GURPS Magic: Plant Spells

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by nanoboy

I could see some books on groups of colleges working. Plant Magic probably deserved its own book, since that college was a bit thin to begin with. I suppose one could make combinations like Elemental Magic (includes Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and Weather), Magical Magic (Meta-Magic, Enchanting, and Gate), Corporal Magic (Animal, Body Control, and Necromancy), or Spiritual Magic (Communication and Empathy and Mind Control). A book for each college would be somewhat over-the-top, since a lot of the colleges are already reasonably fleshed out.

In case anyone is interested, no. spells by college:

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.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

The risk of such books is they can so inflate the abilities of wizard characters that the game becomes uninvolving to non-wizard types, requiring equivalent upgrades for them.

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.

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Bruno

At least in the case of Plant magic: only in the sense that if the wizards have more points than the mundanes - dragging the plant specialists up nearer to the level of the (for example) fire specialists is hardly going to impact non mage PCs. If you're worried about wizards killing you off, the fact that one is killing you with fire and the other is killing you with leaves is really more of a flavor point.

Non-Wizard types get the lions share of attention in traditional SJG books. Martial Arts, Low Tech and associates, Fantasy Tech, endless little martial arts style and gear articles in Pyramid or in setting material - and overall the strong and coherent editorial vision for the system has always prevented "Creeping featuritis" or "Splatbookism" (Hi Kromm, Hi Rev).

The "Incident of the Psionics System" in earlier editions wasn't particularly splatbookism - that particular mechanical problem started right out of the gates with a case of bad math, and predates the current editorial system to boot.

Not what I meant. It's the "New Stuff" Syndrome, new goodies designed with ways to tweak the system in mind. Tweak as in better damae ranges, etc. 23 more colleges, @ 35 or so per book, another 800 spells with 800 spell descriptions that might have loopholoes in them that allow creative players ways to exploit them the GM isn't prepped for.

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.

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Kromm

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.

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.

[Harald387]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

Not what I meant. It's the "New Stuff" Syndrome, new goodies designed with ways to tweak the system in mind. Tweak as in better damae ranges, etc. 23 more colleges, @ 35 or so per book, another 800 spells with 800 spell descriptions that might have loopholoes in them that allow creative players ways to exploit them the GM isn't prepped for.

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.

I can say that one of the big concerns during the playtest was comparing the proposed spells in Plant Magic to existing spells, in terms of energy costs, effectiveness, and damage types. If anything, I recall most of the original proposals being quite underpowered compared to existing competitors in other colleges.

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.

[RobKamm]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

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.

That last observation is kind of the point, 4e has an overriding editorial hand that 3e lacked. Concerns about what happened with Grimoire are not really applicable to GURPS today. Although it could be wished that Magic itself had benefited from more of that editorial attention.

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.

[SimonAce]

Haven't bought it. Love the idea . Will buy it. Think more "college" books would probably sell well and are a great idea.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Harald387

I can say that one of the big concerns during the playtest was comparing the proposed spells in Plant Magic to existing spells, in terms of energy costs, effectiveness, and damage types. If anything, I recall most of the original proposals being quite underpowered compared to existing competitors in other colleges.

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.

Yeah I'm with H here, we playtested the crap out of that book, it was actually one of the longer ones I've been involved with, and I've been involved with a few. I know it was constantly bandied about in email "How does this compare?" "Anyone see anything wonky?" etc. And I used just about every spell in my then campaign which involved PC's who were almost completely magic-users. The few odd bits I came across I noted and that was that.

:) 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

[Voren]

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.

[Lord Herman]

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.