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Old 03-13-2014, 12:42 AM   #1
Grouchy Chris
 
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Default [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

One of the PCs in my game has knows Seeker, but not the prerequisite two Seek spells. (Seeker was acquired with Wild Talent.) The player was lamenting that learning the prereqs doesn't look like the best use of points, because Seek spells are of such limited use.

So I'm trying to think of ways to use Seek spells besides the obvious "I need some X, so I will cast Seek X." The Seek spells from GURPS Magic are:

Seek Air
Seek Coastline
Seek Earth
Seek Fire
Seek Food
Seek Fuel/TL
Seek Gate
Seek Machine/TL
Seek Magic
Seek Pass
Seek Plant
Seek Plastic
Seek Power/TL
Seek Radiation
Seek Water

GURPS Underground Adventures describes Seek Landform. I don't know of any other supplements that introduce new Seek spells.

So what can you do with these? Many of them allow the caster to specify a particular type of target. This could be useful for keeping track of people. If each member of the party carries something not likely to be otherwise found in the area, then a Seek spell can help find party members in the event that they get separated from the group. If the thief goes missing, just cast Seek Earth, and say that you're looking for "borax, not including any carried by the people present here." That will probably find you your thief, or, failing that, your thief's remains.

This can also work to tail someone. Plant some borax on your mark, and Seek Earth will help you track them down later.

The same approach lets you leave waypoints behind while navigating a complex path, though you might need several different substances in order to keep your waypoints straight. This approach is also vulnerable to tampering, if you're careless about how you mark your waypoints.

That's for cases where you've made contact with someone or something. Seek Earth, Fire, Food, Fuel, Machine, Magic, Power, and Water are good for detecting enemies that you haven't otherwise caught wind of yet, in the right environments.

Seek Coastline and Seek Pass are good for navigation, even if you're not going to that particular coastline or pass. If you can get a bearing and distance to a known point on a map, you know your location. Seek Landform is even more versatile than Seek Pass, but unfortunately, neither spell allows you to specify known targets to ignore.

What else are Seek spells good for?
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Old 03-13-2014, 01:12 AM   #2
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Default Re: [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

you can add Seek Ley Line from Thaumatology: Urban Magic to the list.
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Old 03-13-2014, 01:29 AM   #3
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Default Re: [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

Seek Magic is quite powerful. I’m not sure why anyone would think that’s a waste. If, say, you sense an active magic spell somewhere, it tells you something about who might be at that location. Likewise if you sense a magic item or maybe a demon somewhere. It’s generally better to know ahead of time that a demon is down in the basement than it is to just stumble into it.
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Old 03-13-2014, 02:00 AM   #4
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Default Re: [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

Seek Earth is notoriously used as 'Seek Gold', which is pretty useful. Seek Air has some utility for seeking out underground caves, if you assume the caster can reasonably exclude 'everything above ground'.
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Old 03-13-2014, 04:25 AM   #5
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Default Re: [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

I had a player attempt to abuse 3e Seek food into seek anything by restricting it to species with a very specific diet...

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Old 03-13-2014, 08:51 PM   #6
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Default Re: [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

This depends upon whether or not you as GM would allow this, but Seek Water as a spell can be useful, in conjunction with a map, for triangulating one's position. Why?

If you knew for example, that one lake contained fresh water in excess of 5 million gallons, another lake that contained 500 billion gallons, etc - you could generally try to find one's bearings knowing the general volumes of bodies of water in your general neighborhood. Why this is "iffy" and up to the GM, is because the key phrase of
"Any known sources of water may be excluded if the caster specifically mentions them before beginning."

How do you specifically exclude any given water source is the key operative issue. If you can specify to ignore the water in your friend's canteen 10 feet away from you, that is "knowing" a specific bit of water exists and you can ignore that when casting the spell. On the other hand, if you know a particular lake has 100 million gallons of fresh water in it, can you exclude all water under 99 million gallons as part of the spell casting criteria - or do you actively have to know precisely where that body of water is relative to you, to exclude it?

