[Magic] Spells as Skills done Properly

[Celjabba]

Remember the -1 to skill per spell maintened.. buffing a whole party with 9+ single target spells would require astronomics skills levels !

[weby]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

Remember the -1 to skill per spell maintened.. buffing a whole party with 9+ spells would require astronomics skills levels !

Yes, that is indeed a bit excessive I agree, but if you have that skill 20+ needed to have no cost to maintain the spells, then something like missile shield and body of water from one to all 4 in a group, then haste 2+blur 2 from second mage to all 4 or something like that..

Just the body of water is 170+ points(specially taking only 1 point of damage from most attacks), defect missiles is technically unlimited points(and is kind of that against many enemies..., haste two and blur 2 are technically quite low points but getting +2 move and dodge and +1 effective from the lower deceptive attack caused by the skill loss of 2 on attacker are both.. big help in not getting hit.

And at that skill level 25 when you get reduction 3 every mage can easily have 3 spells each on all 4 people..

and so on...

We found that when caster skills got to be close to 40 the number got way too high...

[Bruno]

... caster skills of 40 really should produce amazing effects. That's a lot of points, no matter how they got there (raw skill, Magery, IQ, all of the above).

[GodBeastX]

I don't really like any of the modifications proposed. I think having giant skill should be a thing. I already feel GURPS magic is tame compared to other systems, just a few spells themselves are broken. If you have a problem with high levels, are you giving out more magery to players than the suggested caps? Dungeon Fantasy I believe says cap them at 6 magery. So they are either buying IQ after that or buying up skill, there's nothing else.

If the buffing is a problem, I would go with something that would simply deal with buffing and not alter the entire magic system.

Critical Failure is worse by the number of spells you have on. Perhaps with more permanent effects that might even become death.

Then it becomes like threshold magic, except with threshold of spells.

Done.

Then you can smile as your mages start picking and choosing buffs, and are otherwise not impeded.

[Rindis]

Originally Posted by Kalzazz

Quick question before I can try to contribute to much more . . . . why are we interested in stopping buffing?

Ask this: What makes buffing interesting?

If the party mage is putting, say, a half-dozen buffs on every single person in the party for free, than it's nothing more than an accounting exercise. One person pays the points for the spells, and everyone else gets the effects of the buffs. That doesn't equate to team-making to me, that equates to 'here's our buff machine'.

Now, the -1 skill per maintained spell idea puts a tactical non-character point cost on the entire concept. I would expect the mage (at most moderate point totals) to still do a few important buffs. Deciding which ones are important, who their important for, and if they're more important than improved combat spell-casting ability for this encounter could add up to interesting decisions.

[Leynok]

I had always thought about making Magery only affect one College by default. That gives it more than 12 skills (I think, just working from memory here, haven't ever actually sat down and counted them), but they are all matched by a common theme, which I think makes more sense than just "12 random spells that I want to be good in".