[RPM] Questions
 

I really like Ritual Path Magic. After years of playing with it only being a theory, I am now both playing in and GMing campaigns that use it. So I'm really happy about that right now. A few questions/ideas have arisen as a result of working with it for real...

Spell Wards:
It says in the book RPM24 that Spell Wards require a Lesser Control Magic affect but nothing else, yet later in the paragraph it goes on to describe rules that have other path skills being used. Overall, I find that section to be short and vague and would really like clarification and ideas as to what it means.

Divinations:
I think it should be official that yes/no questions don't work with this. It's kind of implied in the criteria to be counter to the spirit of the rule. The penalty is based on "total number of possible answers" and that could even be a more atrocious abuse than the 4 digit PIN given as an example.

Greater Sense Mind:
I've got a point coming up in the game I'm running where this will be a very important contest between a PC and an NPC with comparable (very high)Path of Mind vs Will scores. (PC is going to be using magic to get all the info he can) I want to say that we go by the rules given for the Advantages of Mind Reading and Mind Probe when running this encounter. Such specifics are not given in the RPM book (One question per Quick Contest for Mind Probe, just for example) I'm the GM so what I say goes, of course, but does that seem fair?

Hit Location:
Seems to me that for spells that do internal damage, there should be a modifier for targeting a specific body part. (Like the eye or the leg). Thoughts?

Resistance:
Is there really no modifier to make a spell harder to resist?

I will most likely come up with more thoughts about this later but that's what I have for now.

Thanks

Re: [RPM] Questions
 

I just reread that paragraph and I don't see what you mean. A spell ward always uses Lesser Control Magic. The only "other Path skills" involved are the ones that the hostile mage must roll against. If it seems to say something else, can you provide a specific quote and how you're interpreting it?

The GM has final say on how to use this, but always look at the question the person is actually asking. As the rules say, you can't divine a question one bit at a time, so a "yes/no" that's really part of a larger question should be interpreted as actually asking the larger question.

Sure. You'll rarely go wrong looking to GURPS advantages for specifics when interpreting how an RPM spell should work.

Canonically, you need the +20% "Selective Effect" enhancement (from GURPS Power-Ups 4: Enhancements) to target hit locations with internal damage. So I'd charge +4 energy and apply normal hit location modifiers.

Nope, because that would be targeting a person with a hostile effect before he'd actually resisted the spell. If you want your spell to be harder to resist, buy your Path skill up.

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Personally, I prefer to have the Hit Location Penalty instead serve as a bonus to the target's resistance - that way, it's more likely to cause the spell to actually fail rather than just get the "try again next round" result until you pull it off.

I've seen a lot of spells built with Bestows a Penalty for this effect. It's never really sat quite right with me - is it correct that this usage of Bestows a Penalty is illegal in RPM?

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I consider it so, yes. Look at the spell Sorcerous Mark for an example of a fair approach -- if that spell succeeds, the victim has a penalty to resist further of your spells.

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"The ward's creator uses the Path skill and modifiers that were used to cast the ward."

If by Path Skill it means Path of Magic Skill since that's the path used to cast wards then fine.

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Works for me. To the OP, I should note that while it certainly seems like you should be able to pump more energy into a spell to make it harder to resist (the tradeoff being that you need to make larger sacrifices, spend more time, and so forth), actually allowing this will allow the character to double-dip in terms of high skill, as high skill both means a higher resistance penalty and more available energy to safely gather.

If you want to make things nice and complicated, one option would be to figure out which skill level the gathered energy corresponds to (use something like "exceeds 2x Safe Threshold"), then average your actual skill with this to determine the penalty (round toward your skill level). So, let's use a Skill 16 mage. With a 12 energy spell, the spell's "skill level" is 11, so use Skill 14 (13.5, rounded toward actual skill, for 14). With a 200 energy spell, the spell's Skill Level is 23, so use Skill 19. In either case, this doesn't make the spell any more or less likely to be successfully cast - the effective skill is only for purposes of determining the penalty (so it can result in a bonus - for example, if the mage rolls a 16 with that 12-energy spell, he still casts it successfully, but the target resists at +2).

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Well, possibly. There's no reason a ward can't be a small part of a larger spell! If someone uses Path of Magic, Path of Spirit, and Path of Undead to make a ward vs. almost everything, then he uses the effective Path skill for the spell as a whole (in this case, the lowest of the three, at -1).