But - if you did allow it, a mage armed with the knowledge of three bodies of water of immense size - can probably get a good fix on his location relative to those bodies of water by use of math and a map.

What is even more fun with this spell, is that it can indirectly become a measuring spell of sorts. "Ignore all bodies of water under 1 million gallons of water, what is the direction of the nearest body of water?" would be one way to find out just how much water is really in that lake that you're only 5 feet away from.
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Old 03-13-2014, 11:43 PM   #7
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Default Re: [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

Quote:
Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris View Post
If the thief goes missing, just cast Seek Earth, and say that you're looking for "borax, not including any carried by the people present here." That will probably find you your thief, or, failing that, your thief's remains.
Or if the GM is feeling evil, the nearest smithy. Borax is a flux.
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Old 03-16-2014, 09:21 AM   #8
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Default Re: [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

Quote:
Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris View Post
Many of them allow the caster to specify a particular type of target.
I have looked through their descriptions and only about half of them are worded to allow to seek only a particular type of the thing in question (or exclude particular types):
The descriptions of
Seek Air (in certain settings with probably high TL only),
Seek Fire,
Seek Fuel/TL,
Seek Machine/TL,
Seek Plant,
Seek Plastic,
Seek Power/TL and
Seek Radiation
mention it.

Seek Earth at least specifies to allow some choice, but to me "any one type of" sounds as if you only have the three choices "earth", "metal" and "stone" and can't specify further and choose a subcategory of any of them, for instance gold as a subcategory of metal.

Seek Gate has an explicit rule for seeking a gate leading to a specific destination, this incurs a whopping -10 penalty (which seems appropriate to me).

The other Seek Spells from Magic, which are
Seek Coastline,
Seek Food,
Seek Magic,
Seek Path and
Seek Water
don't say anything about allowing to only look for a particular type or exclude particular types (if the caster doesn't already know where they are).
To me it doesn't really look like these are unintended omissions, I'd say that the rules as written are intended like this. (Or does anyone know of a different ruling by The Powers That Be?)
The RAW thus don't seem to allow you to use Seek Earth to search for gold, the stuff your thief has in his pocket or specific waypoints or to use Seek Magic specifically for Demons or to use Seek Water to only search for bodies of water of a certain size.
The description of Seek Food seems to particularly support the intention to not allow it, otherwise it probably wouldn't imply that only known sources of insects may be excluded.

I can also see good game-balance reasons for not allowing specification with some of the latter spells:

Seek Gold would allow the PCs to amass wealth pretty effortlessly if they put their mind to it and would also make it implausible why certain types of metals are scarce in the game world at all. Seek Earth is the most basic spell of the Earth college and doesn't have any prerequisites, so many NPCs would realistically know it. So most sources of precious metals would realistically have been found by them, meaning they probably shouldn't even be precious because they aren't very scarce. Unless your game world doesn't have much of it at all, but that at least wouldn't be our Earth then.
Seek Specific Metal would also seem to include Identify Metal, although Seek Earth doesn't have Identify Metal as a prerequisite (but instead vice versa).

Seek Particular Magic would seem very powerful to me, at least in common magic settings. It would also effectively include abilities close enough to Identify Magic and Analyse Magic although both spells are not a prerequisite for Seek Magic.

[In contrast to my argument that the fact that Seek Earth doesn't have Identify Metal as a prerequisite and Seek Magic doesn't have Identify Magic as a prerequisite is an indicator that it makes sense that these Seek versions can't search for particular types, Seek Plant and Seek Plastic can specifically search for particular types and don't have Identify Plant respectively Identify Plastic as a prerequisite, either.]

