[RPM] Critique My Conversion of Ritual Path Magic to Fate Core

[dataweaver]

How about this:

Guidelines for Opposition:
• Fair (+2) Opposition in ideal circumstances: you're in a consecrated space with the subject present, and you can take your time.
• Great (+4) Opposition if any one of the above qualifications isn't met.
• Fantastic (+6) Opposition if only one of the above qualifications is met.
• Legendary (+8) Opposition if none of the above qualifications is met.

If the subject isn't present, you need to have established a sympathetic link to him or the ritual automatically fails.

Instead of measuring the potency of a ritual in terms of how much it increases the Opposition, measure it in terms of how many successful actions need to be completed.

[dataweaver]

“Ritual Adept” Stunts:

• Sympathetic Adept: you don't suffer a higher Opposition if the subject isn't present. You still need a sympathetic link to him if he isn't; but it's no harder to cast through the link than it is to cast on a subject who's present.
• Fast Adept: crafting a spell in the middle of a scene is no harder than crafting a spell during downtime.
• Improv Adept: the lack of a consecrated space doesn't bother you; don't increaes the Opposition if you're not in a consecrated space.

[Raekai]

Fate Core RPM will use the Lore skill, and the standard Lore skill will be replaced by a better-named Knowledge skill. Lore is rolled against a Fair (+2) opposition in ideal circumstances: a caster in a consecrated space with the subject present, and a caster can take their time.*Great (+4) opposition if any one of the above qualifications isn't met.*Fantastic (+6) opposition if only one of the above qualifications is met.*Legendary (+8) opposition if none of the above qualifications is met. On the other end of that, the difficulty of the ritual being cast is also added to the opposition. A ritual's opposition can be anything from Mediocre (+0) for a spell like Light to Legendary (+8) for a spell like Resurrection. The final total of the opposition is also equal to the number of rolls that must succeed in order to overcome the ritual. However, longer rituals are dangerous, and each successive roll after the first garners a -1 to the Lore skill in question. If a roll is failed, the caster must pay the difference between the roll and the number needed for success with stress boxes or equivalent consequences.

Furthermore, there are several other ways to reduce the final opposition. A caster can certainly always chip in a fate point. They can also take 2 boxes of stress to reduce the opposition by 1 step. Appropriate aspects can be invoked for bonuses, of course. A caster's Vial of Dragon's Blood might confer a one-time bonus to creating a potion of the Fire Resistance ritual while A Human Sacrifice might be more relevant to performing the Resurrection ritual. There are also stunts like those in the Freeport Companion which allow a caster to know certain rituals well enough to reduce the opposition of those known rituals by 2 steps. Plus, you could easily have stunts reflecting parts of Ritual Adept. Details on that will come later.

Sympathetic Adept: You don't suffer a higher opposition if the subject isn't present.
Fast Adept: Crafting a spell in the middle of a scene is no harder than crafting a spell during downtime.
Improv Adept: you don't increase the opposition if you're not in a consecrated space.

Example: Jermaine wants to cast the Heal ritual on his dying buddy Lewis. His skill in Lore is Good (+3) and, while the opposition of the Heal ritual is normally Fantastic (+6), Jermaine also has Heal as a known ritual, reducing the opposition to Great (+4). Luckily, he still has his consecrated space from earlier. Furthermore, he has a connection with the subject since his buddy Lewis is right there with him. Since he has time to kill, he will go ahead and take a few minutes for each roll. All in all, that whittles down the total Lore opposition to Great (+4). He'll check off four stress boxes to reduce that to Fair (+2), which is a lot more manageable for his Lore skill. Jermaine rolls and he gets a final total of Good (+3), which is a success. He rolls again and gets a final total of Mediocre (+0), which is a failure and also means that he must pay the difference in boxes of stress or consequences. Jermaine sacrifices another stress box, and also takes a mild magical consequence to absorb the last 2 hits. It's not ideal, but it's a small price to pay in order to completely heal his buddy. So he rolls again and gets a total of Fair (+2), which is a tie, meaning that he will succeed the ritual with a cost. Lewis is feeling much better, having all of his stress and consequences removed with the exception of his last mild consequence, which is still recovering as the cost.

Yes, the opposition is steep, but Jermaine managed to heal Lewis of every bit of stress save for a final recovering mild consequence at the cost of 5 stress boxes and his own mild consequence as well.

Let's try this again. Changed some descriptions to make some things seem more flexible. Changed some numbers to alter scopes, make some things a bit easier, and to make some other things a little harder. I tried to underline most (if not all) of the important changes.

Originally Posted by dataweaver

If the subject isn't present, you need to have established a sympathetic link to him or the ritual automatically fails.

Instead of measuring the potency of a ritual in terms of how much it increases the Opposition, measure it in terms of how many successful actions need to be completed.

I'm also not too worried about having a sympathetic link, but I think that's just personal taste. I like the idea, but it's not necessary for my setting. As for measuring it in actions, the problem is that a ritual will then always take a specific amount of "time" as actions. You wouldn't ever get "faster" with rituals.

[panton41]

Taking my time and thinking it out I worked up a blog entry for the conversion you're wanting to do.

Originally Posted by Count Zero Interrupt

GURPS is a generic roleplaying system I enjoy and it has several magic systems built against its ruleset that would be difficult to translate to Fate. For example the default GURPS Magic system treats spells as a special kind of Skill, modified by the IQ attribute and an Advantage called Magery, and mages end up with dozens of spells. This style of lists upon lists of spells is largely incompatible with Fate for the same reasons that GURPS has several hundred skills and Fate Core leans toward about two dozen and some Fate rulesets even fewer. GURPS Thaumatology introduced several other spell systems like Path/Book and Realm Magic that are broadly more suited to Fate but not without limitations. Eventually as part of the GURPS Monster Hunters series a new style was introduced, and later given its own book, called Ritual Path Magic (RPM) that introduces a system that fits Fate quite well but obviously not without some changes.