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So you mean apply the hit location penalty to the caster's Path Skill? (or bonus to resist like the other guy suggested) Seems to me that there should be a way to build it into the spell. Extra energy that is based on the size of the penalty somehow.

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How about an effect using Bestow a Bonus (p17)? If it was just to offset the location penalty I would class that as "narrow", personally.

I would probably require a Lesser Sense Body effect to incorporate it into a spell.

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That seems pretty plasuble for that specific effect. I could go with that.

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Seconded. Though I wouldn't make someone pay for Selective Effect (4) and Lesser Sense Body (2). That's redundant; do one or the other. (Note that while using LSB seems like the better deal, it also may be adding another Path to the spell, which makes it potentially harder to cast.)

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So it's like "yeah you can target the victem's eye for another 258 points. Maybe you're better off with external damage or inducing blindness instead. ".

That actually works for me. Thanks!

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Tacking on Blindness for +10 base energy and quadrupling damage (to account for a brain hit) is likely going to be significantly cheaper, yeah. You may need to tack on a Destroy Body effect, but that's up the GM - Fireball To The Face! can probably get away with just Greater Create Energy, for example.

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So you guys know I wrote a web app for calculating the cost of RPM rituals.

I'm currently adding some automated tests on the app, and how I verify that the app is working correctly is to directly copy a ritual from Chapter 4 "The Grimoire" from GURPS Thaumatology: Ritual Path Magic and compare the output of my app against the actual text from that book.

In doing so, I'm finding some differences! In some cases these are actually typos in the text; others may be a difference between my algorithms and how the author calculated the ritual.

I'm going to add some posts on specific questions about the cost calculations below to get everyone's feedback.

Does SJG want a list of the things that look like typos?

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Here's the first one I have a question on:

The app returns a cost of 31, not 30. DR6 costs 30 points; there are a total of +0% in enhancements (+20 and -20).

The app uses this rule from GT: RPM p. 17:

So the app calculates the additional cost for the enhancements - 0 points - and based on this rule adds 1.

Which is correct?

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PK can obviously give a better answer than me, but that quote specifically applies to adding enhancements to damage, not Altered Traits, which states:

Here, you just sort out the cost of the trait you are adding, and if it is positive, it costs 1 energy per CP, if it's negative, it costs 1 energy per -5 CP, minimum 1.

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I read that as the base cost of an Altered Trait - and there are few examples of Altered Traits with enhancements. But the costs would work out if the intention is to figure the cost of the Altered Trait, adjust for enhancements, and then take +1 per 1 CP (if positive) or +1 per -5 CP (if negative).

PK, any comments on this?

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The spell is correct. The app is incorrect. The enhancement is being added to the advantage and then the advantage is being added via Altered Traits. In just about every case enhancements can only be added when adding Damage.

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Resistance with HT vs Will:

The book just broadly states that "every potential subject who is not a willing participant resists with a Quick Contest using the better of his HT or Will"

Does this really make sense considering most spells are either mental or physical in their effects? I just had a player take considerable issue with this and, when it comes right down to it, I kind of agree with him. Is there anything I'm missing if I rule that mental spells are resisted by Will and physical spells are resisted by HT?


Quick and Dirty

I think the whole idea of a process like Quick and Dirty Charms is a very good one. I'm thinking of using it not just for charms but any "big" spell that would mean a lot of die rolls to accumulate energy.

The real problem that I have with it is that it's hard to teach players. That's because it's so counter intuitive. For the first roll, the pluses are essentially negatives...ok...but then for the 2nd roll it's reversed.

I understand that it's a method to simulate odds but I don't really get why something more simple and game friendly couldn't be thought up. Any explanation or thoughts are welcome!

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You could, but you'd need to classify every spell you plan on using as either mental or physical and that's just a PITA. You could add +10% to final energy to choose a specific effect using my rules for Repurcussive Rituals - but you must be careful with that.

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Oh hm, I'd been doing it wrong. I thought it was "HT or Will depending on what the GM feels it should be."

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Not really, as long as you're consistent. Just expect some arguments from players if they come up against a foe with especially lopsided stats; e.g., if a bad guy has high Will, low HT, and you rule that this is a mental spell.