On the other hand, Seek Particular Food wouldn't look unbalanced to me at first glance.
I am not quite sure about Seek Particular Coastline, Seek Particular Pass and Seek Particular Water.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris View Post
One of the PCs in my game has knows Seeker, but not the prerequisite two Seek spells. (Seeker was acquired with Wild Talent.) The player was lamenting that learning the prereqs doesn't look like the best use of points, because Seek spells are of such limited use.
It may be true that some Seek spells are of limited use most of the time. However, the standard GURPS Magic system is balanced in a way that the basic spells of a college are often not that useful, but you need them as prerequisites for the more powerful spells which would be overpowered if you could get them for just 1 CP without any prerequisites. So if your PC wants more powerful Earth spells, the CP for Seek Earth is part of the price.
Remember that according to the description of Wild Talent with the Retention enhancement on p. B99, the PC's skill for the Seeker spell he learned with it is at -4 permanently unless he has all of its prerequisites including the two Seek spells. Have you played it this way? It seems to create a sizeable incentive for your CP to learn two Seek spells even if the thinks he can't make that much use of them.

Besides, some of the Seek spells seem powerful enough to me in their own right, particularly Seek Magic (as Critical already mentioned, although I think he can't use it to know that a demon is down in the basement, just to know that there is magic down in the basement).

Seek Plant (which explicitly allows to seek specific plant types) can be very useful when looking for particularly valuable plants, which heal, poison enemies or are magical. The reclusive wizard hires your party to get him those plant ingredients he needs for his spells and potions? Much easier with Seek Plant!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Seek Air has some utility for seeking out underground caves, if you assume the caster can reasonably exclude 'everything above ground'.
Seems fair to me as a "known source of air", I'd definitely allow that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Celjabba View Post
I had a player attempt to abuse 3e Seek food into seek anything by restricting it to species with a very specific diet...
How is being able to deduce the whereabouts of members of a species with a very specific diet close to Seek Anything? Doesn't seem particularly abusive to me, seems like a (positively) ingenious use of Seek Food. Although I probably still wouldn't allow it because Seek Food is among the spells that don't mention that it can look for particular types (of food).
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Old 03-16-2014, 10:01 AM   #9
Peter V. Dell'Orto
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Default Re: [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

My players extensively use Seek Earth to find treasure (seek gold, with exclusions for carried stuff, seek silver, seek emerald, etc.) It's the reason I need to use my spatial skills to know where every treasure in a radius around the group is in my megadungeon.

In the past, they used Seek Magic a lot, and they still use it occasionally in my current game.

In any case, lacking the prereqs enforces a permanent penalty to Seeker that costs more to buy off than getting two Seek spells costs. Buying off that -4 will cost 16 points on Seeker, or 2 points in other spells. It's a bargain even if you only cast the two Seek spells once each ever and use Seeker a lot. My players have a guy with Wild Talent w/Retention and he spends a lot of time back-filling prereqs to get rid of those penalties. It's worth it.
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Old 03-16-2014, 11:03 AM   #10
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Default Re: [Magic] Clever uses for Seek spells

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nikolai View Post
How is being able to deduce the whereabouts of members of a species with a very specific diet close to Seek Anything? Doesn't seem particularly abusive to me, seems like a (positively) ingenious use of Seek Food. Although I probably still wouldn't allow it because Seek Food is among the spells that don't mention that it can look for particular types (of food).
I think the trick is to "seek food for manavore", "seek food for aurumvore", etc. which also should not work unless the mage shapeshifts into the appropriate creature (also probably requiring (crypto)zoology or hidden lore rolls).

Quote:
Seek Air (in certain settings with probably high TL only)
Or if you know it at high level and are under water or in a caved in mine, but for some reason don't know create air or breathe water.

Quote:
Seek Earth at least specifies to allow some choice, but to me "any one type of" sounds as if you only have the three choices "earth", "metal" and "stone" and can't specify further and choose a subcategory of any of them, for instance gold as a subcategory of metal.
breaking down the sentence fragment "any one type of earth, metal, or stone." reveals that earth, metal, and stone are not the options for type selection, but instead the set containers. If they were intended to be the options for type, the phrase would have been "any one type of: earth, metal, or stone." The colon makes all the difference. Without the colon, the sentence can be rephrased as three separate sentences:
"... any one type of earth."
"... any one type of metal."
"... any one type of stone."

Last edited by Culture20; 03-16-2014 at 11:15 AM.
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