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VIVIT · 07-12-2019, 02:38 PM

I'm one of those weird people who actually like basic magic, but what does bother me about it is a certain side effect of magery prerequisites: magery increases your effective skill with all spells, including spells that require a certain nonzero level of magery. It's impossible to know an IQ/Hard spell with a magery prerequisite of 3 at any level lower than IQ+1. The magery you have bought to satisfy the prerequisite increases your effective skill to the level you would normally get from putting 8 points into the skill.

My basic idea is to have Magery levels grant bonuses to spell skill only in excess of the spell's magery prerequisite. Thus, if you have only as much magery as is required by some spell A, your skill level with spell A is as it would be for any other IQ/Hard skill with the same number of points in it. If you have one more level of magery than required by the spell, your skill level would be +1 for that spell, and would receive a further +1 bonus for every additional level of magery. This rule is effectively equivalent to saying that all spells are cast a penalty equal to their magery prerequisite. For this purpose, magery prerequisites would be counted recursively: the penalty applied to a spell would be equal to the highest magery prerequisite in your prerequisite chain to that spell.

My concern is that this approach might be unidiomatic because relative to RAW, it effectively increases the difficulty level of certain spells beyond Very Hard; I would need to make spells IQ/Easy, including the VH ones, in order to keep them all within the range of difficulties that GURPS uses. ESCARGO has uncapped difficulty progression, but there are other misgivings I have about ESCARGO.

Tell me, SJGF: am I worrying too much?

07-12-2019, 02:38 PM	#1
VIVIT Join Date: Jun 2018 Location: The Wired	Limiting the Skill Bonus from Magery I'm one of those weird people who actually like basic magic, but what does bother me about it is a certain side effect of magery prerequisites: magery increases your effective skill with all spells, including spells that require a certain nonzero level of magery. It's impossible to know an IQ/Hard spell with a magery prerequisite of 3 at any level lower than IQ+1. The magery you have bought to satisfy the prerequisite increases your effective skill to the level you would normally get from putting 8 points into the skill. My basic idea is to have Magery levels grant bonuses to spell skill only in excess of the spell's magery prerequisite. Thus, if you have only as much magery as is required by some spell A, your skill level with spell A is as it would be for any other IQ/Hard skill with the same number of points in it. If you have one more level of magery than required by the spell, your skill level would be +1 for that spell, and would receive a further +1 bonus for every additional level of magery. This rule is effectively equivalent to saying that all spells are cast a penalty equal to their magery prerequisite. For this purpose, magery prerequisites would be counted recursively: the penalty applied to a spell would be equal to the highest magery prerequisite in your prerequisite chain to that spell. My concern is that this approach might be unidiomatic because relative to RAW, it effectively increases the difficulty level of certain spells beyond Very Hard; I would need to make spells IQ/Easy, including the VH ones, in order to keep them all within the range of difficulties that GURPS uses. ESCARGO has uncapped difficulty progression, but there are other misgivings I have about ESCARGO. Tell me, SJGF: am I worrying too much?