Interestingly, my original rule was just that: the signs stayed the same for both rolls, and on the first roll, your spell critically failed on a low roll instead of a high one.

The playtesters overwhelmingly hated it, because they felt that it wasn't "GURPSy" to have a spell fail on a low roll. So I changed it to make it more intuitive. Ironic, eh? :)

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Cool. I think that most players understand and accept the challenge of beating enemies by targeting their weaknesses. This is something that becomes a lot harder if either HT or Will are just as good at countering ALL spells. Of course, it also makes the players vulnerable too! Again, I think that's a factor they can accept as long as the rules are made clear.


But in that Quick and Dirty method, it's the first roll that's not GURPSy. The vast majority of rolls made for the game are to roll underneath a target skill number and if a task is harder, the skill number goes down. But with this, the modifier is on the dice, not the target number. I don't get why this is necessary.

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Sorry, I was trying to explain that the signs for the first roll used to be reversed, but that came across poorly. (I blame cold medicine!) I've edited my reply to you to fix that.

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But what about, as an alternate approach, using a slight variant of the rules given to generate what could be called a Malfunction Number like for firearms but for a spell? This has the benefit of being similar to something that already exists in the game and players are likely to be familiar with. In this this case, it seems we would get the same results if we set the base Malf number at 16 and then applied the inverse of the modifiers given.

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I really like this idea.

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Could you go into more detail on this please.

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Ok. I've done up a sheet with my rewritten version of the rules. Anyone interested is welcome to check it out and see if it makes sense to them.

Use the Chart to determine the casters safe threshold

With that information, calculate the spell’s Malf Number. This is used to determine if a critical failure was rolled during the process of accumulating the energy or casting the spell.

The base number is 16 with the reverse of the modifiers applied.

Note that it’s possible to have a number as high as 19. If this is the case, play it out in detail instead.

Roll 3d and check vs the spell’s Malf Number.

If the roll is underneath Malf Number then the spell is successful.
If the roll is exactly the Malf Number, there is a critical failure resulting in a botch based on half the spell’s energy
If the roll is over the Malf Number, there is a critical failure resulting in a botch based the spell’s full energy

Re: [RPM] Questions
 

While I get what you're going for here - you've copied a page worth of text - that is a no-no. I highly suggest you remove the copied bits and load only the parts that are relevant to your rule change.

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Ok edited my post.

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So could you give me an example of this? I'm still having a issue parsing what it's trying to do.

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So say I had a charm that contained a spell in which I have an effective skill of 15 that costs 30 energy. We look up my safe threshold on the chart which is 11. That means it exceeds twice my safe threshold. So the spell's Malf Number is 14 which is 16 minus 2. We role against this instead of the rolling for critical failure given in the book. As far as I can tell, the odds of success would be exactly the same.

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Ahhhh, I see. That is very interesting. Hmmm. I must think about this more, but it seems workable.

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I just ran a RPM game/teaching session at a convention this weekend and it went great! It was just an idea I had when I ran a short campaign earlier this year and I said that if any of the PC's wanted to use magic then that was the system to use. None of the players wanted to try it so I thought I ought to make steps to at least try to do something about that.

In this concept, the PC's are students of magic. I put them at a 200 point level, but I also made pretty heavy use of PK's excellent Pyramid article on Ritual Path Specialists to pre gen a lot of unique and potent characters for people to choose from. I use the context of each of them trying to pass their final exam as a sort of vehicle to teach them the system. That actually worked out pretty well. The second part of their exam is to work together to defend a mansion from thieves. I gave them an opportunity to make their own charms and set some conditional spells in preparation.

The funny thing is that I didn't get any regular GURPS players in the group, just people who like to try out new games in general. Everybody got really into it, though. We had a few really creative spells and exactly one botch! (I'M BLIND!) We all had a great time!

Re: [RPM] Questions
 

So I've found in the RPM book what may be considered an inconsistency. In the description for Path of Body, a Lesser Control Body can cause either a irritating or incapacitating affliction. But for Path of Mind, a Lesser Contol effect just irritates and it takes a Greater Control to incapacitate. Is there a good reason for this that I am just missing?

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The question above is still one that haunts my soul. :(

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Lesser Control Mind does not list irritating mental afflictions as possible effects. For those, you want Lesser Destroy Mind.

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True. My mistake. Destroy and Control cost the same anyway, though.