Replacing FP costs to cast spells

[Inky]

Fairly trivial spells, such as Ignite Fire, ones that are mainly just a convenience but could be done without magic, will be rarely used - they're borderline worth it with the usual FP cost system, not worth it at all with this. Things like curing an otherwise-incurable disease or locating a treasure that you have no other clue to, on the other hand, would be used. Magic becomes extremely serious with this system, and casting a spell would probably be rarer and regarded with rather more awe than in a standard fantasy setting.

Steal Vitality is a game-changer. "Willing subjects or helpless subjects" is still quite a wide range, if you can plan ahead. If you used willing subjects, well, it's surprising what people will do if you pay them well enough. If the process was dramatic enough, I could imagine some young men, and young women for that matter, being quite keen to volunteer just for the excitement and bragging rights.

An adventuring party in a tight place and needing to resort to magic could share the cost if the mage was already in worse shape than the others and couldn't take the hit.

Helpless subjects raises nastier possibilities. The nations with the most magic would be the ones willing to resort to full-scale human sacrifices.

A king might have a captured spy bound hand and foot and her own life force used to cast the truth spell to question her with. Waste not, want not.

A particularly ruthless general might take prisoners only to tie them up for his mages to use as fuel.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Now, mages with Leech would likely have no major issues, but that is more vampire mages that human mages.

Or, in other words: the people of this setting look at mages funny because magic is best known as what vampires do!
The same would presumably go for any other monster with HP-stealing abilities or just stupid amounts of HP. They'd be the top magician races of this setting. Of course, a lot of those are traditionally not very bright monsters, like trolls. In that case you might see a magician, either a human or a monster of a different species, working in cahoots with a troll he's enslaved or befriended. Troll provides the energy, wizard provides the know-how to turn it into fireballs. It'd be a very big familiar, not what you'd call discreet, but them's the breaks.

[martinl]

Self harm and mortification in and out of religion is something that pops up repeatedly in the real world - peeps be weird yo. This is an interesting flavor choice to be sure, and you can spin a lot of fun setting quirks out of it, but it is RW practice.

My ideas for quirks:

1. Pain penalties could interfere with magic and experienced mages would have HPT.
2. Does the self harm have to be inflicted as part of casting the spell or is it inflicted by the casting of the spell itself? Both ways are interesting.
3. Folks will spend a lot of time coming up with ways to learn and practice magic without going all the way to mortification, if the other bits of magic mechanics make it at all possible.
4. I'd have spells that are reduced to exactly 0 FP cost still require a nick, spells reduced to -1 cost require some sort of small pain, and further .reductions effortless, just as a cool flavor thing. A skilled mage can light a brazier by poking their finger with a fin. An archmage can do it with a dirty look.
5. Some really cool and expensive spells could be cast at significant risk to the caster's life. There is drama there.
6. Some insane spells might be possible if the GM allows "overage" damage. Can a crazy or desperate person deliberately inflict HPx6 or HPx11 on themselves to power an ridiculous spell? More? "For this spell, you need a suicidal mage strapped to a nuclear warhead."
7. There is significant incentive for coerced mages here, which is always a fun fantasy trope.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I really do not see people learning magic under that system unless they are masochists of the highest level. Do not get me wrong, I am not objecting to replacing FP costs, I am not a fan of FP costs myself, I just think that a magical system that depends solely on personal HP will only be a curiosity.

I think it depends a lot on the spell, I could see "Stop Bleeding" as being worth 1 HP since you're not just preventing 1 HP loss but possibly a LOT if someone doesn't pass 3 consecutive HT rolls.

Minor Healing would be pointless for self-care, but could bridge you to learning Major Healing which is useful (spend 1 HP to cure 2 HP).

I think a lot of mages who start out useless would be motivated by seeing how the arch-mages eventually have it work out as a net-benefit to practice magic.

I do wonder how this would affect the idea of Slow-and-Sure Enchantment though... I think that seems to assume you're regularly restoring some FP and putting it into spellcasting, but if someone can't restore the enchantment energy source as fast (like with HP) then perhaps it would cause problems.

Quick-and-Dirty has always been the easier-to-understand form of Enchantment since it's almost like standard spellcasting where you just pay the entire price at the end.

slow-and-steady seems to only put in 1 FP per day (possibly more if using assistants, or Thaumatology's optional rule of Magery FP per day) yet M18's "Interruptions" box makes it seem more extreme, saying you'll be down 1d FP

I could see maybe something like (if we wanted minute-by-minute, or at least hour-by-hour) that we might consider S&S enchanting to cost something like 1d FP per hour, but you recover FP as if resting so even if you roll 6s each time, you have 6x10m standard intervals to get it back.

This probably can't be avoided by "Recover Energy" spell though since that requires too much focus: some amount of concentration compared to just "relaxation" as with enchantment.

Enchantment does seem to allow breaks though: you can sleep at night, after all. AFAIK the standard 8-hour day in gurps doesn't take into account the paid 30m lunch and 2 paid 15m breaks which are seen in a lot of jobs, so if you're actually taking those you'd need to be putting in 9 hours per day?

Given that you will always be missing at least 1 FP but never more than 6 FP, it could be something like giving the "Enchant" spell a 10m duration with 1 fp/minute maintenance, and then standard rest cancels this out?

The actual daily FP wouldn't come from you directly but instead via the "meditative magic" type formula.

[Whitewings]

Originally Posted by martinl

Self harm and mortification in and out of religion is something that pops up repeatedly in the real world - peeps be weird yo. This is an interesting flavor choice to be sure, and you can spin a lot of fun setting quirks out of it, but it is RW practice.

