doing so, and each level of the new Perk reduces the cost multiplier imposed by that rule by two. You stop at four levels because when you get to the fifth, it automatically converts into Magery 0.

[Plane]

One other advantage of this that I just thought of, is that it would probably allow someone to cast spells while not registering as a mage... which might be a very worthwhile investment for Mages if their Magery was switchable. They could switch it off to avoid detection, but still be able to cast limited magic.

The alternative to that is buying "Subtle Aura" (T28). But on Magery 0 a 40% enhancement is going to cost 2 points, which is more than a perk. So a perk could be a worthwhile alternative.

That said... maybe non-mages who can cast magic (even at -6 to skill or x10 cost) should be detectable to magery and other spells to some degree, as opposed to those who lack that option?

They should be harder to detect than full-fledged mages, of course, but maybe something similar to the -5 to detect those with the first version of Subtle Aura that's worth half as much as undetectability?

Originally Posted by dataweaver

I'd go with Rules Exclusion and a new four-level Perk as the options available for non-mages: you can use the rule in question unless explicitly forbidden from doing so, and each level of the new Perk reduces the cost multiplier imposed by that rule by two. You stop at four levels because when you get to the fifth, it automatically converts into Magery 0.

Something like this?

Muggling 1 : spells only cost x8 energy
Muggling 2: spells only cost x6 energy
Muggling 3: spells only cost x4 energy
Muggling 4: spells only cost x2 energy

Aside from cost, the other side of T58 has a Continuous Mana suggestion of -6 to skill for non-mages though I'm not sure if that's meant to be used in combination with or as an alternative to energy multipliers. It seems like what Magery 0 does is remove that -6 penalty.

If we were using both, then maybe the levels could reduce it to 4/2/0 ... you know it might work better if the basic penalty was 5 (like how it is for path/book magic) so that it was reduced to 4/3/2/1 instead.

Maybe a side effect of this is as they approach Magery 0 they could be progressively easier to detect. Like they would go to -4/-3/-2/-1 to detect, until at Magery 0 they were at no penalty to detect.

Subtle Aura +20 giving -5, if we break that down, is a +4% enhancement per -1 to detect. So if we were mimicking the proposal using existing modifiers we could take that into account.

Assume people lacking the Rules Exclusion quirk (but who can cast magic) have the full -5. Which is like they have a built-in (free) Magery 0 that's hard to detect, but with a host of other limitations which limits its value to just 1 point. That would actually take -100% in limitations to do.

FP costs can be mimicked using the "Costs Fatigue" multipliers. T26 lets you get 1 minute of Magery as in the -5% basic version of CF, so you could get -10% per each FP cost if it was per second, presumably.

Costs Fatigue 10/s -100% would give you 1 second worth of Magery if you spent 10 FP. Which could still be a better deal if you were casting a spell that cost 2 FP, since that would cost you 20 FP.

That said, it might actually be more, because you probably need Magery activated for the entire casting time of your spell, not just the last second when you fire it off. So you'd be paying 20 FP to keep Magery active to fire off a spell which takes 2 seconds to cast. Which will be the case if your skill is 9 or less.

In a lot of cases casting time is actually tied to the amount of energy put into the spell (though not always) so it might balance out okay.

So progressive deductions in this might be...

Costs Fatigue 10/s -100% ; Subtle Aura 5/5 +20% (-80%) BASE (built-in non-quirk)
Costs Fatigue 8/s -80% ; Subtle Aura 4/5 +16% (-64%) PERK 1
Costs Fatigue 6/s -60% ; Subtle Aura 3/5 +12% (-48%) PERK 2
Costs Fatigue 4/s -40% ; Subtle Aura 2/5 +8% (-32%) PERK 3
Costs Fatigue 2/s -20% ; Subtle Aura 1/5 +4% (-16%) PERK 4
Costs Fatigue 0/s -0%; Subtle Aura 0/5 +0% (-0%) = Magery 0 [5]

My addition of the 4%/level (while I think it makes sense) screws up the math though, I'll need to find another 4%/level in limitations to counterbalance that.