Broadly speaking RPM requires a character to have a single skill – Thaumatology – that is used to roll for magical effects. There are in addition Path Skills which allows a player to roll a slightly higher target number in exchange for limiting their diversity. (Though there are few enough Path skills that a dedicated mage might max them out if they’re given enough points.) When performing magic players must raise energy for several turns and then roll against a high penalty of -10 to their Thaumatology or Path skill. This penalty can be negated with the Ritual Adept Advantage which has a fairly high price of 40 points.

What does this mean for Fate Core, however? Since Thaumatology acts as a catch-all “science of magic” skill in GURPS that very few non-mages will (or can in certain campaigns, if the GM limits it) it could reasonable be considered its own skill in Fate as well. Individual Path skills could be Stunts connected to the Thaumatology skill to give an edge (for a Fate Point) whenever the PC is using that kind of magic. The argument for spending a Fate point, as opposed to accepting the limited scope, is that PCs would be likely to play their mages based off the maxim, “When all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail” and use their limited-scope Stunts on every problem.

To further expand the Extra of Ritual Path Magic there is the Permission of taking an aspect allowing the PC to effectively have the equivalent of the GURPS Ritual Adept – ideally their High Concept. Bear in mind, this doesn’t need to be worded “Ritual Adept” but instead something that get the point across that the PC uses magic and this kind of magic if there’s multiple types. Second, they must take the Thaumatology skill. Finally, though optionally, they can take the Path skills as stunts.

To use RPM a PC will roll against whatever opposition is reasonable for the challenge assuming they weren’t a mage. If the task is truly challenging and can only be performed with magic then it’s reasonable to raise the opposition to higher levels but require the mage to effectively take on a Challenge to gain the successes (and in effect raise the energy) to cast the spell. The mage may roll multiple times across multiple turns to raise energy and any successes go toward reaching the goal, however any negative rolls also get added in, and rolling enough minuses to get a Terrible result (-2) will mean failure. (Particularly evil GMs might even argue a single roll bringing to total below Terrible, especially after several energy-building successes means Bad Stuff happens like a nail-studded demon emerges with “Such sights to show you.”)

If the PC is not a mage (no Aspects denoting they’re an RPM mage) the opposition get a bonus of +2 if they don’t have a magical connection (like they have something intimately tied to the subject or a piece of them, e.g. wedding ring, hair, blood, etc.) or know their exact location, a further +2 for not having a consecrated ritual space (which takes significant time and must be ritually prepared long in advance), another +2 if they’re not a mage at all (no Aspects for a different magic system) and finally a further +2 if they want to cast spells in within the timeframe of a Conflict (turn-based time like during combat as opposed to taking as long as needed to raise energy). Bear in mind this can mean +8 on top of whatever the original opposition was (and possibly a visit from a Hierophant of Pain with a single roll).

Finally, this framework could also allow for a system similar to GURPS Thaumatology’s Realm Magic (itself a generic version of White Wolf’s Mage series) by requiring the use of Stunts to perform magic within their limited scopes (and only within their limited scopes) and allowing each Realm (sphere) of magic to be Stunt Families built off of Thaumatology. This method would do away with the required Fate Point because the limited scope is a requirement to do magic at all instead of being optional (i.e. no rolls again straight Thaumatology). A GM using this concept would probably want to give the PCs a high starting Refresh to offset the fact they’ll be taking lots of Stunts.

Suggested Paths (or Realms) for this would be Body (or Life), Chance (or Fate, etc.), Crossroads (or Space), Energy, Magic, Matter, Mind, Spirit, Undead (or Death). Of course this pulls from both GURPS Ritual Path Magic and White Wolf’s Mage the Awakening for ideas. If you’d prefer to make your own list, or rename the existing list, then that’s certainly reasonable.

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by Raekai

Let's try this again. Changed some descriptions to make some things seem more flexible. Changed some numbers to alter scopes, make some things a bit easier, and to make some other things a little harder. I tried to underline most (if not all) of the important changes.



I'm also not too worried about having a sympathetic link, but I think that's just personal taste. I like the idea, but it's not necessary for my setting. As for measuring it in actions, the problem is that a ritual will then always take a specific amount of "time" as actions. You wouldn't ever get "faster" with rituals.

If you say that succeeding with style counts extra toward the number of actions needed, you would. And remember that fails would slow your progress, unless you choose to pay a Serious Cost (p. 132) for each to have it count as a success.

The sympathetic link thing is there to provide some sort of control against the possibility of someone sitting in a secluded location, lurking on the Internet to choose a victim, and casting a Death Note ritual that the victim can't possibly see coming or defend against — though even in Death Note, the mass murderer in question at least needed to get his victim's name (which would be a Sympathetic Link).

[dataweaver]

The bit about Paths is something I was thinking of, too. My solution would be to have a ritualist (i.e., a character with an Aspect that grants access to RPM) get an extra “Skill Pyramid” to be filled exclusively by Path Skills, with its apex capped by your Lore skill from your primary skill pyramid. Given that there are only nine Paths (ten, if you include Nonexistence), the usual Pyramid has too many slots; so I'd go with a narrower Path Pyramid:

• one Path at your Lore rating
• one Path a step down from your Lore rating
• two Paths two steps down from your Lore rating
• two Paths three steps down from your Lore rating
• three Paths four steps down from your Lore rating

Stop just before you get to Mediocre (+0) proficiency.

You wouldn't use Lore to perform RPM; you'd use the appropriate Paths. As such, I'd revert Lore to its standard definition in Fate Core.