Unofficial GURPS 4.5e—or, your favorite post-Basic Set rules

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I will admit that neither myself not anyone playing while I ran were trying to break the system in actual play. We were all trying to have fun rather than be subversive and when we broke parts of the the system it was unintentional. I do try and break things while playtesting though.

Many of the problems areas currently exiting with Magic like the SM rule and the new Golem rules were inserted without much playtesting much less actual play experience.

However, for the sake of all that's holy share your experiences of when things broke down.

I had just sort of assumed you knew this stuff, based on the many, many discussions that have happened on the forums, but if you insist...

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

The balance of the spells in Magic are baaad. I end up with players coming to me wanting to make a wizard focused on the Gauntness spell when that's a horrible spell. It's a nice concept, but the rules for it don't allow it. And I know exactly what would happen if I allowed this concept to be finalized into a character sheet and then entered into play: "GURPS sucks." That's exactly what I would hear after the first combat. And then that person would be back to playing Dungeons & Dragons.

What is the point of that Gauntness spell? I don't understand why that's even in the there. Was there any kind of guessing made to balance that against the other spells? I honestly cannot fathom how that spell came to be. I would not be surprised if the person picking the energy cost and the casting time for it rolled a die. I'm not even joking. That would make more sense than someone deciding that Tickle is five energy, but Gauntness, which is so extremely powerful in comparison, has to cost even more than that. Oh, yeah, and for good measure go on and make it a Very Hard spell too. We sure dodged the bullet there on that one. Think of what a mess we'd have on our hands if Gauntness cost four fewer character points to get at skill 40 where you can cast it for free. I don't think anyone would want to live in that world.

It upsets me, because I've had that kind of thing happen. Ten or fifteen times now. Players look through Magic, assume there's some semblance of balance to these spells, pick some that look like fun, insist they be allowed to use those spells--because, hey, that's their character concept, right?--and then find out that, no, there's no balance in those spells. Not even the pretense.

Just look at the Necromancer spell list in DF: 1. It takes such classics as Wither Limb and Choke. Spells that you will regret trying to cast. There is no doubt about it. If you're a new player and you think you're going to have fun casting Wither Limb, then you're in for a very rude awakening.

Admittedly, I think I've only ever played in one game that used the Basic Set magic system. I was mostly frustrated with my wizard's ineffectiveness, whereas the party cleric's player had carefully studied Magic and realized that a single spell (See Secrets, if I recall correctly) would completely wreck a lot of standard challenges in dungeon crawling games.

But based on stories like ErhnamDJ's, I've generally felt pretty good about my decisions to usually default to other magic systems in my games. Thank PK for Ritual Path Magic. And Sorcery. And really everything he's ever written for GURPS, honestly.

[Michael Thayne]

Getting away from the tangent on GURPS: Magic: I'm thinking of maybe ruling that Vampiric Weapon halves weapon damage, with a -5 penalty eliminating this drawback. Thoughts?