"Hard to Use" seems like a good solve. That's worth 5% per level and gives -3 to rolls to use the ability. The "Non-Mages Casting" rule actually doesn't say anything about non-mages being able to make IQ rolls to sense items are magic when they see/touch them, so progressively erasing that ability fits with the them. That'd be:

HTU4 -20% for Perk 1 (bringing cost to -84%) giving -12 to IQ roll
HTU3 -15% for Perk 2 (cost -63%) -9 to IQ roll
HTU2 -10% for Perk 3 (cost -42%) -6 to IQ roll
HTU1 -5% for Perk 4 (cost -21%) -3 to IQ roll.

Those penalties might also apply to spellcasting, although that ends up being double (-12) the suggestion of -6 in Continuous Mana at baseline. It wouldn't be that far off if HTU was merely -2/level instead of -3 level, then it would just be -8 for the perkless/quirkless baseline.

Given that this is actually overpaying... what would people think of a version of HTU which cost -4%/level and only did a -2 penalty?

... or really, you could redesign it as being -2%/level and doing a -1 penalty per level. So in that case it would be:

HTU8 -16% for Perk 1 (bringing cost to -80%) giving -8 to IQ roll
HTU6 -12% for Perk 2 (cost -60%) -6 to IQ roll
HTU4 -8% for Perk 3 (cost -40%) -4 to IQ roll
HTU2 -4% for Perk 4 (cost -20%) -2 to IQ roll.

That works out to a slightly bigger discount (-6%) compared to the original HTU design on PU4p18 giving -3 to a roll (instead of merely -5%) but it always seemed pretty steep (compared to +5% for Reliable only giving +1 instead of +3).

Maybe the posited 1%/level enhancement could somehow buy a halving of the canon 3/6/9/12 penalties (for detecting magic objects) to 2/3/5/6 for casting spells?

T21 mentions halving limitation values on Magery 0 if they only restrict spellcasting but not detecting/using items, but I don't know if that works the other way around too. I couldn't find an example of Magery 0 that only works for casting spells but not for detecting/using objects.

[dataweaver]

The reason I went with Rules Exclusion and a four-level transition trait was because of the five-point cost of Magery 0 and the ×10 cost multiplier. If I were to go with Extra Option, I'd need to squeeze the transition trait into three levels:

Extra Option
Extra Option+Magical Dabbler 1
Extra Option+Magical Dabbler 2
Extra Option+Magical Dabbler 3
Magery 0

You'd have to split the energy cost reduction between three levels rather than four, which is somewhat awkward.

[Plane]

I was agreeing with you on using a Rules Exclusion perk :)

"Costs Fatigue 10/s -100% ; Subtle Aura +20%" is basically just me estimating an ability somewhat similar to adding NMC onto the basic rules.

Treating it as a built-in advantage is basically like people starting at -1 and then going to 0 character points by getting it.

It's not an exact match of course. Technically a non-mage would never register as a mage at all, but I think especially if we're going to let them approach near-Magery levels of power with leveled perks it might make sense to have them be gradually as easy to sense as a magic, which is why I split up "Subtle Aura" into levels.

Also not an exact match in terms of FP costs. Spending 10 to get magery would make it more expensive (11) to cost a 1-energy spell in 1 second, so it's worse in that respect, even if it does make it cheaper to cast a 2-energy spell in 1 second.

Basically paying 10/second ends up being 9 cheaper than x10 cost so long as the casting time is 1 less than the base energy cost.

At some point though, if you're wanting to deal with long casting times, it'd just be cheaper to take 2 levels of the -5% costs fatigue, and have magery turned on for a full 60 seconds instead of 1 second.

Paying for Subtle Aura incremenets with Hard-to-Use increments also helps gradually erase item-sensing from magery, and maybe even spellcasting itself.