11-03-2010, 12:28 PM | #21 | |
"Gimme 18 minutes . . ."
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Albuquerque, NM
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
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Air: 49 Animal: 60 Body: 62 Communication: 35 Earth: 31 Enchantment: 59 Fire: 32 Food: 24 Gate: 30 Healing: 40 Illusion: 21 Knowledge: 51 Light and Darkness: 32 Making and Breaking: 35 Meta-spell: 41 Mind Control: 58 Movement: 47 Necromancy: 43 Plant: 32 Protection: 41 Sound: 27 Technology: 48 Water: 67 Weather: 31 So the front runners (at least by lowest number of spells in each college) would be food, illusion, and sound. However, note that the Plant college had the more spells in it than Earth, while Water has more than Earth and Plant combined. I'm not convinced number of spells is really a good indicator of which colleges should get their own book. Anywho, I picked this up because I thought it would be a good fit for a possible druid character in mark langsdorf's DF game, and I wanted to make a crushroom fungi druid in my own game. I thought it was pretty good, but would prefer a few more templates for summonable stuff (body of fungi, body of wood, etc in addition to body of leaves) and as an easy way to make treants, shambling mounds, crushroom relatives, etc. That said, I'd probably be interested in more supplements for other colleges. There's a lot of technomancer spells that didn't get converted, IIRC, and I'd happily pay someone to do some work for me so I can just pick up GURPS Magic: Fire Spells for my pyromancer. I actually think this is one of the things I like most about this series, is it beefs up individual colleges to the point where single college specialists (who I'd like to build magical styles for) can JUST be a "plant mage" and still have a pretty darn wide variety of tricks in their preferred environment. |
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11-03-2010, 12:32 PM | #22 |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
We don't allow that. I know that sounds conceited, but . . . well, we just don't. Our books that add new abilities for characters interpolate between what's already there, adding more in-between options and detail. They don't extrapolate way off one end, leading to crazy and unbalanced power levels. More important, the abilities all cost points, so the more there are, the more points you need to be a completist. If anything, extra abilities encourage players to spread things out some and/or divvy up a large field into smaller specialties that prevent similar PC concepts from being the same. Neither especially inflates anybody's abilities.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
11-03-2010, 01:32 PM | #23 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
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GURPS gets away with this with guns more than many other games because it has this realism fetish and bases it's stats on the real world ones. Spells? Spells have no real world models.
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11-03-2010, 01:38 PM | #24 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
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You guys do a much better (and much appreciated) job of this than most other game designers, but things do slip through. Phantom as written in Grimoire allowed two movement spells added to Perfect Illusion to create a Dragon Illusion who could ignite inanimate objects with it's (illusory) breath. 4th edition took that example OUT of the description of the spell, but the fact is this feature of that spell did get past editing and into print.
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...().0...0() .../..........\ -/......O.....\- ...VVVVVVV ..^^^^^^^ A clock running two hours slow has the correct time zero times a day. |
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11-03-2010, 02:06 PM | #25 | |
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Ottawa, ON, CA
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
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I'm not really worried about "feature creep" with future entries (if there are to be any) in this line; that's why we get playtests, after all. |
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11-03-2010, 02:10 PM | #26 | |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Chicago
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
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To get back to the topic at hand though, what I particularly enjoy about M:PS is that, in addition to the spells there are Perks, Techniques, a meta-trait, and suggestions for tying in related advantages for plant mages. With that kind of detail books could be written for all of the existing colleges, even the ones with an abundance of spells. The only things that I would have added (to be fair neither occured to me until well after the playtest) are prereq counts (as noted above), notes and errata for controlling Plant spells from Magic that didn't get fixed in the original book, and some GMing notes ala DF2 and Action2 for using plants and plant spells (building off of the very useful material in M:PS's first chapter). Of course that would have pushed the page count, so maybe it is for the better. |
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11-03-2010, 05:25 PM | #27 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
Haven't bought it. Love the idea . Will buy it. Think more "college" books would probably sell well and are a great idea.
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11-03-2010, 06:00 PM | #28 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Portsmouth, VA, USA
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
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:) Like Kromm says though, SJGames doesnt really do power creep well. BTW it did turn out nice, my SO is already picking spells she wants to 'invent'. God save us all. Ghostdancer |
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11-03-2010, 08:30 PM | #29 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Ontario, Canada
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
Bought it. Like it.
In particular, I echo others who have said they appreciate the background notes re: different type of plants, and the discussion of relevant advantages, new perks, and so on. I also echo the desire for more creature templates for things like summoned help or shapeshifted forms.
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GM, to player: "Yes, acid can look like water." |
11-05-2010, 06:19 AM | #30 |
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: The Netherlands
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Re: GURPS Magic: Plant Spells
Love it! Now to think of an excuse to use a plant mage in my game...
I'd certainly be interested in more books like this. |
Tags |
magic, plant spells |
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