Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
Well, in one sense of fantasy, the one that means roughly "wish fulfillment." I don't think that's the same as the sense that refers to a genre of literature, visual art, or gaming. My own preference is for fantasy to have constraints that are just as stringent as those of the real world, but not in the same way.
But that's my own preference; it's not some sort of law.
I think that GURPS can certainly accommodate improvement in Magery. It's purely a question of whether that fits the GM's vision of how the game world works.
Checking GURPS Social Engineering: Back to School, I see that it says that adding levels of Magery, if you start out with Magery 0, is at the GM's option, and suggests a mechanism for doing so: point conversion (buying up Magery and simultaneously buying down multiple spells so that the net spell casting ability in those spells remains the same). There's also the cinematic option of buying up a Talent or power Talent: Magery 1 or above is effectively a Talent.
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So - that brings up the next question - can Talents justifiably be increased merely by throwing points at it? Is Talent one of those things, that as Gnome points out, you're reaching out for depths of your ability you never knew you had?
I guess what I'm looking for here is that although the game centers on the player characters as the main point of interest - what I'm looking for is justifications where the rules that apply to the player characters as "People" also apply to the non player characters as "People".
If Talents/traits are improvable with no limitation in sight for player characters, the rational that ordinary people who might have talents, could also advance to greater and greater levels of Talents.
In a way, any "Talent" or "Trait" such as magery, has the great divide between those who have it and those who do not. That is the difference between the lowest level of the talent/trait and the non-existence of it in ordinary people. So in this instance - having a particular talent/trait is essentially binary in nature. Either you have it - or you don't.
Does that make sense?