My ideas for quirks:

1. Does the self harm have to be inflicted as part of casting the spell or is it inflicted by the casting of the spell itself? Both ways are interesting.

It’s a side effect of casting.

[Whitewings]

Originally Posted by Plane

slow-and-steady seems to only put in 1 FP per day (possibly more if using assistants, or Thaumatology's optional rule of Magery FP per day) yet M18's "Interruptions" box makes it seem more extreme, saying you'll be down 1d FP

I tend to view that as simply the non-magical fatigue accrued from engaging in an activity that requires extremely intense concentration and some degree of physical effort for many hours.

[DangerousThing]

If I were to power spells by HP rather than other points, I'm thinking that I would use the following rules for it.

1. The damage would be caused by the magic, and be a withering type.
2. This damage would be extremely painful.
3. It could not be fixed by anything except normal healing. I'm still thinking about regeneration.

Even with that, I could picture some people using magic.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Plane

slow-and-steady seems to only put in 1 FP per day (possibly more if using assistants, or Thaumatology's optional rule of Magery FP per day) yet M18's "Interruptions" box makes it seem more extreme, saying you'll be down 1d FP

I could see maybe something like (if we wanted minute-by-minute, or at least hour-by-hour) that we might consider S&S enchanting to cost something like 1d FP per hour, but you recover FP as if resting so even if you roll 6s each time, you have 6x10m standard intervals to get it back.

More likely, S&S 'puts in' one energy per day, but is quite inefficient, so the casters spend rather more over the course of each day. I doubt it's a random cost, probably more like 1FP/10min for an hour, followed by a rest period, repeat all day. The -1d6FP if interrupted simply reflect that we don't know exactly when in the cycle the caster was interrupted.

If this is the case, S&S enchanting is out for HP burning mages unless they can find (many) other sources of hit points as they'll probably need a human-sized sacrifice per day.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Plane

slow-and-steady seems to only put in 1 FP per day (possibly more if using assistants, or Thaumatology's optional rule of Magery FP per day) yet M18's "Interruptions" box makes it seem more extreme, saying you'll be down 1d FP

For Quick and Dirty, you're able to put all the energy into the item in one go. For Slow and Steady, you have to build up the energy slowly, but this may well mean putting quite a bit in for each point that actually "sticks." Optionally, you could think of the latter as involving the character pumping 6 FP into the item over the course of an hour (so 1 FP every 10 minutes), then resting for an hour, then pumping 6 FP into the item over the course of an hour, and so forth, for 8 hours. That works out to 24 FP invested per day for every 1 energy. Note this interpretation could allow for faster S&S enchanting for some characters - Recover Energy lets you spend less time resting, while Energy Reserve and Regeneration (FP) could let you spend the full 8 hours investing energy, halving the time needed (and if it's possible to invest at a rate faster than 1 FP per 10 minutes, would let you do more than just halve the time.

If using the above interpretation, S&S enchantment is pretty much impossible unless your mage has Fast Regeneration or better (or Regular Regeneration and 60+ HP, but that's not very likely), at which point the character could invest around 480 HP into the item over the course of 8 hours, which works out to around 20 energy per day; a character with Very Fast Regeneration could invest up to 28,800 HP (1,200 energy), while a character with Extreme Regeneration could invest up to 1,728,000 HP (72,000 energy). The first risks breaking the game; the latter two are more-or-less guaranteed to, so this interpretation is probably a bad idea (and note the same could apply with Regeneration (FP) under the normal system).

I'd say stick with the 1d FP down if interrupted, to represent effort. For the damage, I'd be inclined to have the enchanters suffer something like Moderate Pain in any scene where they've been interrupted, and have the process inflict 1d HP injury on them spread evenly over the course of a week (which you could instead do as a 50% chance of 1 HP every day; note a character with HT 10 would therefore be able to typically maintain this indefinitely). Optionally, you might allow characters to invest more each day, in exchange for greater damage and/or a greater chance of taking damage (multiply average damage per day by 2 to find energy invested).

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Rupert

probably more like 1FP/10min for an hour, followed by a rest period, repeat all day.

Seems like we could then have options for mages to mags with more FP to avoid the rest period to get it done faster but be even more depleted/vulnerable

Originally Posted by Rupert

The -1d6FP if interrupted simply reflect that we don't know exactly when in the cycle the caster was interrupted.

One weird thing about simply applying this is that if you were an enchanted with an FP of less than 6, applying a lump sum of 6 FP could actually have you lose HP.

Originally Posted by Varyon

you could think of the latter as involving the character pumping 6 FP into the item over the course of an hour (so 1 FP every 10 minutes), then resting for an hour, then pumping 6 FP into the item over the course of an hour, and so forth, for 8 hours.

I guess the question is what stops you from doing 10on/10off to make sure you're only ever down a max of 1 FP, instead of 60on/60off.

If 60on/60off is required then <6 FP mages are going to be suffering HP on an hourly basis.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Plane

I guess the question is what stops you from doing 10on/10off to make sure you're only ever down a max of 1 FP, instead of 60on/60off.

I would say that there's a set-up and put-down time cost that when you work in hour long units can be ignored, but when you're picking up the job for only 10 minutes at a time starts really eating into productivity.

As for why you stop at 6FP - for the average person with 10FP, -6FP is just above the 'less than 1/3rd FP' point where you are at 1/2 move and dodge. Thus it's just before the point where your average enchanter starts feeling completely wiped out. That's a good place to stop and recover.

Thus for most people 6FP per session is the sweet spot between keeping start and stop losses to a minimum and not completely exhausting yourself meet.