Ritual Magic vs. Spell based magic in DF boxed set

[Michael Lewis]

Which do you prefer? Regular spelled based magic as in the Dungeon Fantasy boxed set or Ritual Magic?

I've been trying to wrap my head around the Ritual magic system in Thaumatology. It seems to work better if you had a larger number of spells to work from. I can't decide which would be better for Sword and Sorcery, grim and gritty campaign set in a Lankhmar style setting.

I have no experience using the magic system in GURPS.

[finn]

If you are using the DFRPG boxed set, I will recommend using the standard spell based magic system as described in DFRPG.

A major advantage of the DFRPG is that everything is worked out. None of the Templates for DFRPG expect that you would use the Ritual Magic system described in p242 of GURPS Basic or p72 of GURPS Thaumatology. This will require quite a bit of fiddling, including calculating the prerequisite count (which would be different from GURPS), so I will advise against it.

Also, adding Ritual Magic would mean adding GURPS material to DFRPG, which is actually out of the scope of this forum. If you really are intrigued by Ritual Magic and want to know its merits, I suggest you start a new thread at the GURPS forum.

[ArchonShiva]

Magic in GURPS scales ridiculously hard with how much the player knows the Magic rules and how much they’ve been able to tweak their character.

Ritual Magic amplifies this further.

Wizards are the most powerful template by about an order of magnitude, at the very least as a force multiplier. Giving them more tools which encourage further breadth of ability will make other templates increasingly irrelevant except as boosted puppets.

Generally speaking, DFRPG is pretty solid as a self-contained system. If you’re going to tack on stuff, I suggest small things like Thief power-ups, not overhauling the Magic System.